Speaker 1: Three million. I just I want you to stop for
a second whatever you're doing and just let that number land.
Three million pages.
Speaker 2: It's almost an impossible number to visualize, right, I mean,
we're not talking about dry tax code here or some
municipal zoning plan, No, not at all.
Speaker 1: This is three million pages of records tied to I mean,
maybe the most notorious, speculated about, and deeply disturbing criminal
case in modern history.
Speaker 2: It is a truly staggering amount of information. And what
makes it even more intense, you know, and frankly more
difficult to even begin to process, is how it arrived.
Oh yeah, it didn't just trickle out. It wasn't a
slow leak over a few years where reporters could kind
of digest it in pieces.
Speaker 1: Oh this was a fire hose.
Speaker 2: It was a dam breaking. It was dropped essentially all
at once in this massive compliance release by the Department of.
Speaker 1: Justice, exactly. And as if that wasn't enough, sitting on
top of that mountain of paper, one hundred and eighty
thousand images, two thousand videos released today, Welcome to Thrilling Threads.
I'm your host, and I think it's safe to say
we're ready to pull on some very loose ends of
this massive story and see what unravels.
Speaker 2: And I'm here to help untangle that. Not yeah, because
when you hear numbers like that, millions of pages, thousands
of videos, it's just it's so easy to.
Speaker 1: Get overwhelmed completely.
Speaker 2: The natural human reaction is either to just shut down
because the data is too much, or you know, you
just read a sensational headline and you move on with
your day.
Speaker 1: But that's not what we do here.
Speaker 2: No, our mission today is different. We're going to slow
this whole thing down.
Speaker 1: That's the plan. We aren't just skimming the surface or
god forbid, reading tweets about it. We are going straight to.
Speaker 2: The source, the only place to start, really.
Speaker 1: We are combing through the official Department of Justice press briefing,
the transcript of the announcement about this release of the
Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell files. We're going to walk
you through exactly what they said, what they released, and honestly,
the incredible logistical nightmare behind getting this information out to
the public.
Speaker 2: It's a really fascinating look at the intersection of bureaucracy,
the demand for transparency, and a very very dark criminal reality.
The source material we have is the transcript of this
DOJ official, you know, standing at a podium announcing this
massive compliance. And I have to say, just reading the text,
the vibe that comes off the page, it isn't mission accomplished.
Speaker 1: No, not at all.
Speaker 2: It's exhaustion.
Speaker 1: It's pure exhaustion.
Speaker 2: Oh absolutely, you can practically hear the fatigue in the
written words. This isn't a victory lab It feels more
like survival, like they just finished running a marathon while
carrying a filing cabinet full of lead.
Speaker 1: That is a very very apt analogy. And we have
to give some context for why this is happening right now.
You know why today?
Speaker 2: Why now?
Speaker 1: The source material, the transcript, it explicitly mentions the driving
force here. This isn't just some random act of transparency.
Speaker 2: The DOJ didn't just wake up and feel generous at all.
Speaker 1: They cite fulfilling President Trump's promise of transparency and more importantly,
complying with the Act. The Act. It sounds so ominous
when you say it like that, well sort of is.
But it's the specific piece of legislation that basically forced
this door open.
Speaker 2: Correct, This is a statutory obligation. They are under a
legal microscope to produce these materials that are deemed responsive.
So what's so fascinating is that while the volume is
just enormous, millions of pages, what is not in there
is almost as interesting as what it is.
Speaker 1: You're teasing the good stuff early, and we're definitely going
to get to that. I mean, there are some really
bizarre details in this briefing. There really are, Like the
whole mention of commercial pornography found in the files, which
was a curveball I was not expecting. And the very
very specific, almost strange redaction rules they had to invent
for men versus women.
Speaker 2: Oh, it's redaction protocols. I am sure they are going
to spark a lot of debate, a lot, I would
think so. But we have to start with the human element.
We have to, because getting three million pages ready for
the public isn't something you just feed into an algorithm.
Speaker 1: No, it's people, and apparently very very tired people. So
let's unpack that first. The human costs do it? So
the DOJ official, he lays out the timeline in the briefing,
and it just sounds brutal.
Speaker 2: Brutal is the word they.
Speaker 1: Mentioned a seventy five day period a sprint.
Speaker 2: They call it seventy five days and not you know,
a casual seventy five days of nine to five work.
Speaker 1: Yeow.
