The Epstein Email Dump Is a Mess

Summary

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Podcast Summary: The Epstein Email Dump Is a Mess

The 404 Media Podcast | November 19, 2025
Hosts: Joseph Cox, Sam Cole, Jason Kebler
Main Theme:
This episode dives into the chaos and implications surrounding the recent congressional release of a massive trove of Jeffrey Epstein estate documents and emails. The team also discusses the implications of ICE outsourcing immigration surveillance to "skip tracers" via LinkedIn. Expect candid analysis of key events dominating tech and investigative journalism, peppered with the hosts' signature humor and cynicism.

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Episode Overview

• Part 1: The “Epstein Email Dump” — why the document release is such a mess, the politics behind it, and what it means for journalism and public accessibility.
• Part 2: ICE’s contracting of bounty hunters/skip tracers, revealing how ordinary people are being recruited via LinkedIn to surveil immigrants, and the dangers and bizarre realities of this outsourcing.
• Part 3: Brief, humorous detour back to the most meme-ified and confusing tidbits of the Epstein emails, such as the alleged “Trump blew Bubba” message.

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1. The Epstein Email Dump: “A Mess”

(Starts ~02:55)

Background and Context

• The House Oversight Committee has released tens of thousands of documents and emails from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate—done through Google Drive and Dropbox links.
• Both Democratic and Republican members of Congress have participated in selective releasing, turning transparency into a political sparring match.

“Basically, the House Oversight Committee has been releasing tons and tons of emails and documents pulled from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate...it’s actually been a bit of a sparring match between the Democrats...and the Republicans have also been releasing other files.”
— Sam Cole [03:51]

The Actual Document Dump (Why Is It So Messy?)

• Files are released via unofficial Google Drive and Dropbox links with no clear naming conventions or organization—“literally just folders labeled ‘data’, ‘images’, ‘text’, and ‘natives’ with subfolders like 001-002-003.”
• No chronological or thematic order. Formats vary: JPEGs, emails, PowerPoints, random screenshots, few OCR (Optical Character Recognition)—making them non-searchable.
• Comparison to the disorderliness of court system archives like PACER.
• Congress lacks infrastructure for proper transparency, or chooses not to use it.

“It felt to me like I was playing Jeffrey Epstein email lottery or slot machine...you open a folder and it’s just...random stuff...screenshots of articles...Powerpoint presentations...emails in different formats.”
— Sam Cole [10:02]

• Release has been so chaotic that “hackers are sometimes more organized than Congress.”

— Jason Kebler [16:37]

The Pros and Cons of a “Raw Dump”

• Disorganization leads to difficulty in public or media scrutiny, but unfiltered release means less chance of curation, omission, or manipulation.
• Feeds the conspiratorial nature around the Epstein files—intentionally or not.
• Journalists and hobbyists have stepped in to create tools for searching/OCR-ing the dump, but with mixed results.

“If you went to organize it more, what would it be—by billionaire, by state, by date? Even date would be helpful!...But I don’t really need them to be helpful. Just let the people who are actually doing the process do the process.”
— Joseph Cox [21:38]

Notable Moment

• Michael Wolff’s PR advice to Epstein on Trump (22:13):
  A journalist offers Epstein advice on how Trump should handle media questions about their relationship:

  “You should let him hang himself. Metaphorically. Actually a really poor choice of words looking back in time...”
  — Michael Wolff, relayed by Jason Kebler [22:13]

• Highlights ethical lapses in journalist-source relationships.

Public Archive and Accessibility Efforts

• Third-party projects and media orgs have tried to build searchable archives and AI-powered summarizations.
• Flaws: Loss of fidelity, missed context, and the fundamental problem of having to “reverse engineer” the government’s release.

“I got a floppy disk from a government like maybe three years ago. It’s just like they’re sending stuff out in really bizarre ways very often. And this is a function of different local governments using different computer systems...”
— Sam Cole [28:10]

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2. ICE’s Skip Tracer Program: Outsourcing Surveillance

(Starts ~34:53)

Shocking Recruitment on LinkedIn

• ICE (Immigration and Customs Enforcement) is now contracting “skip tracers” (a kind of bounty hunter/private investigator hybrid) to physically verify addresses of immigrant “targets.”
• These jobs are actively being recruited via public LinkedIn posts, targeting ex-police and ex-military.

“Jim Brown, president at Feds United...says they’re looking for around 20 more of these retired or former law enforcement or retired military personnel...to assess whether contractors can validate addresses associated with subjects of interest...you’re to only observe and report. That’s it. All pretty vague...”—Joseph Cox [34:53]

Practical Details and Ethics

• Contractors stand to earn $300 per address confirmed (up to $30,000).
• This move is part of a broader ICE effort to use bounty hunters and skip tracers—via contracts worth up to $180 million—to track undocumented people.
• Private surveillance is now indistinguishable from government law enforcement, raising accountability and ethics concerns.
• The PI/skip tracer industry sits in a legal gray area: almost as much access as cops, but less oversight.

“They basically have the same capabilities as cops, like technologically and data-wise—it’s just that, you know, potentially there’s far less accountability...”
— Jason Kebler [44:13]

Risks and Alarming Trends

• Less accountability, increased impersonation risk (e.g., fake ICE/bounty hunters).
• Dehumanizing and potentially dangerous—what happens when a surveillance contractor is confronted on the job?

