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The Epstein Chronicles
Three Million Pages Released—and Millions Still Withheld (6/19/26)
00:27:42
CBS News found that the Justice Department’s massive Epstein-file release still leaves major holes in the public record. Although the DOJ said it collected more than six million pages, it released only about three million, claiming the remainder...
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What's up, everyone? And welcome to another episode of the Epstein Chronicles. Over the past year or so, we've talked about pretty much nothing else but Jeffrey Epstein. And while that obviously is going to remain the focus, but with so much crazy stuff going on in the United States and around the world, I think that it's important that we touch on some of these other topics. And I think that one of the topics that we should definitely touch on is the grooming gang inquiry that has just been released by Rupert Low over in the uk. And look, I know that there's people out there who have their doubts about what this investigation found, but I think it's very important that we have all the facts, have all the details, and I think it's important that all of you have all those details word for word. And that report is 219 pages. So we're going to dive into it the same way we do with all the other court documents. And then, like everything else, it'll be up to you to decide what you think after you have the facts or the allegations presented to you. But I think it's pretty interesting that there are people out there that refuse to believe this report. And look, I don't know if the numbers are correct, I don't know if that many women and girls have been abused over in the uk, but now that the allegation has been made, I think we need to dive into it and take a look. Because if what that report is saying is true, we're talking about one of the most dastardly, disgusting, depraved rings of all time, and on a level of abuse far larger than anything Epstein could have ever dreamed of. So if what that report is saying is true, then that topic certainly dovetails into what we're talking about all the time when it comes to systemic breakdowns. So I think that the topic is important, and I think it's a topic that we need to dive into. And starting later on today, that's exactly what we're going to do. And we're going to look at it with the same eye that we look at the allegations made against Jeffrey Epstein and his trafficking ring. If you go into something and you automatically think that there's no there there, then a lot of times that's where your confirmation bias is going to take you. So I'm coming into this completely neutral as far as I don't know one way or the other what's true or not. But I do know this. I have some people over in the UK that I really trust who believe that this is true. And if that is the case, this is one of the biggest cover ups in the history of the whole entire world. And keep in mind the UK is already dealing with the situation with Prince Andrew and Peter Mandelson. So things are spinning out of control over in the UK pretty quickly and we're going to do our best to follow along. Now, one thing I will say is I'm not some expert on English politics, but what we're going to do is call balls and strikes, because in my opinion, if you believe the Epstein survivors, then at the very least should be listening to what these survivors have to say as well. Now, that doesn't mean you have to believe people blindly, but I see a lot of people that dismiss this stuff out of hand and act like it's just politics. And I'm sure that politics does play a part. But to write all of this off as politics, to write it all off, is fake or overblown because it doesn't fit with your political view. That's bad news. And anybody doing that is. Is enabling this kind of. So if you're somebody that says they care about the Epstein survivors, then I would hope that that kind of empathy moves over to anyone who has suffered the way that these people have allegedly suffered. And I think that the women who are making these accusations over in the UK deserve to be heard and listened to the same way the Epstein survivors are. And that's exactly what we're going to do around these parts. All right, now, with that said, why don't we turn our focus right now to the topic at hand. And the topic at hand, obviously is Jeffrey Epstein's ass and the Trump administration's cover up. To do that, we have an article from CBS News and the headline what's missing from the Epstein Files? Questions persist about unexplained redactions, missing documents and email gaps. This article was authored by Daniel Rootnick. When the Department of Justice released more than 3 million pages of documents under the Epstein Files Transparency act, survivors advocates and lawmakers quickly raised questions about an apparent discrepancy. The DOJ had said it collected more than 6 million pages of material during its investigation, but was only releasing half that number. Oh, you know, duplicative national security stuff you're not allowed to see. Meanwhile, that's not what the law is called for. The Justice Department tells CBS News it's released every document required by the Epstein Files Transparency act and maintains that those unreleased 3 million documents were either duplicative, unrelated to Epstein or. Or Protected by legal privilege. Who believes that? Like, how can you have a valid investigation when the people who are in charge of that investigation are doing everything in their power to make sure it goes nowhere? And if there's ever been a time for a special counsel, now is it. But concerns persist about evidence that important documents are still being withheld. At the same time, the Government Accountability Office recently announced it was launching an investigation into the way documents that were released had information blacked out. That move comes at the request of several members of Congress. Representative Robert Garcia, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, says that if there are duplicates, okay, that's fine, let's see them. He adds, I think that the people need to understand is we're not sure what's in the 3 million. And I think that's a big problem. That wasn't what was called for by the law. That wasn't what was required. All these redactions that we see in these emails that are protecting people's names, etc. That aren't