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.
Unfortunately, no. Those are what I was looking for with the Jmail, but even those pointers to the Bates numbers are gone -- at least for these particular entries -- and Jmail no longer has a link to the actual EFTA files on the DoJ site for these specific emails.
However, the specific sender/receiver is known for each, and the wording is specific enough, so that taken together anyone with text search can take fairly unique strings and get a hit on a non-DoJ archive. The first article is all about Lord Peter Mendelson and references two specific emails, for which I included the Jmail links (see above).
The second article had ten points of evidence from the files, two that I could no longer get from the DoJ site. (I did not bother looking for the birthday book, so I can't say for sure on any parts of that.) From above:
For example, "Petie's quitting" happens a good bit in Jmail (apparently Petie's a quitter, lol) but we are looking specifically for an Epstein email to Jes Staley: nothing. But we know they were there at some point, because the Graun quoted them.
That's another slight oddity: more often than not, papers have started including direct links to the DoJ site when quoting very specific documents like an email; these too are not present in the articles.
Had a look. Some findings:
I dont think I need my tinfoil hat for this: the fact that the 12th dataset is so small and that DS13 > DS20 are scaffolded on the server, but never released. So, to state the bleeding obvious: the war in Iran started to prevent the most damning datasets to be released.
This is amazing. And I can tell you I'd never have figured out #3 or #4; I am only dimly aware of the non-DoJ sources at best. That is excellent. Thank you.