Copy, paste, reveal: the Epstein redaction failure that exposed whom America's Justice Department was really protecting
The DOJ violated a law passed 427-1 by hiding perpetrator information—then failed to hide it properly
Select the blacked-out text. Copy. Paste into Word. Read.
That is all it takes to uncover the "redacted" portions of the Epstein files released by the Department of Justice last week. The black rectangles covering sensitive passages are cosmetic. The underlying text remains intact, waiting for anyone curious enough to highlight it.
This is not sophisticated. Security researchers have warned about this exact failure mode since 2002. The National Security Agency published guidance on proper PDF redaction in 2005. Yet here is America's premier law enforcement agency, twenty years later, making an error that would embarrass a first-year paralegal.
What emerged from beneath those black boxes is damning—not because of what it reveals about Epstein, but because of what it reveals about whose interests the DOJ was protecting. The leaked passages do not identify victims. They identify perpetrators: shell company finances, payments to Epstein's lawyer, immigration fraud facilitating "forced marriages" among trafficking victims. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, passed weeks ago with 427-1 support, permits redaction only to protect victims and active investigations. The DOJ redacted neither. It redacted the powerful. Then it failed to make those redactions stick.
What they tried to hide
The unredacted text follows a pattern. Consider one passage from the Virgin Islands civil complaint against Epstein's estate executors. Hidden beneath the black: between 2015 and 2019, Epstein's lawyer Darren Indyke signed foundation cheques totalling over $400,000 to "young female models and actresses". One former Russian model received $380,000 in monthly instalments of $8,333.
Another passage describes a payment to an immigration lawyer "involved in one or more forced marriages arranged among Epstein's victims to secure a victim's immigration status". The cheque memo referenced the Russian model's surname.
Still other sections expose shell company fraud. Cypress, an Epstein entity, reported $301 in expenses for 2018 while paying $106,000 in property taxes. Maple reported $300 in expenses while paying $336,000 in property taxes. The discrepancy between reported and actual expenditures suggests systematic misrepresentation to the government.
None of this is victim information. All of it concerns perpetrators and enablers. Indyke, whose name threads through the improperly hidden passages, now works for Parlatore Law Group—the firm representing Defence Secretary Pete Hegseth, the firm that previously defended Donald Trump in the classified documents case.
The DOJ was not protecting victims. It was protecting people with connections to the current administration.
The law they broke
The Epstein Files Transparency Act could not have been clearer. Within 30 days of enactment, the attorney general must release "all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials" related to Epstein. Only two exceptions: victim personal information and materials jeopardising active investigations.
The DOJ failed both requirements. It missed the 19 December deadline, releasing a partial tranche while promising the rest would follow "over the next several weeks". Republican Representative Thomas Massie posted a photograph of the statute with the words "not later than 30 days" and "all" highlighted in yellow.
Worse than the timing violation was the substance. Shell company tax fraud is not victim information. Payments to Epstein's lawyer are not victim information. Forced marriage details are not victim information. Democratic Representative Ro Khanna, who co-sponsored the bill, was blunt: the law "requires them to explain redactions. There is not a single explanation."
So the DOJ violated the law by redacting what it was forbidden to redact. Then it bungled the redaction so badly that anyone with a mouse could undo it. The cover-up was illegal. The cover-up also failed.
The institutional collapse
Six years ago, William Barr's Justice Department faced a similar task: redact the Mueller Report before public release. They used an analog method. Print every page. Redact with actual ink. Rescan. This technique is foolproof. No digital trace remains.
Pam Bondi's Justice Department chose a method known to be insecure since the Bush administration. Why?
The answer lies partly in how they approached the task. According to documents obtained by journalist Jason Leopold, FBI personnel logged 4,737 overtime hours on the "Special Redaction Project" at a cost of $851,000. Counterintelligence specialists were pulled from their regular work to process documents. The department threw bodies at the problem. It did not throw expertise.
Political scientists call this the loyalty-competence trade-off. When leaders demand loyalty above all, they get less capable subordinates—because competent people have options and resist control. Research by Alexei Zakharov formalised the dynamic: incompetent subordinates are more loyal precisely because they cannot survive elsewhere. In personality-cult regimes, the effect accelerates as ideological demands drive out anyone with professional standards.
The Epstein redaction failure makes this abstraction concrete. An institution that executed technically competent redactions in 2019 could not execute the same task in 2025. The personnel changed. The capacity degraded. What remains is $851,000 spent documenting the department's own incompetence.
Sabotage or stupidity?
There is a counterargument worth considering. The redaction technique used—black boxes over text without removing underlying data—is so notorious that any lawyer who has handled e-discovery should recognise its weakness. The FBI employs many lawyers. Could everyone in the building have forgotten?
Some observers suggest deliberate sabotage. Career officials, ordered to execute what they considered an unlawful cover-up, complied maliciously. They did the job badly enough that the truth would emerge while maintaining plausible deniability. One commenter called it "an act of resistance... an act of bravery."
The hypothesis is seductive but faces a problem: someone reviewed the work. For the failure to persist through quality control, either the reviewers were complicit in sabotage, or the reviewers lacked the competence to catch an error any security-minded undergraduate would spot. The first requires coordination. The second requires only the predictable consequences of replacing experienced personnel with loyalists.
Both paths lead to the same conclusion. Whether through intentional resistance or cascading incompetence, the Department of Justice demonstrated it cannot execute even tasks that serve the interests of those running it. The institution has degraded to where it fails at cover-ups.
Who they were protecting
Marina Lacerda was fourteen when Epstein began abusing her. Now an adult, she watched the DOJ's bungled release with the exhaustion of someone who has seen the system fail before.
"Who are we trying to protect?" she asked. "Are we protecting survivors or are we protecting these elite men?"
The redaction pattern answers her question. The hidden text concerned payments, shell companies, immigration fraud, and a lawyer now connected to Trump administration officials. It did not protect victims. It tried to protect perpetrators.
But the larger story extends beyond Epstein. It is about what happens when institutions demand loyalty so aggressively they lose the ability to function. The Department of Justice violated a law passed with near-unanimous support. It attempted an illegal cover-up of perpetrator information. It used a technique known to be insecure for two decades.
They could not do the right thing. They could not competently do the wrong thing. What remains is an institution that can do very little at all—and documentation, now public, of exactly how badly it failed.