“What could possibly go wrong? You know, like any number of things could go wrong...There’s already been cases of people impersonating ICE agents and FBI agents and all that. This just raises that to a 10, I think.”
— Sam Cole [48:45]

• Conspiracy rumors about “Proud Boys” and random bounty hunters as ICE officers now closer to reality with this formal policy.

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3. Memes, Conspiracies, and the “Trump Blew Bubba” Email

(Starts ~50:45)

The Viral Email: Fact, Joke, or Both?

• An email in the dump contains an offhand comment about “Trump blowing Bubba”—where “Bubba” is a known nickname for Bill Clinton.
• The hosts debate whether it’s real, a joke, or a meme—ultimately, it’s all three.

“It’s a meme. It’s a joke and it’s real. No.”
— Sam Cole [51:19]

• Snopes rated the email as real, but there’s debate about who “Bubba” refers to.
• The actual content is absurd and hard to parse, highlighting both the squalid eccentricities of the powerful and the chaos of the dump.

“Teenager downloading anime...uses like six VPNs, Tor network, etc. And then it’s just like Jeffrey Epstein discussing pedophilia and sex crimes—just talks about it in the open on emails. It’s very crazy. But they also can’t type at all.”
— Sam Cole [54:14]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On Media Ethics:
  “You shouldn’t be giving PR advice to anybody—you’re a journalist. What the hell are you doing?”
  — Jason Kebler [22:13]

• On Document Disorganization:
  “Sometimes, like, hackers are more organized than this—sometimes reckless hackers...will put more effort into their press release...”
  — Jason Kebler [16:37]

• On the Nature of the Dump:
  “Behind every door, a new horror. So, maybe the slot machine aspect is actually smart.”
  — Sam Cole [21:15]

• Summing Up the Disarray:
  “Billionaires are incapable of sending a cogent email, it seems.”
  — Jason Kebler [54:51]

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Key Takeaways

1. Government transparency is a mess by design or incompetence—either way, the public loses.
2. The lines between state power and private surveillance are blurring in alarming ways.
3. Information chaos (intentional or not) fuels memes, confusion, and conspiracy theories—while serious stories get lost or delayed.

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Timestamps:

• Epstein Dump Intro & Chaos: 02:55 – 19:00
• Media & Ethics, Archive Efforts: 19:00 – 31:30
• ICE & LinkedIn Skip Tracers: 34:53 – 49:36
• Email Memes & Conspiracies: 50:45 – 54:51

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Original, irreverent reporting with smart, critical takes—if information disorder and government unaccountability worries you, this episode is a must-listen.

Transcript

[Sam Cole]

Foreign.

[Jason Kebler]

Hello and welcome to the 404 Media podcast where we bring you unparalleled access to hidden worlds, both online and IRL. 404 Media is a journalist founding company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404 Media Co as well as bonus content every single week. Subscribers also get access to additional episodes where we respond to their best comments. Gain access to that content at 404 Media code Joseph. I'm your host, Joseph. And with me are two of the 404 Media co founders, the first being Sam Cole. Hey. And the other being Jason Kebler. Hello.

[Sam Cole]

Hello.

[Jason Kebler]

Final reminder. Well, if you're a paying subscriber, you get this on Tuesdays. If you're listening to the free feed, you get it on Wednesdays. And that is the same day as our latest forward FOIA forum as a reminder. Well, I even did the cadence of the intro then or the outro as a reminder. Anyway, the FOIA Forum, a live streamed event where we will teach you how to file public records requests. This one specifically, as I've said before, is about our Flock reporting and that of researchers as well. We're going to show you those requests, how people learned from their local police departments or sheriff offices or local government, how and why police have been using Flock cameras in their local communities and what that all means. And of course, our reporting shows the local cops have been doing lookups for ICE in there. Of course, this very important abortion story we did as well. Actually, there's one which I always forget to bring up, which is that Flock cameras were used to monitor an immigration protest. I feel like we barely, barely even mention that in the pieces when we're sort of rounding up our reporting. But there's a link in the show notes to the page on the site, go to that and then paying subscribers will find the livestream link to the event on the site. And Again, that is the 19th of November, Wednesday at 1pm Eastern. If you can't make it or you do become a paid subscriber later, we upload all of them to a certain section of the website and be able to watch an archive there. Jason, we should probably do the slides for that.

[Sam Cole]

Yeah, it's been busy. It's only Tuesday. It's been a very, very busy week and we have to put together a presentation for tomorrow. But we've done a lot about this, so I'm very excited for it. We've been meaning to do this walk FOIA forum for like quite some time. So very excited to talk about it and the last few FOIA forums have been like, more and more people have been at them, which has been really awesome. So very excited for it.

[Jason Kebler]

Yeah, we will bring it all together and of course, we will answer a bunch of questions live on the, on the live stream as well. All right, for this week's first section, we're doing something a little bit different. We're not talking about an article we wrote and published. We're talking more about something that we were maybe going to write about, but, you know, then we, we don't have enough time or whatever, but something that's still wild and important and that we felt like talking about. And then the two other sections are going to be about articles we publish. So the headline of this story isn't. But could be something like the formatting on the Epstein emails is crazy. It's is what I have in the Google Doc. Jason, what do you mean by that? And then I'm sure we'll go back and give people context. But, like, what's your beef?