survivors, that's not what the law called for. The whole last point of this is accountability. And how can anyone be held accountable if nobody knows their name? CBS News has analyzed the archive not only for what has been disclosed, but also for documents that appear to be absent. Despite the unprecedented volume of material now available, it's apparent that many gaps remain in the public record surrounding Epstein's activities. His communication, the federal investigation into him and the circumstances surrounding his death behind bars identified several areas where important questions were remain unanswered or documents appear to remain unreleased. Well, that's basically the whole last investigation, right? The Epstein Files Transparency act provides only limited grounds for withholding information or redacting names. Its primary purpose is to protect victims. The bill specifically excluded reputational harm or political sensitivity as a reason for redacting. Yet in many instances, prominent individuals names were redacted while victims names were not. And it's funny how it always went one way, right? One way traffic the whole entire time. Always the victim's name being released, never the dirtbags. I know, just another big accident. They were overworked. All these lawyers from all these different departments. Some redactions seem difficult to justify. In one example, a text where Epstein sent Steve Bannon a link to an article. Bannon's face was blacked out in a photo that had already been publicly posted online. Have to protect Donald Trump's guy, right? Mr. Steve Bannon himself, Jeffrey Epstein's other BFF. Elsewhere, the names of business contacts and acquaintances of Epstein appear to have been redacted without an obvious reason why, under the terms of the law. Well, there is no reason. The thing is, they knew they didn't have to answer for any of it. Every single one of these officials that's involved in this knows that no matter what happens, they're never going to face consequences. Donald Trump will pardon them so they can say and do whatever they want to further the COVID up. And the only way we're ever going to get to the bottom of it is if we have an independent council. In another widely cited example, a 2002 email with the sign off love Melania had the full name and email of the sender and receiver redacted. In April, first lady Melania Trump acknowledged having exchanged emails with Ghislaine Maxwell, saying in a statement that it cannot be categorized as anything more than casual correspondence. My polite reply to her email doesn't amount to anything more than a trivial note. Oh, no, nothing at all. All of us have those kind of emails to people who are diddling little kids like the whitewashing of this is just unbelievable. I remember a point in time in this country where a scandal like this would be the end of you, but now, no big deal. In fact, this dude has convinced people that it's all a hoax. And I'll tell you what, as much as people don't want to admit it, it's been a masterful stroke by Donald Trump and his administration. Oh, it's costly for the American people, but for him personally, starting that war in Iran was the best movie ever made. And now that that's winding down, a lot of the hubbub and buzz surrounding the Epstein files has been muted. Whether that's people who lost interest because of all the inaction or people who thought things were real now think it's a hoax because Donald Trump told them so. Either way, Donald Trump got what he wanted. And that's people focusing on other things besides this issue. The Epstein Files Transparency act requires the DOJ to provide justification for every redaction. It permits withholding information that would constitute a clear, unwarranted invasion of personal privacy, but also states that all redactions must be accompanied by a written justification published in the Federal Register and submitted to Congress. The Department of Justice has made no attempt to address specific redactions and instead issued a general statement saying its redactions were consistent with the act. And that certainly is not the law. They have to justify every single redaction made, every last one. And if they don't do that or they're unwilling to do that, then they're not complying with the law as it's written. And there certainly should be consequences for anybody that refuses to complain, the same way there would be consequences for me or you. Members of Congress have been given the opportunity to review redacted material, but the process is time consuming and some have complained that their searches are being monitored by the doj. Well, who are we kidding? Let's not act like the DOJ is not monitoring everybody. Pretty sure that everybody's information's getting swooped up, maybe not by the doj, but by the nsa, by the CIA. Remember what Edward Snowden told us after CBS News reached out to the DOJ for comment on these redactions? A photo of Bannon and two of the emails were quietly unredacted. After one of those was unredacted, it revealed the sender was former UK diplomat Peter Mandelson, who was arrested earlier this year on suspicion of mishandling sensitive government documents, which BBC News reports he denies. Mandelson has said that he regrets his friendship with Epstein and says he never witnessed criminal activity. Well, besides his own, right? I mean, you sent the emails and in those emails was sensitive information, correct? The DOJ released millions of Epstein emails. Nearly all originate from an email account he created around the time he went to jail in 2008, missing from the Epstein files or emails from his other earlier accounts, including approximately 20,000 messages from Epstein's Jee eprojectahoo.com account, which were previously obtained by hackers and later archived by the nonprofit Distributed the Nile of Secrets. It's unclear if the DOJ itself ever obtained those emails. That's concerning. How could the DOJ itself not get those emails? You're the doj. You mean to tell me you don't have the power to subpoena those emails? Some older email messages do appear in records apparently obtained from Glenn Maxwell's account or other sources, but the DOJ's release is missing most of Epstein's earliest communications. However, a batch of documents raises questions about what the DOJ does have. A series of screen grab images of Epstein's inbox for an email account, Little St. Jeff, at