Speaker 2: The source notes that the professionals involved met twice daily,
sometimes more during this.
Speaker 1: Sprint, twice a day for two and a half months.
That alone is a nightmare scenario for any office job
I've ever had.
Speaker 2: I can't even imagine the burnout. But then then they
drop the hammer on the timing.
Speaker 1: Yeah, this is the part that got me.
Speaker 2: They specifically call out that these teams, these human beings,
work through Christmas, New Year's Eve, and New Year's Day.
Speaker 1: It's one thing to say you worked hard, it's another
to say you gave up Christmas for this.
Speaker 2: That is the detail that really struck me. We so
often think of the government or the DJ as this
faceless monolith, right totally, But the official at the podium
is taking specific time to thank specific human beings. Over
five hundred lawyers and professionals who essentially gave up their
holidays to review the Epstein files.
Speaker 1: Can you just put yourself in that room for a second.
It's Christmas morning. Most people are opening presents with their
kids drinking eggnog, watching a Christmas story m hm, and
you are sitting in a secure government facility under fluorescent lights,
staring at documents related to one of the darkest sex
trafficking rings in history.
Speaker 2: It's a grim, grim picture. And the source then lists
the departments involved, which really gives you a sense of
the scale of this operation.
Speaker 1: It wasn't just one little office tucked away somewhere, not
even close.
Speaker 2: It was the Office of the Attorney General, the Deputy
Attorney General, the Criminal Division, the National Security Division, the FBI, FBI,
the Southern District of Florida, the Southern District of New York,
the SDNY, the Northern District of New York.
Speaker 1: It's a roll call of pretty much the entire Justice
Department infrastructure.
Speaker 2: It's an all hands on deck emergency mobilization. And the
DOJ official he makes a very poignant point about who
these people actually are. He calls them highly trained reviewers.
Speaker 1: Right, that's the reviewer's burden you mentioned earlier exactly.
Speaker 2: He notes that these are people who usually spend their
careers putting bad guys in jail.
Speaker 1: These aren't interns they brought in to make copies. These
are senior prosecutors. These are seasoned investigators, people whose job
is normally active chasing down leads, building cases in.
Speaker 2: Court, and for seventy five straight days, including holidays, they
were all shifted to document review, which is, let's.
Speaker 1: Be honest, generally the most tedious part of any legal word.
Speaker 2: The most tedious, But in this context it's also psychologically crushing.
You're not reviewing documents for a corporate merger. No, you're
reviewing the internal records, the images, the videos of a
prolific predator and his network. What does that do to
a person after seventy five days?
Speaker 1: It just completely reframes the whole data dump idea. We
see the file size on a news report, but we
don't see the five hundred people who were losing their
minds over Christmas to make sure they didn't accidentally release
a victim's name to the entire world.
Speaker 2: And that's the key takeaway for this part. This wasn't
just dragging a folder onto a public server and clicking share.
This was a massive, coordinated, bureaucratic mobilization, a seventy five
day sprint by hundreds of the government's top legal minds
just to meet a deadline. Said by the act.
Speaker 1: And speaking of the data, we have to talk about
the math because the numbers in this briefing were spinning
my head a little bit.
Speaker 2: The numbers are absolutely critical to understanding the scope in
the process.
Speaker 1: Okay, so the headline number we hear everywhere is three
million pages released today, but the source says the total
production is actually closer to three point five million pages.
Speaker 2: Correct, there were some earlier smaller releases.
Speaker 1: But here's the kicker. They started with six million pages.
Speaker 2: That is the funnel, the input versus the output. It's
a key distinction.
Speaker 1: So my first question is where did the other three
million pages go? Did they shred them? Did they hide
them in a warehouse next to the ark of the Covenant?
What happened to them? No?
Speaker 2: And the official in the transcript is very very careful
to explain this. This is all about the difference between
collection and production. Okay, the source says the DOJ made
a conscious choice to air on the side of over collection.
Speaker 1: Over collection. That sounds like what I do with books.
I'm never going to read. It sounds like hoarding.
Speaker 2: In a legal context, it's actually a strategy for transparency,
or at least that's the argument they're making. Oh, so,
the source explains they wanted to ensure maximum transparency and
compliance with the Act. So at the very beginning, they
just grabbed everything everything everything FBI emails between agents, summaries
of interviews, images, videos, all the generated materials, anything that
even smelled like it was related to the Epstein investigation.
