The Epstein Email Dump Is a Mess

0:03Hello, 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 founded company and needs your support. To subscribe, go to 404media.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 404media.co. 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, hello. Oh, final reminder. Well, if you're a paying subscriber, you get this on Tuesdays.

0:47If you're listening to the free feed, you get it on Wednesdays. And that is the same day as our latest 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 officers or local government, how and why police have been using flock cameras in their local communities and what that all means.

1:33And 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 i actually did 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 paying subscribers will find the live stream link to the event on the site. And again, that is the 19th of November, Wednesday at 1pm Eastern.

2:17If 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. 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 Flock FOIA forum for quite some time, so very excited to talk about it. And the last few FOIA forums have been... More and more people have been at them, which has been really awesome.

2:55So very excited for it. Yeah, we will bring it all together, And of course, we will answer a bunch of questions live 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 then 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, is what I have in the Google Doc.

3:44Jason, what do you mean by that? And then I'm sure we'll go back and give people context. But what's your beef? Yeah, I mean, I think that we're trying to talk about something that everyone else is talking about. And as you mentioned, 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.

4:34And so as part of 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, um... 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.

5:32These are like the Epstein emails in a way, right? So there are many, many, many, many, many, many Epstein files. And I think that when we're talking about like, 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 different parts of court cases over the years. And that's another kind of issue with this is that there has been 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 plain records, all these sorts of things have come out as different parts of different court cases over the years.

6:33And 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, the Epstein emails is probably the correct way to think about it, as you said. 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 Times words it.

7:19And it's like, now that'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. And who sends that Google Drive link out? Is it like an official congressional email? Where does this Google Drive come from? So on November 12th, there is a press release from the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform. And here's the entirety of the press release.

8:09It 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 to the Dropbox. First of all, it's 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 an adult actor who's like, follow my backup account here.

9:01It's kind of odd, I would say. I guess given what we know about Pacer, which is the court system's file system, which is a shit show and very hard to search and very expensive. 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 native. and then there's a bunch of subfolders that are just like 001, 002, so on and so forth.

9:54And I'm like really... It's not sorted at all, like chronologically or anything like that? 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 the image folder 006 and then you click into something and then it's just screenshots of articles. It's just random stuff. There's PowerPoint presentations. There's many, many emails. There's emails in different formats. I don't even know if that's necessarily that bad. 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.

10:55And then one of the earlier documents just had a bunch of JPEGs of emails that were not OCRed in any way. OCR means optical character recognition, meaning you can search them, like Ctrl-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.

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15:20My 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 conjunction with the IT department. I don't know about the Jeffrey Epstein IT department. It could be lawyers or whatever, right? But they will 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 a 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 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 i guess it's also not going to get hugged to death right right it's likely to stay up a ton of that 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 uh sometimes reckless hackers you know they'll put more effort into their press release with their ASCII art than it sounds like the committee did here in getting these documents online.

17:02I just click three files that are next to each other. One is an email from 2016, one is an email from 2018, and the other is an email from 2017. It's like they're not in any sort of order really from what I can tell. I think that you're correct and I think also so this entire entire 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 the metadata shows that there's missing footage.

17:52So 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 maybe this is getting too political, but 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 a way that makes sense in addition to the raw dumb? From a political narrative, why are they like, here's a bunch of random files with random formats in no order. Good luck. Do you think that it's just like a, hey, have fun with this?

18:40Go crazy, read this stuff? Does it feed into the conspiratorial nature of it? Or the like, you know, I don't know. 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 Blue Sky and Twitter and Reddit started finding interesting emails. But I don't know. It just, it feels like not very calculated, I guess. yeah and Sam I'm going to ask you something without revealing what you're working on but you're 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 um i don't think i would want like uh 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.

20:07That said, I don't think this is... I don't think they're thinking that hard. I don't think there's a smart way and a not smart way that they've considered. I think this is just like chumming the water. Just get it out and let journalists and whoever and whatever talking head wants to deal with it at a cable news network can go through it. I just don't think anyone's 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 wonder if it's a mess on purpose, if it's hard to go through on purpose.

20:50But it's also like, I don't know. It's like you click. I have barely touched it, but you can just throw a dart and end up with a billionaire admitting to horrible crimes. Which is awesome. Its own bizarre... It's like you can't really go wrong clicking around on that thing. There's not really a boring file in there. Because it's all horrible. 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, had a good time hanging out, then it's like the next one is Larry Summers. And then it's just like behind every door, a new horror.

21:31So I mean, yeah, maybe the slot machine aspect of it is actually smart. So I guess how would you organize it anyway? I guess 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, by billionaire, by a state 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, don't be helpful, honestly. Just let the people who are actually doing the process do the process, but, you know.

22:16Yeah. And as you say, journalists have been going through it. And there's a few stories that come out of it. There's the Michael Wolff stuff, for those who don't know. I mean, a 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 Wolff, again, apparently the journalist says, oh you should let him hang himself. Metaphorically, actually a really poor choice of words looking back back in time.

23:02But obviously, what the hell are you doing? You're like giving PR advice to a paedophile 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 then some stuff like you're a times writer and that's like a whole other thing there was um 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.

23:42When Epstein 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? 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 our own site. And I think it is still our highest trafficking article of all time. Yeah. I think. It's literally, to be honest, it's probably more sketch than Google Drive.

24:28It'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. It's actually not. It's not the biggest anymore. It was the biggest for a while, but we passed it many times this year. But that was soon after we 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 200 ,000 people looked at this one. And crucially, those court documents were probably OCRed or capable of being OCRed, right? You just download them and you can search them if you have the right tools, right?

25:13They were all PDFs, which is helpful. There's not a PDF to be found, honestly. In the latest stuff, yeah. I mean, there's some, but they're mostly in just weird formats.

25:29Interestingly, on that first one where we upload them, we 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 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 expecting an influx, downloading gigabytes and gigabytes of data from our website. but anyways well 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 well I was going to say there actually have been a few projects immediately after these documents have been released to OCR them, sort of run them through optical character recognition software and then to upload them in a more searchable format.

26:48I think Zetel, 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 OCR it, but then they also had AI summaries of different documents and things like that. It's an interesting project, interesting attempt at AI, especially because he used an offline AI. He used one that he had, an open source one that he had on his computer. And those websites allow you to search all documents that mention Trump, all documents that mention Larry Summers, all documents that mention Michael Wolff.

27:33You can search by, I don't know, type of document, things like that. But I've heard pretty mixed things about how well they are OCR'd just because there's so many documents and these projects are really rushing. And so there is maybe a loss of fidelity in that process. I think that those projects are cool and are 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. I don't know what the best way to do it is. But I wanted to just bring it up because we have been talking a lot about ICE on this podcast over the last few months.

28:19And we're going to talk about it more. You're going to talk about it again in the minute. 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 Nuzzi, 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 with the FOIA forum coming up tomorrow and things like that, the ways that governments release documents is pretty interesting and it's crazy. It's all over the map. If you filed public records requests, I think everyone has some sort of story about a weird file format or 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.

29:10I got a floppy disk from a government 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.

29:55I've learned how to open up Windows. Windows only files on a Mac more times than I would like to count. And it doesn't go very well very often. Dealing with my small farm of virtual machines, I have to tend to... 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 a 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.

30:33I 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.

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