[Sam Cole]

Yeah, I mean, I think that we're trying to talk about something that everyone else is talking about. And as you mentioned, like, I did run, I did want to write an article about this last week. I just got really busy. But basically, the House Oversight Committee has been releasing tons and tons of emails and documents pulled from Jeffrey Epstein's estate. It's actually been a bit of a sparring match between the Democrats in the House Oversight Committee. And the Oversight Committee is like the part of Congress, of the House of Representatives that oversees the government, is responsible for government accountability and various investigations and things like that. And so as part of, you know, the, the sort of tussling over the Jeffrey Epstein documents and investigations, the Democrats have been releasing some files and then the Republicans have also been releasing other files. And just as like people who go through a lot of documents for our jobs and also care about archiving and government transparency and things like this. I thought that we could maybe talk a little bit about it. So.

[Jason Kebler]

And I guess just before you go ahead, these also aren't, in case it wasn't clear to people who've been following this isn't like the Epstein files either. The Epstein files, quote, unquote, are the FBI investigative files which lawmakers may actually vote to release. Now, these are like the Epstein emails in a way. Right?

[Sam Cole]

So there are, there are many, many, many, many, many, many Epstein files. And I think that when we're talking about, like, cons, I don't even want to call it conspiracy theories, but when people are Saying, like, release the Epstein files. I think that they are Talking about the FBI's investigative files, as you said. That said, the FBI and the Department of Justice have released various Epstein files. It's just that many of them are redacted and many of them have come out as parts, different parts of court cases over the years. And that's another, like, kind of issue with this, is that there has been like many, many different times where documents related to Jeffrey Epstein and his sex crimes and pedophilia crimes and sexual abuse and all the people that he interacted with, his plane records, like all these sorts of things have come out as different parts of different court cases over the years. And now what's being released, as I understand, are subpoenaed records from the House Oversight Committee from the Epstein estate. Yeah, but there were also some Department of Justice records that got released somewhat recently in this same chaotic, insane way that we're about to talk about. And so I think, yes, like the Epstein emails is probably the correct way to think about it, as you said. But, but then again, it's like I actually just got a push alert as we're recording this that the House voted overwhelmingly to release the Epstein files, demand that the Justice Department release all files tied to its Jeffrey Epstein investigation, is how the New York words it. And it's like, now that I'll go to the Senate, who knows if the Senate takes it up, who knows if Donald Trump will sign it? It's like, we don't really need to get into it for this podcast, but these document dumps that have been happening over the last few months and then very notably last week have been released on Google Drive with a backup on Dropbox.

[Jason Kebler]

And who sends that Google Drive link out? Is it like an, is it like an official congressional email? Like, where does this Google Drive come from?

[Sam Cole]

So on November 12, there is a press release from the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. And here's the entirety of the press release.

[Jason Kebler]

Okay.

[Sam Cole]

It says, oversight committee releases additional Epstein estate documents. Then it says Washington, where they're located, Washington, D.C. the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released an additional 20,000 pages of documents received from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein. Documents can be found here, and it's a link to a Google Drive with no title, no anything. And then it says a backup of the documents can be found here. And it's a link up link to the Dropbox. First of all, it's like pretty insane that Congress is releasing files via Google and Dropbox. And it's also kind of crazy that they are having a backup link like a mirror, as though they are worried that Google is going to delete these. As though they are like an adult actor who's like, follow my backup account here. It's kind of odd, I would say, I guess, kind of, given what we know about pacer, which is the, you know, court systems file file system, which is a shit show and very hard to search and very expensive. Like, I guess the House Committee on Oversight doesn't have its own server to upload these to. Maybe this is actually, I mean, we can debate it. Maybe this is not the worst way to release these sorts of documents. But basically it's like you click a link and it's just called Epstein Estate Documents. And then there's four folders, and the folders are data, images, text and natives. And then there's a bunch of subfolders that are just like 001-002-SO on and so forth. And I'm like, really?

[Jason Kebler]

It's not sorted at all, like chronologically or anything like that?

[Sam Cole]