Speaker 1: Okay, I see, So rather than trying to cherry pick
files at the start, they just scooped up the whole pile.
Speaker 2: Precisely, they cast the absolute widest net possible. That initial
trawl resulted in six million pages. But then comes the
hard part, the review process. Right now they have to
determine what is actually responsive under the terms of the Act.
Speaker 1: So this is where your attic analogy comes in, right,
It is.
Speaker 2: The perfect way to think about it. Imagine you're told
you have to clean out a massive, chlored attic because
there are important historical documents somewhere inside.
Speaker 1: Okay, I'm with you, I'm in the dusty attic.
Speaker 2: The collection phase is you grabbing every single box, every
loose paper, every old magazine and just dragging it all
downstairs into the living room. Yeah, that's your six million pages.
You haven't looked inside anything. Yet you just know it
came from the attic.
Speaker 1: Got it, And now my living room is an absolute
disaster full of chunk exactly.
Speaker 2: Okay, now starts the review phase. Yeah. You open the
first box. It's just old receipts from a grocery store
in nineteen ninety five. That's not relevant to the history
of the house. That's non responsive. You toss it.
Speaker 1: Okay.
Speaker 2: The next box has the original blueprints for the house.
You keep that. That's responsive.
Speaker 1: So the drop from six million to three million pages
isn't the DOJ burning evidence in a back room.
Speaker 2: That is the claim.
Speaker 1: It's them sorting out the trash from the treasure.
Speaker 2: That is precisely the argument they're making. The source explicitly
says that the reduction in numbers is due to relevance.
It's responsive materials versus non responsive.
Speaker 1: Can you give me a real world example from the case.
Speaker 2: Sure. Let's say an FBI agent send an email to
his partner saying, Hey, I'm going to be ten minutes
late for the Epstein case briefing. Can you grab me
a coffee?
Speaker 1: Okay?
Speaker 2: That email was probably collected in the initial six million
page sweep because it has the word Epstein in it,
but is not responsive to the acts demand for investigative materials.
It's logistical chatter, so it's not in the three million
pages released to the public.
Speaker 1: That makes a lot of sense, and it actually makes
the three million page number even more impressive or you know,
terrifying also, because that means those are three million pages
of relevant stuff, not just a bunch of coffee orders
and administrative fluff.
Speaker 2: Correct. It is, in theory three million pages of substantive
material related to the investigation and prosecution.
Speaker 1: And within that substantive material we get to the digital evidence,
the videos and the images. This part of the transcript
really really caught me off guard.
Speaker 2: It's one of the most misunderstood aspects of this entire release,
I think.
Speaker 1: So let's lay out the inventory. The DOJ says two
thousand videos and one hundred and eighty.
Speaker 2: Thousand images to staggering numbers.
Speaker 1: When I hear one hundred and eighty thousand images in
the Epstein files, my brain, and I think most people's
brains goes to a very dark place. Immediately.
Speaker 2: Of course, you.
Speaker 1: Assume these are all documentation of crimes, every single one.
Speaker 2: And that is a completely natural assumption. But The DOJ
official takes specific time in the briefing to debunk that
very idea. He makes a crucial distinction about what these
which actually are.
Speaker 1: He does. He says, and I'm pretty sure i'm quoting here,
they are not all videos and images taken by mister
Epstein or someone around him.
Speaker 2: Right, And this is where that bizarre phrase comes in.
Commercial pornography.
Speaker 1: Yeah, explain that to me. The source says, large quantities
of the images are commercial pornography. What does that even
mean in this context?
Speaker 2: Think about how digital forensics works. When the FBI seizes
a computer, a server, a hard drive, say from Epstein's
island or his Manhattan townhouse, they create a perfect copy
of everything on that drive, every single file. The source
states that these files include commercial pornography and images that
were seized from Epstein's devices but which he did not take.
This implies that Epstein or people in his network possessed
a vast collection of adult material that was produced commercially.
Speaker 1: So not illicit underground recordings they made themselves.
Speaker 2: At least not all of it. A significant portion was,
according to the DOJ, stand commercially available pornography, albeit likely
disturbing given the context of who owned it.
Speaker 1: So a huge chunk of that one hundred and eighty
thousand number is just a pre existing collection, a.
Speaker 2: Stash exactly in a forensic sense. It's clutter. But because
it was on the sea's devices, it was collected and
because of the act, every single one of those one
hundred and eighty thousand images had to be reviewed by
a human being.