yahoo.com, a reference to his island Little St. James from the early 2000s, notably a period of time when Epstein was in touch with Donald Trump, whom he knew through New York and Palm beach social circles. The sender and recipient fields on those records are heavily redacted. Mr. Trump has repeatedly claimed he has never used email, but those communications could potentially have references to Epstein's relationship with Mr. Trump and others. This was also the period in which Epstein was found to have been recruiting underage girls for sexual massages and would likely have been of high interest to investigators. Mr. Trump has consistently denied any wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. Well, those emails could be pretty interesting, huh? And I think this really just goes directly to the heart of the issue with the DOJ claiming that they have nothing left to investigate, nothing left to look at, nowhere else to go when it's obvious that that's not the truth. There's plenty to investigate. The problem isn't that there's no evidence. The problem is there's no willpower. Despite the DOJ apparently having access to Epstein's inbox, only a handful of emails from that account were included in the release. The release includes a substantial amount of internal DOJ and FBI correspondence. The names of many DOJ and FBI officials involved in those communications have been redacted, making it difficult to reconstruct who is responsible for key investigative actions. Part of the plan. That's what they're covering up. I'm telling you right now. It's the institutional fuckery that they're so worried about spilling out because they know what'll happen. They already know. Nobody trusts the doj. And if this comes out and it spills out the way it should, forget it. There's no coming back from that. Numerous emails in the archive reference detached documents that do not appear to have been included in the release. One example concerns the theft of approximately 30 firearms from Epstein's Orro Ranch property in New Mexico. In August 2018, an employee emailed Epstein a file titled ZMC Gun Inventory PDF, which contained information about the weapons, including their serial numbers. According to a New Mexico State police report obtained by CBS News, those serial numbers were withheld from investigators during the theft investigation. CBS News was unable to locate any document containing firearm serial numbers in the released archive. Well, I wonder why. And as far as guns go, Jeffrey Epstein was, at his heart, an arms dealer. That was part of his grooming process of his own. Before he started this, he had that. Even where the attachments may have been released, linking them back to the emails from which they originated is nearly impossible. The DOJ replaced original file names with its own document numbering system, making it difficult to determine whether such attachments were included elsewhere in the archive or which email a file may have been originally attached to. Confusion is the game. That's the goal. They want you to be confused. They don't want you to understand what's happening here. They don't want you to have any idea that they have a bunch of files that they didn't release. And that's why they're going so hard in the paint to try and make you move on. A notable document in the files is a 69 page report produced by the Organized Crime Drug Enforcement Task Force Fusion center identifying Epstein and 14 others as targets of a DEA investigation into alleged money laundering connected to Ecstasy or ketamine trafficking. Sounds about right. Jeffrey Epstein was moving money, bundling it and repackaging it for everybody. What, you think the cartels didn't know about that? You think drug dealers didn't know about a guy like Epstein? An investigation of that scope would likely have generated substantial records, including investigative reports, emails and financial analysis. None of that material was released. Of course not. It would tell you too much. And that was never the point. But sure, let's move on. The DEA denied CBS News requests for related records under the Freedom of Information act and also declined a request from Oregon Senator Ron Wyden seeking additional information about the investigation. The Senator's office told CBS News, well, that's crazy, you know, the Senate, Congress, oversight. But sure, I guess the DEA could just tell them to go get stuffed because you know, the DEA has never been involved in anything crazy. We should just trust the DEA too. All these three letter agencies, we should trust them and we should never ask questions. Previous reporting by the Washington Post revealed that Epstein had been named in an investigation in the 90s into Towers Financial, a notorious Ponzi scheme, but was never charged. Documents related to the investigation was were not included in the release despite it having been conducted by the doj. One notable limitation of the law requiring the Epstein files release is that it only applies to the doj. Other agencies may have documents relating to Epstein that they have not released. And that's the rub, isn't it? I told you that the DOJ has the crumbs. The cake is at Langley. The document about the DEA investigation revealed three separate Immigration and Customs Enforcement investigations, two of which had already been closed by the time of to the 2015 report and one that was listed as pending. But ICE, which falls under the Department of Homeland Security, is not covered by the Epstein files Transparency Act. Typical and not shocking. With all of the fraud that came with immigration, we don't even have a valve to get that information. But sure, it's not a cover up. They've been very transparent since the very beginning. Neither are other government agencies, including the State Department, Treasury Department, CIA or nsa, which may have collected material on Epstein over the past several decades with his global network of political business contacts. Epstein himself wondered if US Intelligence had files on him. Oh, he knew if they had files on him. Are the Knicks the NBA champions? That's how certain I am that there's files that the FBI, the CIA, nsa, and everybody else are still hiding that have to do with Epstein. CBS News spent weeks analyzing indexes of files provided to Glenn Maxwell by the DOJ during her criminal case. The same index has been used previously by media outlets to identify three missing