Not from what I can tell it really, honestly, when it came out, it felt to me like I was playing Jeffrey Epstein email lottery or slot machine. Because you open up like the image folder 006 and then you click into something and then it's just like screenshots of articles or like, it's just random stuff. Like there's PowerPoint presentations, there's, you know, many, many emails. There's emails in different formats. I. I don't even know if that's necessarily like that bad. Like, you know, some of the emails have. Or some of the images have thumbnails and things like that. But it is just like an incredibly chaotic way to release something that has so much public interest, I guess I would say. And then one of the earlier documents just had a bunch of JPEGs of emails that were not OCR'd in any way. OCR means Optical character recognition, meaning you can search them like control F. You can search through them. That hadn't been done on anything. And I guess I'm curious what you think, like, why this is the case. I have a few theories, but from a usability perspective, from a, like, hey, I'm interested in this as a normal person. It's very, it's not the best. Let me ask you a question. Do you trust your Internet provider to respect your privacy? There's a good reason not to. Depending on where you live, ISPs may be required to keep logs of your online activity. In the US ISPs can legally sell your browsing history for profit. The good news is you don't have to trust your ISP as long as you use ExpressVPN. We report on privacy and data brokers all the time and have learned that without ExpressVPN, third parties can see every website you visit, even if you use incognito mode. This includes your isp, your mobile network provider, and the administrators of your Wi Fi network. Think your boss, your school, your parents, et cetera. ExpressVPN reroutes your traffic through secure encrypted servers. To prevent this, ExpressVPN is offering its lowest price ever, starting at just $3.49 a month or 12 cents a day. ExpressVPN is easy to use, works on all devices, and hides your IP address, meaning you can maintain your privacy without it impacting your life. Select plans include Identity Defender, a new suite of tools to get your data removed from data brokers, alert you when your data appears on the dark web, and even insure you against data theft for up to a million dollars. I use ExpressVPN to change my browsing habits for 404 Media's reporting purposes all the time. With just one click, I can show a website or service that I'm in another state or another country. That's been really useful when we do our reporting on age verification, which has been really impactful and then I also use it in my regular life, whether I'm at home or using public WI Fi. Secure your online data today by visiting expressvpn.com 404media that's E X P R E S s v p n.com 404 Media to find out how you can get up to four extra free months. Expressvpn.com 404 Media are you ready to win this holiday season? Aura Frames will help you do it. This digital picture frame is a gift that's personal, easy and unforgettable. Mine is actually back there if you're watching on YouTube. My sister is incredible at giving gifts. Somehow she just knows the perfect present to put under the tree for every person. I'm usually the one giving out impersonal gift cards. Not this year. This year I've got her beat thanks to Aura Frames, the world's smartest digital picture frames. Aura Frames is a digital picture frame you can load with unlimited free photos and videos. You can preload it with photos before it ships so it's ready to spread memories the minute it's out of the box. On Christmas morning my 404 Media co founders actually bought me that one that you see back there and preloaded it with pictures of their faces and gave it to me for my birthday, which is pretty amazing when I opened the box and saw that photos were already on it. And when you snap pictures of the smile on their face when they open the box, you can send them straight from your phone to the frame. So don't wait. Win the holidays now with Aura Frames. For a limited time, visit auraframes.com.com and get $45 off Aura's bestselling Carver Matte frames, named number one by wire cutter by using promo code 404Media at checkout. That's a frames.com promo code 404Media. This exclusive black Friday Cyber Monday deal is their best of the year. So order now before it ends. Support the show by mentioning us at checkout. Terms and conditions apply.

[Jason Kebler]

My guess is it sounds like a RAW export in response to the subpoena in that when the subpoena is issued and then it's received by the target, they will, you know, maybe the legal department will do it in, in conjunction with the IT department. I don't know about the Jeffrey Epstein IT department. It could be, you know, lawyers or whatever. Right. But they'll have software to produce the correct records in response to a subpoena. And the fact that it hasn't been. It sounds really curated in any way. It sounds like it's just like a RAW export, especially that natives folder. So maybe it's just that, you know, and they didn't really. I mean, maybe they read them obviously for their congressional investigation, but it doesn't sound like they then went and curated them at all to then publicly release them. It's more like a dump. And it's weird because, yeah, the argument for it being on Google Drive, I mean, pretty accessible, everybody has a Google account. And even if you don't, you can usually download stuff from a public Google Drive link even if you don't have a Gmail. Right.

[Sam Cole]

I guess it's also not going to get hugged to death. It's likely to stay up a ton of that.

[Jason Kebler]

And then. So I can see the argument for it. It's just funny where been covering data dumps for like 10 years at this point. And sometimes like hackers are more organized than this, you know, like young, sometimes reckless hackers, you know, they'll put more effort into their press release with their ASCII than it sounds like the committee did here. And getting these documents online, I just.

[Sam Cole]

Clicked three files that are next to each other. One is an email from 2016, one is an email from 2018, and there is an email from 2017. It's like they're. They're not in any sort of order, really, from what I can tell. And so I think that you're correct. And I think also. So this entire, like, case or a huge part of this entire situation is built on the idea that we can't trust the government. We can't trust the official narrative of what happened here or the investigation. And there have been instances where the government has been accused of altering files. For example, the surveillance footage of his jail cell when he died. There's like, you know, Wired did a story where there's, like, the metadata shows that there's missing footage. So I do think that it's. I actually think, despite everything that I said, it's good that they did a raw dump or what seems to be a raw dump of the files. What I don't understand is why. And, like, maybe, maybe this is, like, getting too political, but, like, why did the Democrats who wanted to release this not spend more time curating these emails and creating a website or somewhere that you can read them in, like, a way that makes sense in addition to the raw dump, like, from a point political narrative? Like, why are they, like, here's a bunch of random files with random formats in no order. Good luck. Like, do you think that it's just like a, hey, have fun with this. Like, go, go crazy. Read these. Read this stuff. Like, does it feed into the conspiratorial nature of it or the, like, you know, I don't know, maybe. Maybe this is like, a better way of releasing it because things did then seem to, like, come out slowly over the weekend as journalists and people on bluesky and Twitter and Reddit started finding interesting emails. But I don't know, it just. It feels like, not very calculated, I guess.

[Jason Kebler]

Yeah. And, Sam, I'm going to ask you something without revealing what you're working on, but you are working on something at the moment where you have to go through a lot of data to figure out who you're going to reach out to, the story, that sort of thing. How would. If you were covering this Epstein story, how would you prefer it was delivered to you rather than this?

[Joseph]

I don't think I would want.

[Sam Cole]

Like.

[Joseph]

I don't think I would want, like, a neat, organized version because it would make me wonder what they. If they left anything out or, like, what they cut or, like, if they were, like, oh, that's not important. But maybe it was important. Like, I don't know. It's like, I don't. I think, like, don't touch it and just dump it is probably the smartest way to do it. That said, I don't think this is. I don't think they're thinking that hard. I don't think there's a smart, smart way and a not smart way that they've considered. I think this is just like chumming the water. Like, just, like get it out and let journalists and whoever and whatever, like, talking head wants to deal with it at a cable news network can go through it. Like, I don't. I just don't think anyone's, like, spending that much time thinking about how to do this, which is probably why we end up with it the way that it is. I don't know. I mean, I guess you could go down various rabbit holes and, like, wonder if it's a mess on purpose, if it's hard to go through on purpose. But it's also like, I don't know, it's like you click. I have barely touched it. But like, you. It's like you can just throw a dart and end up with, like, a billionaire admitting to, like, horrible crimes, which is awesome. Like, its own bizarre. You know, it's like, you can't really go wrong clicking around in that thing. There's not really a boring file in there because it's all horrible.