Speaker 1: But the source does pivot right. They don't say it's all.
Speaker 2: Commercial, no, and that is the absolutely chilling part. After
explaining the commercial material, the official admits some of the
videos though, and some of the images do appear to
be taken by mister Epstein or by others.
Speaker 1: So the real evidence, the self produced material is mixed
in with the commercial stuff.
Speaker 2: It is the needle in the haystack, but in this
case the haystack is made of well other deeply unsavory material.
Speaker 1: Let's just go back to the reviewers for a second.
We talked about them working on Christmas, but now realize
what their job was. It was to look at one
hundred and eighty thousand images one by one and decide
is this a commercial video that was bought online or
is this a home video of a crime being committed.
Speaker 2: The psychological toll of making that distinction over and over
again is immense. It's beyond comprehension for most people.
Speaker 1: You're hunting for evidence of abuse in a sea of
explicit content, and you have to be right every single.
Speaker 2: Time, absolutely, because if you mistake a personal video of
a victim for a commercial one and it somehow gets
released unredacted, you've just destroyed that victim's privacy forever.
Speaker 1: And if you mistake a commercial one for evidence, you
waste investigative resources. The stakes are impossibly high.
Speaker 2: They are, which leads us directly into what might be
the most controversial part of this whole transcript.
Speaker 1: The redaction rules, or, as I was thinking of it,
the art of who gets hidden.
Speaker 2: This is where the legal rubber really meets the road.
The DOJ had to balance two powerful opposing forces, the Act,
which demands maximum transparency, and their core mandate of victim protection.
Speaker 1: And the solution they landed on is well, it's fascinatingly
gender it is.
Speaker 2: It's a very clear, bright line rule they created. The
source lays out the protocol very specifically. They state we
redacted every woman depicted in any image or video.
Speaker 1: Every single woman a blanket.
Speaker 2: Rule, no exception, well, one major exception.
Speaker 1: All right, Gislaine Maxwell.
Speaker 2: Correct, missus Maxwell is a convicted perpetrator, so she is
not redacted. Yeah, but every other woman, regardless of who
they are, their age, their role is blacked out or blurred.
Speaker 1: Okay, So that's the rule for women, protect all potential victims.
Simple enough. But what about the men?
Speaker 2: This is where it gets really interesting. The source is
incredibly blunt. We did not redact images of any men.
Speaker 1: Woah, just flat out, flat out.
Speaker 2: So if you are a man and you are in
a photograph in this document dump, your face is visible
to the entire world.
Speaker 1: Unless there's a small caveat.
Speaker 2: Isn't there a very small one? A man is only
redacted if it was quote impossible to redact the woman
without also redacting the man.
Speaker 1: So if they're standing too close or he's behind her,
he might get partially obs secured, just as collateral damage
to protect the woman's identity exactly.
Speaker 2: But if he's standing alone or off the side, the
men are completely exposed.
Speaker 1: Let's really unpack the logic there. Why make that stark distinction.
Speaker 2: It's a game of probabilities and victimology in the specific
context of the Epstein and Maxwell case, the victims were overwhelmingly,
if not exclusively, female, and often underage. Therefore, the DOJ
is operating on the presumption that any woman depicted in
these files could be a victim, and since they can't
possibly interview every single person in one hundred and eighty
thousand photos to confirm their status.
Speaker 1: They just chose the safest option redact them all.
Speaker 2: Better safe than sorry applied to personal privacy on a
massive scale. But for the men, the presumption is flipped.
The men depicted are likely not the victims of this
specific sex trafficking ring. They are more likely to be associates, employees, guests,
or potentially perpetrators or enablers, So.
Speaker 1: They don't get the benefit of the doubt. They don't
get the blanket victim protection reaction.
Speaker 2: They do not. It's a powerful and controversial choice. It
basically sends a message, if you are a woman in
these files, we are assuming you might be a victim
and we are protecting you. If you are a man,
you're on your own.
Speaker 1: That is going to open up a lot of men
to a hell of a lot of public scrutiny.
Speaker 2: It absolutely will, and it's a deliberate policy choice made
at the highest levels of the DOJ.
Speaker 1: Now there is a kind of escape hatch here, though
the source mentions Congress.
Speaker 2: Yes, the congressional loophole this is key.
Speaker 1: What does it say?
