Heads-up: An update to this article has been posted.
There have been a lot of complaints about both the competency and the logic behind the latest Epstein archive release by the DoJ: from censoring the names of co-conspirators to censoring pictures of random women in a way that makes individuals look guiltier than they really are, forgetting to redact credentials that made it possible for all of Reddit to log into Epstein’s account and trample over all the evidence, and the complete ineptitude that resulted in most of the latest batch being corrupted thanks to incorrectly converted Quoted-Printable encoding artifacts, it’s safe to say that Pam Bondi’s DoJ did not put its best and brightest on this (admittedly gargantuan) undertaking. But the most damning evidence has all been thoroughly redacted… hasn’t it? Well, maybe not.
I was thinking of writing an article on the mangled quoted-printable encoding the day this latest dump came out in response to all the misinformed musings and conjectures that were littering social media (and my dilly-dallying cost me, as someone beat me to the punch), and spent some time searching through the latest archives looking for some SMTP headers that I could use in the article when I came across a curious artifact: not only were the emails badly transcoded into plain text, but also some binary attachments were actually included in the dumps in their over-the-wire Content-Transfer-Encoding: base64 format, and the unlucky intern that was assigned to the documents in question didn’t realize the significance of what they were looking at and didn’t see the point in censoring seemingly meaningless page after page of hex content!