[Sam Cole]

That's part of what is so horrifying, where it's just like, oh, click one email, it's something terrible from Peter Thiel saying, like, had a good time hanging out. Then it's like, the next one is like, Larry Summers. And then it's just like behind every door, a new horror. So, I mean, yeah, maybe the. The slot machine aspect of it is actually, like, smart.

[Joseph]

So I guess, how would you organize it anyway? It's like, I guess chronologically. Chronologically would be the only way that I would think would make any sense. But then if you went to organize it more than that, it would be like, what would it be like by billionaire, by estate that they're located in during the email? It's like, how do you kind of go more granular than just like, by date? But even by date would be helpful, I guess. But I don't know. It's like, I don't really need them to be helpful. It's like, I don't be helpful, honestly. Just let the people who are actually doing the process do the process.

[Jason Kebler]

But, you know, yeah, and as you say, journalists have been going through it and there's, you know, a few stories that come out of it. There's the Michael Wolf stuff for those who don't know. I mean, very famous journalist, slash writer. And in the emails he's seen giving a quote, heads up to Epstein that, hey, CNN is working on something, they're planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you. And then Epstein replies, if I were to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be? And Michael Wolf again, apparently the journalist says, oh, you should let him hang himself. Metaphorically, actually. A really poor choice of words looking back in time, but obviously, what the hell are you doing? You're like giving PR advice to a pedophile. And then even if he wasn't, you shouldn't be giving PR advice to anybody. You're a journalist. What the hell are you doing? Anyway, there was that and there was some stuff like New York Times writer. That's like a whole other thing. There was, I think a Democrat on a committee, during a Michael Cohen hearing, was texting with Epstein. So there's definitely interesting stuff in there. But as you say, Jason, it took a few days for it sort of to come out because it required people to really dig through it and then probably do additional reporting as well. When, when epscene documents have come out before we've even published them. I think the most traffic we've ever got is when we published some Epstein docs. Right.

[Sam Cole]

It was very funny. We were the Google Drive in this instance because there's a big dump of Epstein documents soon after we launched, like within a couple months of us launching, I think, and I downloaded them all off of pacer. We bought them, we paid for them, and then we uploaded them to. To our own site. And I think it is still our highest trafficking article of all time.

[Jason Kebler]

Yeah, I think it's literally, to be honest, it's probably more sketch than Google Drive. It's literally a link at the bottom of the article. It's like, do you just want to download the PDFs? It's like raw, straight from our server, basically.

[Sam Cole]

But it's actually not. It's not the biggest anymore. It was the biggest for a while, but we passed it many times. This. But that was at the. That was like soon after he launched. So it was like a bunch of articles that had just a few thousand people read them and then like tens of thousands, hundreds of over, well, 200,000 people looked at this one.

[Jason Kebler]

And crucially, those court documents were probably OCR. Or capable of being OCR'd.

[Sam Cole]

Right.

[Jason Kebler]

Like you just download them and you can kind of search them. You have the right tools. Right?

[Sam Cole]

They were all PDFs, which is like helpful. There's like not a PDF to be found, honestly, in the latest stuff. Yeah, not that, I mean there's some, but they're. They're mostly in just like weird formats. The interestingly on that first one where we upload them, we like upload them to our website and I did hear from Ghost, our service provider after that, that it was like they were like, that was like very expensive for us to host those files because they got downloaded so many times. And that was like when we were smaller. When they were smaller. I just don't think that anyone was kind of like expecting an influx like downloading gigabytes and gigabytes of data from our website. But anyways.

[Jason Kebler]

Well, what. I mean, two things. Obviously we're joking a bit, but there is also like a serious element to this in that it's really important to be able to access information. So why do you think that's so important? Because, you know, journalists will figure out eventually we have these stories like, why does it really matter that it gets delivered more easily? And how would you prefer it?

[Sam Cole]