Speaker 2: The official states that if any member of Congress wishes
to review the production in its unredacted form, they are
welcome to make arrangements with the Department to do so.
Speaker 1: So the original unblacked out versions exist. They haven't been destroyed.
They're just behind a gate.
Speaker 2: They are gated. The raw information is preserved. If a
Congressional committee with oversight authority wants to see exactly who
those redacted women are or view the raw unedited files,
they can.
Speaker 1: Which sudjusts a sort of tiered transparency, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: It does. The public gets the sanitized for victim protection version.
The official oversight body Congress can access the raw data
if they have a legitimate reason.
Speaker 1: Which I guess makes sense from a governance perspective, But
it also means the full truth is still slightly out
of reach for the average citizen listening to this right now.
Speaker 2: That is always the tension in these massive releases. Total
absolute transparency would mean a total violation of victim privacy,
so we get this hybrid model.
Speaker 1: Speaking of things we don't get, let's talk about the
excluded files. This is section five of our breakdown. There's
a whole list of things that just simply didn't make
the cut for release.
Speaker 2: This is the no fly list of the document. Dum
categories of information that were completely withheld.
Speaker 1: The source runs through the standard ones. First PII personally
identifiable information.
Speaker 2: Right, you can't relieve people's social security numbers, bank accounts,
or home addresses. That's standard practice standard.
Speaker 1: Then medical files.
Speaker 2: Again standard privacy law hipA and all that.
Speaker 1: Makes sense absolutely, and then see sam child sexual abuse material.
The source says this was obviously excluded.
Speaker 2: Which thank god. The last thing we want is the
Department of Justice becoming a distributor of that horrific material.
Speaker 1: Can't argue with that one. Then there's gore violence, images
of death, physical abuse or injury. Those were polled.
Speaker 2: Also makes sense, there's no public interest served by releasing that.
Speaker 1: And finally, active investigations, anything that would jeopardize a current case,
which is interesting. It is interesting because it implies there
might be current cases still running that are connected to this.
Speaker 2: It's a standard clause they put in every release like this.
But yes, it does leave that door tantalizingly open. But
the real surprise, the thing that made my ears perk
up when I read the transcript was the category of
national security.
Speaker 1: So this is the big one that this is the
ultimate trump.
Speaker 2: Card, right, It's always the ultimate trump card. National security
is the giant black marker the government uses to hide
anything embarrassing or into venient.
Speaker 1: We can't show you this because it would endanger the nation.
It's the classic redaction tool.
Speaker 2: It is. But listen to what the DOJ official explicitly
says in this briefing. He says, no files are being
withheld or redacted on that basis.
Speaker 1: Wait what? None? Zero files?
Speaker 2: None? The Act allows for it. They could have used
that excuse. The official acknowledges that the law permits withholding
for national security or foreign policy reasons, but he states
very clearly they chose not to use it.
Speaker 1: That feels like a massive twist in the story. I mean,
how many conspiracy theories are out there that Epstein was
some kind of intelligence asset, countless that he was working
for Masad or the CIA, or that these tapes contain
blackmail on world leaders that could destabilize global politics exactly.
Speaker 2: The theories are endless and elaborate, and by standing up
at a podium and stating no files are being withheld
on national security grounds, the dog is effectively trying to
pour cold water on all of it.
Speaker 1: They're saying, whatever is in here, it's not classified intelligence,
or at.
Speaker 2: The very least, they are saying, we are not using
that excuse to hide it from you.
Speaker 1: Right, that's a crucial distinction. It forces us to look
at the crimes as crimes, not as some grand spy
thriller plot.
Speaker 2: It strips away that veneer of state secrecy. It says,
if something is redacted in these files, it's to protect
a victim or a legal privilege, not to protect the state.
Speaker 1: That's a huge shift in the narrative. It kind of
grounds the whole thing in a much grittier, more sordid reality.
Speaker 2: It does. It makes it less James Bond and more
just brutal, sorted abuse.
Speaker 1: Now, of course the skeptics will have a field day
with that.
Speaker 2: Well, of course they'll say that if there were any
real intelligence files, they would never have been put in
this collection to begin with.
Speaker 1: Right, we didn't withhold them because we never put them
in the box in the first place.
Speaker 2: Precisely, you can't prove a negative. But taking the source
the official DOJ statement at face value, it is a
significant declaration of transparency on a very sensitive topic.