FBI interview records known as 302s, in which agents documented that they were told by Epstein accusers who made claims about Mr. Trump. This index used a Bates numbering, a common legal document indexing system, to catalog records. More than 70% of the roughly 5,000 documents listed in the index could not be located through searches of the released archive using their assigned document numbers, according to a CBS News analysis. Of course not. It was never about giving you the information. I want people to understand that this is about COVID so Trump can run around and say he's done more for the survivors than than anybody ever. And the fact that people are lapping that up is terrifying, Absolutely terrifying. The DOJ told CBS News that many of the missing entries may have been identified as duplicates and therefore were excluded from publication. Using contextual clues, including witness interview dates and document descriptions. Some files could be located elsewhere, but for many that was not possible. One example involves an individual named Joseph Alvarez, also known as Gypsy Gita, who we talked about years ago. Geeta had previously reported been named by one Epstein survivor as someone who introduced her to Ghislaine Maxwell. Alvarez died in 2021. CBS News was unable to locate four of a documents associated with with Alvarez in the index. Most of the documents that were present, one was a picture of Alvarez with Mr. Trump, one was Alvarez business card, and two were photographs of large bags of cash. The four missing documents were listed as Alvarez asset report, Alvarez law enforcement report, Alvarez contact card report, and screenshot of redacted Facebook. It's unclear from the documents which why these photos were included in the case files while they were looking at him as a co conspirator. That's obvious. Maybe not named, but certainly unnamed. Have you ever read a court document? Yeah, that's what they say, right? Named and unnamed co conspirators. And what that means is they know there's other co conspirators, but they're not ready to name them. One of the most conspicuous absences is communication relating to scheduling of massages. In the years prior to Epstein's death, Epstein was known to have multiple massages each day, a practice that he used as a mechanism for recruiting and exploiting young women and girls. When authorities searched his Palm beach residence in 2005, investigators found hundreds of messages from women and girls that they said referred to the scheduling of massage appointments. Yet the released archive contains little correspondence about how appointments were arranged. After his release from jail in 2019, Epstein frequently encouraged associates to communicate using the encrypted messaging app Signal. No signal messages have been included in the release. It's possible that investigators were unable to obtain them. Look, Epstein was a clandestine dude, and he had a lot of things going on behind the scenes, and he had a lot of access to technology that a lot of us don't have. Among those who apparently used signal to communicate with Epstein were technology investor Peter Thiel and real estate investor Thomas Barack. Barack, a longtime friend of Mr. Trump, is now US ambassador to Turkey and special envoy of Iraq. Both Thiel and Barack were involved in Mr. Trump's 2016 presidential campaign. They have not been accused of any wrongdoing in the Epstein case. Well, didn't Sarah Kellen have some things to say about Tom Barack and how he introduced her to Jeffrey Epstein? I believe maybe something you want to talk to Mr. Barack about? Suspicious activity reports which document millions of dollars in transactions made by Epstein that were flagged by financial institutions were released, retracted, and then re released in an entirely redacted form. They originate from the Treasury Department, but were used in the DOJ's investigation of Epstein and Maxwell's crimes. Not well enough. They had all that information and they weren't able to hit them with rico. Now, do you think it was because they didn't want to, or do you think that Main justice told them not to? One document from the Epstein files revealed the DOJ had footage from 147 cameras from the Metropolitan Correctional center covering a 24 hour period before and after Epstein died, totaling over 8 terabytes of data. The internal documents indicate that the footage does not reveal anything significant since the cameras in the Special Housing Unit were not active at the time. Even so, by law, those videos should have been released. Also missing are videos from July 23, 2019, the night Epstein apparently first tried to take his life. I don't believe that for a second. Sorry, I'm just going to keep saying it over and over. I refuse to use Nicholas Tartaglioni as a source. The independent journalist Katie Fang is currently suing the Department of Justice to force it to provide justification for many of the redactions and release additional documents. According to former Attorney General Pam Bondi, her deputy and now Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche was responsible for handling the redaction and the release of the Epstein files. This man should not be confirmed. Anyone that votes for this dude to be the Attorney General is suspect. The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform has requested that Blanche appear before the committee and answer questions about the process. Now, look, I don't know if they're going to be able to force him to do that, but they should. And he should willingly accept if there's nothing to hide and the administration's doing what they say they're doing, being the most transparent administration ever. Nothing to worry about, right? Somehow I think that Mr. Blanche is going to fight tooth and nail about going under oath and talking about this topic. And as far as the other stuff goes, all the stuff that's missing, unfortunately, it's just the tip of the iceberg. We all know that there's a lot more that's still bubbling under the surface and a lot more they're hiding. So at this point, it's not. If they're hiding something, the question is how much of it is still hidden. And unfortunately, at this point, we just don't know. So like usual, we're going to keep pounding away, and when we have something new, we'll get it added to the catalog. All the information that goes with this episode can be found in the description box.