Today I was reading about the judicial progress against another unchecked billionaire rapist and it mentioned some statements Lord Peter Mandelson made to Jeffrey Epstein upon the occasion of Epstein's conviction in 2008.
I didn't recall that exact wording, so I went to the linked article that focused entirely on the emails between Epstein and Mandelson. As I often do, I wanted to see if the quoted section was all there is or just a truncated version of a much longer exchange, so I went to find the EFTA version.
Only thing is, when I went to the DoJ site, these particular career-ending emails are gone, or are at least not found when searching by text, which is what I was doing. They're still readily found in Jmail, of course, though even the Jmail versions no longer have a link to the actual EFTA files on the DoJ site.
Here's the first email mentioned in the above-linked Guardian article, and here's the second. But nothing left on the DoJ site, even though almost 6,000 other records of Epstein's communications with Mandelson remain.
Just to see if this is going to be a thing, I went to another linked article in The Guardian that lists ten points of evidence in the Epstein -- Mendelson correspondence that suggest a close friendship, and looked up each of the quotes on both the DoJ site and in Jmail.
Many were there and findable on a text search just as they should be, but sure enough two are missing from both the DoJ site and strangely also from the Jmail archive: #3: “Peter will be staying at 71st over weekend” from Epstein to Jes Staley, June 2009; and #5: “Petie’s quitting” from Epstein to Jes Staley, May 2010.
Am I missing something? Or are the orange lackeys just back to quietly removing the rich and powerful from the EFTA releases hoping nobody notices.
It is still possible that those mails have been quoted from an image, I.e. the DoJ stores a scan, and someone at the Guardian typed them in for the article. Text search will not find text in a scanned image unless someone did OCR on it.
BUT: there are known cases of evidence from the Epstein case being removed from the site, so this could be just another of those cases.
Eh, it's possible, but very, very unlikely. Given the DoJ's own claims and how OCR is what they were using to mass redact the files (like all the redacted instances of "don't" lol) I personally think it's safe to assume that everything on the DoJ site was, at some point and without exception, OCR'd, even the handwritten materials, and that has been my own experience with it.
In this case I was definitely using text search, but that is the only search available on the DoJ site. I have not had a problem before now with finding anything via text search, not least because when I can't find it with one string I try another, and another, removing punctuation, etc.
This is the current disclaimer on the site:
As I said, the DoJ is no foreigner to removing published materials again. The idea that the search failure could have technical reasons is something to consume with a grain or two of salt, but not impossible.
I should add that today there is another Guardian article regarding the now-public transcript of Jes Staley's closed door interview with the House Oversight Committee on July 24. It mentions two separate email exchanges by quote, and all are easily found via search on the DoJ site, usually in multiples, and of course specific Bates numbers are in the transcript as well. (I prefer text search because if you open all the results you'll often get the whole long email chain, but with Bates number you at least have that one isolated quote.)
However, in this case almost all of the text search results include the wording, "Confidential Treatment Requested by JPMorgan Chase" somewhere on the document. I've spent many hours in the legal cases in the files, and even in cases that are now removed -- like the entire probate proceedings in the USVI -- I have never seen that before for any other individual or organization. If I venture to guess, that notation is likely a relevant factor in where the other now-absent Jes Staley emails have gone.
EDITED TO ADD: Just for the hell of it, I searched the DoJ site for the text "Confidential Treatment Requested by JPMorgan Chase" exactly as seen on the documents I looked at from the transcript, not even stripping the capitalizations, and it came back with 8602 hits. Many also have a JPM-SDNY Bates number but not all, which tends to suggest that all material related to litigation between SDNY and JPMorgan, or at least whatever JPMorgan provided, has been labeled with that request, but it has little/no prohibitive weight in itself. So for myself, I am back to asking why those specific emails, the contents of which are already public, have been removed from the public-facing DoJ site.