Well, I was going to say there actually have been a few projects immediately after the these documents have been released to OCR them. So to run them through, you know, optical character recognition software and then to upload them in a more searchable format. I think Zeteo, which is another independent media company, made a tool that allows you to search things. And then there's been a few projects, one of which we wrote about a few weeks ago, that tried to use AI to do it. And so they would like OCR it, but then they also had AI summaries of different documents and things like that. It's like interesting project, like interesting attempt at AI, especially because he used like an offline AI. Like he used one that he had like an open source one that, that he had on his computer and those you can. Those websites allow you to search like all documents that mention Trump, all documents that mention Larry Summers, all documents that mention Michael Wolf, like you can search by, I don't know, like type of document, things like that. But I've heard like pretty mixed things about how well they are OCR'd. Just because there's so many documents and like these projects are really rushing and so there is maybe like a loss of fidelity in that process. I think that those projects are cool and are like Needed. And I think we love an archive project. We've talked a lot about different archive projects. I do think that I don't know, like, I don't know what the best way to do it is, but I kind of wanted to just bring it up because we have been talking a lot about ICE on this podcast over the last few months and we're going to talk about it again, but I think it was just like, let's do something that's not like in another show that's entirely about ice. And this is something else that people are talking about that and Olivia Nu, which I think we probably won't talk about. But that's like the thing that is like going on at this juncture in the discourse. But. But with the FOIA forum coming up tomorrow and things like that, like the ways that governments release documents is pretty interesting and is. It's crazy, it's like all over the map. Like if you filed public records requests. I think everyone has some sort of story about a weird file format or like a proprietary file format or a password protected PDF that they don't tell you the password for that. They've gotten things like this like I got a floppy disk from a government like maybe three years ago. It's just like they're sending stuff out in really bizarre ways very often. And this is a function of different local governments using different computer systems, different filing systems. A lot of them use Outlook, but they don't know how to export Outlook email boxes, things like that. Gotten a lot of corrupt files, things like that. And so part of being a journalist is figuring out how to open up all of these file formats and how to search through them and all that. And this just seemed like a good opportunity to talk a little bit about that. I've learned how to open up Windows, like Windows Only files on a Mac more times than I would like to count. And it doesn't go very well very often.

[Jason Kebler]

But yeah, dealing with my small farm of virtual machines, I have to tend to. You know, I think I just gave up. Well, no, I used to do that a lot running various Linux virtual machines, then Windows ones to open all different files. Now I'm just like, Emmanuel, could you just open this on your Windows machine and just send the screenshot to me? I don't have time to fucking do all of that. Okay, we will leave that there unless. Well, I know we're going to finish this podcast and maybe they have dumped the documents. I guess we're going to see when we come back after the break. We're going to talk about a fun recruiting effort on LinkedIn. I'll put it like that. We'll be right back after this.

[Sam Cole]

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[Jason Kebler]

Yeah, I'm looking at it now. So it's from a guy called Jim Brown who is the president at Feds United. Feds United is a federal contractor consultancy. So it is a contractor in some ways, but it's more they work with other contractors to figure out their contracts. It's probably the Most, you know, D.C. belt, Virginia, Maryland thing you could probably think of that a company exists to do the contracts for the contractors, blah, blah, blah. Anyway, Jim posted on LinkedIn, well, while I was writing this, it was three weeks ago and now it's a month. So basically, bang on a month ago he writes this LinkedIn post and he says hello to my LinkedIn retired law enforcement and military friends. He then goes on to say that Feds United is looking for around 20 more of these retired or former law enforcement or retired Military personnel in D.C. or Northern Virginia to participate in what he calls a quote, 90 day pilot project that is expected to kick off within the next few weeks, end quote. And he says that the project is to assess whether contractors can validate addresses associated with subjects of interest. You're to only observe and report that's it all pretty vague, you know, not a lot of details. But he says if you're Interested in true LinkedIn fashion, if you're interested in the opportunity, please contact me here via LinkedIn messaging or. Or share it in your, you know, your wider network. He doesn't have hashtag hiring in his LinkedIn profile photo. I didn't see anybody with hashtag open to work in their profile photos, even though Jason made that pretty good joke. So, yeah, it all started there, basically.

[Sam Cole]

Yeah. One of the worst LinkedIn posts I've read in quite some time. So, so basically you see this LinkedIn post and then you spoke to some people who had been briefed on the plans. Like what? What did you learn?

[Jason Kebler]

Yeah. So as you heard, that LinkedIn post, as I said, was vague. It didn't say what exactly the work was, who exactly they would be working for. But I then spoke to multiple people who had been briefed on those plans, and they said that it is verifying information for ice. So Feds United or the contractor they're working with that we'll probably talk about in a minute. They would provide addresses from ICE of immigrant targets, undocumented people, alien targets, alien obviously being the US government term for somebody who's in the country who's not a citizen. And they will be tasked with, here are some vehicles. You have to go verify whether this address belongs to this person or not. So we can figure out, yes, this undocumented person is at this location that gets reported back to ice, and then presumably that is going to be. So then ICE can act on that information. From what I was told, ICE does not have. Doesn't always have a good address for the people it is trying to go after. I think there's a lot of different reasons for that. Probably one might be, that is targets might be mobile. Maybe they use some services and not others. And I think a very interesting one which came up in some of my conversations is that DHS has repeatedly been cut out of a lot of tools that they used to have access to. So stuff like utility bill data. I remember in the first Trump administration, there was a big story in the Washington Post, which I think came after a Wyden Office investigation about how utility companies were selling personal data, and that was ending up with dhs, as far as I know, that got cut off. So what is this pilot trying to do? Well, we have all these addresses and other people can go verify them with the tools they have, which, you know, different tools in private industry, or simply there's Just a lot of work to do like going out and verifying whether somebody lives here or something and observing them. That is a lot of manual work for a lack of a better way of pulling it. But that is what this plan was. Start with a LinkedIn post, then right up to you go out, verify these addresses and we'll give you $300 per address up to a maximum of 30k.

[Sam Cole]

Yeah. So this is part of a bigger ICE initiative to work with skip tracers which are bounty hunters essentially, which basically I actually I sort. And private investigators. I I think is fair to say. Like I, I didn't know that bounty hunters was a real job honestly outside of Star wars until a few years ago when you did an article about the bounty hunting industry where we tracked ourselves using a tool that they had access to. And that was a huge, huge story. I did not understand that this was a thing. So maybe it would be helpful just to like talk about the ICE project but also just a little bit about the skip tracing industry.

