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.
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.