Speaker 1: Speaking of declarations, there is a moment in this transcript
where the tone just shifts on a dime.
Speaker 2: It's a palpable shift.
Speaker 1: We've been talking numbers, protocols, reactions, very bureaucratic, and then
suddenly the DOJ official just gets mad.
Speaker 2: He does. We move from the official reporting function of
the briefing to a very personal defending of the department.
Speaker 1: You called it umbridge, and the speaker actually uses that word,
doesn't he He.
Speaker 2: Does, he says, and it's a powerful line. I take
umbridge at the suggestion that the Attorney General or this
department does not take child exploitation or sex trafficking seriously.
Speaker 1: He sounds personally offended.
Speaker 2: He is, And it really highlights the immense political pressure
cooking around this entire release. There is a narrative out there,
and the speaker references it as coming from slight members
of Congress and some of the public eye that the
DOJ has been dragging its feed, or protecting powerful people,
or just not caring about the victims in the Epstein case.
Speaker 1: And he is having absolutely none of it. He just
starts rattling off stats like he's in a rap battle.
He came prepared with receipts he.
Speaker 2: Absolutely did to prove the department's worth. He pivots completely
away from the Epstein case and just lists what the
DOJ has accomplished in the fight against trafficking last year alone.
Speaker 1: Yeah, let's go through these numbers, because they're pretty impressive.
He says. The FBI located twenty seven hundred victims of
child exploitation last year.
Speaker 2: Twenty seven hundred people rescued. Yeah, that is not a
small number. No.
Speaker 1: He mentions that they terminated three point eight million million
dark web pedophile accounts.
Speaker 2: Three point eight mone. It just shows you the sheer
scale of the digital fight they're engaged in every single day.
Speaker 1: He brings up a specific case in La eleven defendants
charged for sex trafficking of illegal immigrants and underage women.
And then this thing called Operation Restored Justice, where they
rescued two hundred and five child victims and arrested two
hundred and ninety three offenders.
Speaker 2: He's stacking the deck. He's laying his cards on the
table and saying, look at the scoreboard. His argument is,
while you are criticizing us for the speed of this
one compliance report on an old case.
Speaker 1: We're out here on the front lines arresting current predators
every single day.
Speaker 2: Exactly. It's a passionate defense of the entire institution. He's
basically saying, don't you dare judge our total commitment to
justice based on the seventy five day timeline of this
one bureaucratic task.
Speaker 1: He really calls out the public in Congress for ignoring
these other successes while quickly pointing a finger. It's a
rare moment of like bureaucratic vulnerability.
Speaker 2: You can feel the heat on him and the department.
He knows that this release is not happening in a vacuum.
It's happening in a very hostile and skeptical political environment.
Speaker 1: And that defensiveness, it tells you just how high the
stakes are for the DOJ's reputation. They know that no
matter what they release or how they do it, some
people will say it's not enough for that it's a
cover up, which.
Speaker 2: Brings us to the final inevitable reality of a release
of this size and complexity.
Speaker 1: Mistakes, the inevitable mistakes, as you called it. The speaker
just admits it right up front. He says that with
three million pages being reviewed under such a tight deadline,
mistakes are inevitable.
Speaker 2: It's a smart public relations move if we're being honest
about it. How you lower expectations, you pre apologize. If
you stand up and claim absolute perfection and then one
victim's name slips through unredacted, you get crucified. But if
you say, look, this is a monumental task and mistakes
are inevitable, and then a name slips through, you get
to say we told you this might happen, and we
have a system to fix it.
Speaker 1: And they do have a remedy. They mentioned a specific
email inbox.
Speaker 2: Yes, they established a dedicated email inbox specifically for victims.
It's apparently been active since December. The sole purpose is
for victims to report redaction errors they find in the documents.
Speaker 1: So if a victim or someone representing them is going
through the files and sees their face or name unredacted,
they can email the DJ and say, hey, you missed one.
Speaker 2: Fix this, which is It's good that it exists, but
it's also tragic that it needs to.
Speaker 1: It puts the burden back on the victim, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: It does. It puts the burden on the victim to
police the DOJ's release and relift their trauma, to protect
their own privacy.
Speaker 1: Hi, you guys messed up and broadcast my identity to
the world. Could you please fix it? That is a
very very tough email to have to.
Speaker 2: Write, extremely tough.
Speaker 1: There's also this other weird loose end, this detail about
the twenty nineteen law firm documents. What is that about?