[Jason Kebler]

Yeah, I mean my, I learned they're not just dog the bounty hunter, that was my one. Not, not just the, the Star wars one. But yeah, I had to learn this all pretty quickly back in 2018 when we did that story, as you said, where it turned out bounty hunters and skip tracers had access to the basically real time location data of I think most phones in America sold by T Mobile, Sprint AT and T at the time. And I didn't really know what a skip tracer was. So then I ended up speaking to a few pretty sure before I published that and then definitely after. I've been speaking to a lot of these people for years at this point and skip tracer will do a few different things. I mean a lot of it comes down to finding people who skipped. Bailey, that's where the term comes from. A skip tracer is somebody who finds somebody else who has skipped bail and then you need to locate them and you'll be paid for those services. They also do stuff like finding stolen vehicles and that'll be on behalf of I don't really think an individual, but more like an insurance company or something like that. And they'll go find those vehicles, find people as well. As I said and I think to be fair to that industry, we and others sometimes use the terms skip tracer and bounty hunter basically interchangeably because I think people know what a bounty hunter is and I know skip tracers won't agree with this, but they're kind of the same. You were being paid a commission to go find a person or find an item or something like that. Right. But whenever I speak to somebody who says no, I'm specifically a skip tracer, obviously I respect that and I will attribute it as such in the article. But what I learned through doing that phone location story is that bounty hunters, skip tracers and private investigators. And of course, in many states, you have to get a license to be a private investigator. And I believe sometimes the skip tracer as well, they have access to all sorts of different technologies and tools and data. So that's sometimes phone location data. It's stuff like tloxp, which is a powerful data tool that we've covered actually way when we, way back when we first launched in 2023, where it has the personal data from the top of a credit, from a credit report. So name, address, that sort of thing. And that can be really, really useful for tracking down somebody because presumably they put their real address on their credit card bill so they can receive it even though they might not give their address elsewhere, something like that. So skip traces, they have access to all of that sort of stuff, smartphone location data as well, potentially, and license plate readers, which are all over the country. We actually covered one recently, which we were going to talk about in detail today. But like the Motorola Thomson Reuters one and the Vigilant one, there's all of these cameras all over the country. And law enforcement can use a tool to search those private investigators can as well. And years ago, a private investigator source showed me that tool in action and actually tracked someone with their consent. So I've always been drawn to the skip tracers and the bounty hunters and the private investigators ever since, like 2018, because I don't think people understand. They basically have the same capabilities as cops, like technologically and data wise. It's just that, you know, potentially there's far less accountability because although yes, a PI might be licensed and yes, they could use their license, they're much closer to a member of the public than a cop right now. Of course, these people don't have always the authority to arrest you, but they can get pretty damn close if they can't. Yeah.

[Sam Cole]

And so, so now ICE is reaching out to this industry. They're giving contracts to this industry and they are saying, hey, you, you know, largely do this for private purposes or like sometimes for courts, perhaps, now do it for ice.

[Jason Kebler]

Yeah, that's basically. Yeah, that's basically right. Where. Well, we already have this massive private industry of skip tracers who. Their entire thing is finding people's addresses and finding their physical location. Why don't we essentially outsource that part of ICE's mass deportation effort to skip tracers and bounty hunters? And I'm pretty sure this pilot, that this article is about paying the randos off LinkedIn, 300 bucks. I'm pretty sure it is part of this broader plan, which was first reported by the Intercept in October, where on a Friday night, ICE published his procurement document. I think I was already several beers down and then I saw the Intercept piece. I was like, damn, I should have seen that. Intercept publishes that. Very, very interesting. We then cover, I think a couple of weeks later that we find that ICE has allocated as much as $180 million to this effort. I then speak to PIs and skip tracers and they say, well, some of them are horrified. Some of them are like, yes, I will do this work. And. And one of them says, well, the budget is so big that this is probably going to be for large scale government contracts. It's probably not going to be your random family run PI business, Although I imagine ICE will probably take all the help they can get. So we publish that and then somebody reaches out about this latest contracting effort. And you know, our style very much is to do story after story after story after story. Like, we don't wait to do like one big 3,000 word article or something. Sometimes we do, but I much prefer this cadence because it leads to these sorts of stories where people reach out. And for me, and I guess I'll just leave it here, for me, this is a story not just because it provides some specifics of what's going on. It's like, oh, it started with ICE being like, yes, we'll get skip tracers and probably licensed PIs and that sort of thing. Now they're getting randos off LinkedIn. And to me, I think that was really, really crazy. You know, Jason, last thing, I think we changed the headline on this. Why did we do that?

[Sam Cole]

I mean, we just added LinkedIn on it because the origin story of it being these people being recruited off of LinkedIn is just so crazy. It's like the whole thing is so dehumanizing and upsetting. And, you know, ISIS mass deportation campaign is. It's bad for all the reasons that we've talked about. And it's just like when the government is doing it, I mean, when this government is doing it, there's not a whole lot of like, care and guardrails and restraint and all that sort of thing. But. But at, at least, I guess at least it is like the government. And now it's like con. Subcontractors of the government finding people on LinkedIn to do this type of work. It's just like, what could possibly go wrong? You know, like any number of things could go wrong. And I think there's been a whole controversy about, you know, ICE officials identifying themselves and, and that sort of thing. And now it's like, yes, the, apparently this project, there's not supposed to be altercations. It's like these people are supposed to, quote, observe and report is how you put it in the. The article, or I think how the LinkedIn post put it. Yeah, but what happens when someone's observing and reporting and then someone asks like, what the hell are you doing here? Vibes like that. It's. It's easy to say that, but then who knows what happens? And it just like raises all these questions about, you know, like, you sort of expect law enforcement to identify themselves and, and there's already been cases of people impersonating ICE agents and FBI agents and, and all that sort of thing. And this just like, raises that to a 10, I think.

[Jason Kebler]

Yeah.

[Sam Cole]

So very. Not. Not good. This of, like, I say this all the time, but of the many, many stories that we've done about ice, like, this is one that is very alarming. I feel this is very alarming.

[Jason Kebler]

Yeah. Actually, I'll just add that Spencer Ackerman mentioned this on Blue sky after we publish. But, like, there has been these sort of pervasive rumors for months and months and months on Blue sky and other social media platforms where it's like, oh, that ICE official you're filming, he's actually a bounty hunter. He's actually somebody from the Proud Boys who's pretending to be ICE and then get paid money. And frankly, it's an unsubstantiated myth. Right. I think people are kind of just buying in, into that for whatever reason. I mean, maybe it's easier to believe that than, no, that's a federal government employee and they're not identifying themselves and they have the full power of the state behind them and a culture of impunity and there's nothing you can do about it. Maybe that's a little bit scarier. But that said, that was a myth for months now. It's like, oh, they actually did it. They actually hire the bounty hunters now and it became real. I just don't think it was really real before October or it wasn't a formal policy before October, is my understanding.

[Sam Cole]

Before you end the podcast, may I simply Go back to Epstein for a second and ask what happens. No, it's just like the. The Donald Trump blew Bill Clinton. Are we not even going to even discuss at all?

[Jason Kebler]

Well, Emmanuel's not here and he's obsessed with it.

[Sam Cole]

Yeah, I feel like, Sam, like, you what. Where do you come down on this? How do you feel? How do you feel about this?

[Joseph]

Is that even I didn't even know if it was a meme or joke or real, which is kind of how I'm engaging with this entire. This entire news cycle. So is it real?

[Sam Cole]

It's a meme. It's a joke and it's real. No.

[Joseph]

Is there video?

[Sam Cole]

No.

[Joseph]

I would like to see it.

[Jason Kebler]

Can you explain it, please, Jason?

[Sam Cole]

So I don't have the exact email in front of me, but there is an email, I believe it's from Jeffrey Epstein's brother to someone where he says that Trump blew Bubba and Bubba is like a nickname for Bill Clinton. And so, you know, it's sort of become like the JD Vance Couch meme situation. But there is an email claiming that Trump blew Bubba and Bubba, perhaps Bill Clinton. There's been some reporting that Bubba is not Bill Clinton, but is a private citizen, is like another person. But it raises, like, many questions. It raises questions just in terms of like, what's. What's going on here. I've. I've seen some very good jokes. This is obviously, like, extraordinarily upsetting stuff and like, very dark and terrible. However, some of the jokes are funny, I must say.

[Jason Kebler]

I would say that. I mean, it's basically. And it's not going to be as big as this, but it's basically pee tape too, right? Where people are like, yes, yes, yes, if, if this happens, it will come out. And then I'm talking about like, you know, the hashtag resistance, Muller, she wrote or whatever. X accounts and Blue sky accounts or whatever. Like, yeah, if this comes out, finally, it'll be over for Trump and, and he'll be out or whatever. And it's like, dude, absolute delusional copium. Like, that is not happening. We already know that there isn't like a single story that changes things. Like post 2016, I just. That just doesn't happen, you know?

[Sam Cole]

So Snopes has fact checked this and has rated it true. Here is what the email says. The email says, from Epstein's brother to Jeffrey Epstein, it says, ask him if Putin has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba, question mark. And then Epstein, then they make like various jokes about it of which I can't like really understand. Epstein says back. And I thought I had service T S U R I S And then one of the reasons why some of these emails are so like difficult to parse is because they're all boomers who don't know how to type.

[Jason Kebler]

It's crazy.

[Sam Cole]

Which is like worth mentioning. It's just like these people email how you think that they would email. It's like they're one. They're like confessing to crimes like left and right. Like I saw a good joke that it was like, like teenager downloading anime from piracy website. Uses like six VPNs, you know, Tor network, etc. And then it's just like Jeffrey Epstein discussing pedophilia and sex crimes. It's just like, just talks about it in the open on emails. It's very crazy. But they also can't type at all.

[Jason Kebler]

Yeah, billionaires are incapable of sending a cogent email, it seems. All right, we'll leave it there. If you're a billionaire who can read, can write a cogent email, please send once in and we'll take a look. If you're listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out. But if you are a paying 404me, you subscriber, we're going to talk all about this new code of conduct in the adult industry that Sam has covered, which has been frankly a long time coming. You can subscribe and gain access to that content at 404 Media co. As a reminder, 404 Media is journalist founded and supported by subscribers. If you do wish to subscribe for a free media and directly support our work, Please go to 404 Media co. You'll get unlimited access to our articles and an ad free version of this podcast. You also get to listen to the subscribers only section where we talk about a bonus story each week. This podcast is made in partnership with Kaleidoscope. Another way to support us is by leaving a five star rating and review for the podcast. That stuff really helps us out. Here is one of those from Mousewitch in depth reporting from truly independent journalists. An essential listen for staying informed and sane during this moment of corporate capture over our media environment. Thank you so much. This has been 404 Media. We'll see you again next week.