Speaker 2: This is one of the final pieces of the puzzle
that isn't in place yet. The source mentions a very
small portion of documents that are currently in limbo.
Speaker 1: Why are they stuck? What's the hold up?
Speaker 2: They came from an unnamed law firm and were produced
to the Southern District of New York back in twenty nineteen,
but they are subject to a protective order in a
separate civil lawsuit.
Speaker 1: Ah so it's a legal jurisdiction issue, civil court versus
the criminal investigation exactly.
Speaker 2: The DOJ wants to release them as part of this
transparency push, but a civil court judge has a lock
on them, so or says, the DJ has already filed
the motion to get that protective order lifted.
Speaker 1: So once the judge grants that motion, they go out immediately.
Speaker 2: That's the plan. So there is still a small part
two coming technically.
Speaker 1: But the bigger next chapter, it seems, is the final
report to Congress.
Speaker 2: The final report.
Speaker 1: Yes, the source mentions that a final comprehensive report will
be submitted to both the House and the Senate Judiciary committees.
And this report will specifically list all government officials and
politically exposed persons named in the Act.
Speaker 2: And that sounds an awful lot like the list that
everyone has been talking about for years.
Speaker 1: It really does. It's one thing to have three million
pages of raw data, but it's another thing to have
an official report from the DOJ that names names.
Speaker 2: And that phrase politically exposed persons is a very specific,
very loaded term in legal and financial circles. It implies
people with prominence and influence.
Speaker 1: So we have the three million pages and now we're
just waiting for the DOJ to hand Congress the needle,
or a.
Speaker 2: List of all the needles found in the haystack.
Speaker 1: A list of needles.
Speaker 2: Wow, it's coming in due course, as the speaker says.
Speaker 1: In due course the favorite phrase of bureaucrats and government
officials everywhere. So let's try to wrap this all up.
We've covered the immense human costs, the staggering numbers, the
weird distinction about commercial porn, the very controversial gendered redactions,
the huge national security surprise, and the DOJ's very defensive posture.
Speaker 2: It is a massive, deeply imperfect, but ultimately historic data.
Speaker 1: Dump, it really is. And the thrilling takeaway here for
me is that dichotomy you mentioned at the start. It's
the central tension of this whole story. On one hand,
you have this dry, exhaustive, mind numbing bureaucracy meetings twice
a day, compliance protocols, redaction rules. And on the other hand,
the subject matter is the darkest, most twisted reality of
human depravity imaginable.
Speaker 2: It's the banality of evil meeting the banality of bureaucracy.
It's just it's such a strange collision. You have highly
paid government lawyers working through Christmas to apply redaction software
to photos from a criminal enterprise.
Speaker 1: It's a collision of two completely different worlds. And the
fact that we have the pages now, but the list
of politically exposed persons is still to come. That just
keeps the suspense alive, doesn't it.
Speaker 2: The story is not over, not by a long shot.
This was just a massive chapter being published for the
world to read.
Speaker 1: So here is the question we want to leave with you,
our listener. We talked about all the trade offs today.
The DOJ official argues they were caught in a triangle
between speed, transparency, and victim protection.
Speaker 2: It's the classic project management problem, the iron triangle. Fast,
good or cheap. You can only pick two. In this case,
it was fast, transparent or perfectly safe for victims exactly.
Speaker 1: And they admitted that with a release of this size
under the studline, mistakes were inevitable. So here's the thought experiment.
If you were in charge of this release, if you
are the one canceling Christmas for those five hundred lawyers,
what would you have done.
Speaker 2: It's a tough call.
Speaker 1: Would you have prioritized getting the information out faster to
the public, excepting that some mistakes would happen and some
victims might be harmed, or would you have slowed it
all down even more, maybe taken another year to try
and ensure absolutely zero errors and redaction.
Speaker 2: What is the true cost of transparency when it's measured
against the privacy of a single victim whose name slips through.
That's the real human question.
Speaker 1: At the heart of this it is we genuinely want
to know what you think. Head to the comments and
tell us your stance. Would you push the button for
speed or would you hold the line for absolute accuracy?
Speaker 2: I am very, very curious to see where our listeners
land on this dilemma.
Speaker 1: He too. Thanks for unpacking this labyrinth with us today.
This has been thrilling threads we'll see in the comments.
Speaker 2: Goodbye everyone,