Black square vs redaction tool difference is well known if someone's job involves redacting PDF or just working with PDF. It's most likely that additional staffs were pulled in and weren't given enough training.
Colleagues whose full time job is doing this sort of thing for various bits of the government have told me this is exactly the case here. People from all over the government have been deputized to redact these documents with little or no prior training.
I wonder if this activity is being used as a kind of loyalty test. Keep track of who is assigned to redact what, and then if certain files leak or are insufficiently redacted, they indicate who isn't all in on Dear Leader.
It's not like a few more stories of Trump raping $whomever are going to move the needle at all, especially with how the media is on board with burying negative coverage of the regime.
Also if you're wondering how this activity isn't some kind of abuse of government resources, keep in mind that thanks to the Supreme Council's embrace of the Unitary Executive Theory (ie Sparkling Autocracy), covering up evidence about Donald Trump raping under-aged sex trafficking victims is now an official priority of the United States Government.
Let people believe it's deliberate sabotage. Unfortunately, in real life, minions of a dictator serve the dictator; they don't risk their live or safety for a noble cause. Any screw-ups are a result of gross incompetence that is typical for every dictatorship.
Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
>Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.
Same reason unions always work hardest when fighting on behalf of the worst workers. If you go to bat for a man who can't do better elsewhere he'll go to bat for you in return.
But wait, the situation is more complicated than that you say? Why yes, that's exactly the point. Two of us can play at the stupid smug oversimplification game.
While the effect being described is real to an extent, distilling it to the point you did is useless because there is so much more nuance. Why assume the place was staffed with first rate talent to begin with? And even if there is a lot of first rate talent many will stick around because they don't care who they serve (people not like this don't tend to make careers in government TBH).
A man who tried to overturn an election is in power and is disappearing people on the streets without due process.
The other day there was news about some ICE members who blew up the door to a family's home in order to detain a man. The man was a citizen. They knew that. They came to intimidate him because a few days earlier he tried filming their cars on a public street. That's just one example but these cases are only becoming more common.
One thing that's clear is that if he tries to overturn an election again, he is way better positioned to succeed this time. ICE is now the 5th most heavily funded military in the world and the whole point of DOGE[0] was to centralize the government and fill only with loyalists.
> disappearing people on the streets without due process.
Undocumented immigrants can be detained and deported by the U.S. government but they are still legally entitled to due process.
What is happening is aggressive enforcement and detention that can feel like “disappearing,” but it is not the same thing as extrajudicial abduction in the legal sense.
When people use the word "disappeared" they usually mean families temporarily can't find someone after detention, detainees are transferred far aways, no lawyer automatically assigned, communication is difficult, deportation happens very quickly. While this is real harm, it is not the same phenomenon as disappearance under international law.
The U.S. is aggressively detaining and deporting undocumented immigrants under civil law, sometimes with minimal process and poor transparency — but not through secret, extrajudicial disappearances. Due process is thinner than for citizens, enforcement can be opaque and traumatic, but this is not the same as "vanished" outside the legal system.
I wouldn’t go so far as to call it a dictatorship, but it’s definitely trending toward authoritarianism.
Wasn't too hard to put together a quick graph of the past decade for the U.S. using the World Press Freedom Index (relative ranking and score) - an annual ranking of 180 countries published by Reporters Without Borders that measures the level of press freedom.
what is the US exactly currently if not dictatorship? is there a single
thing “President” cannot do right now and if so who would be stopping him? so perhaps on paper US is not dictatorship much like Russia and China are not… We spend decades trying to fight these regimes and lost so much that now we are worse than them :)
He has functionally neutered Congress. It is almost completely meaningless and it is operating without an independent Speaker.
I think he could succeed in principle re: Mount Rushmore, to be honest. I think eventually people will cave in and agree to do it, and then they will just pray to cholesterol that they can wait it out.
I've no doubt that if we plopped you down in the middle of, say, modern-day Russia, you'd be able to observe a few important differences in the political organization of the two countries.
Fewer than you would a year or nine ago, certainly, and a lot of people are working very hard on closing the gap.
Democracy is a spectrum. There have always been significant flaws with American democracy, but you'd be mad to not observe significant, active regression and effort by the government to replace it with something else.
I truly believe we're headed that direction. I've lived long enough to have seen a wide variety of presidents, both good and bad. This one is easily the worst one, in terms of bare naked power grabs.
I believe Trump will manufacture a crisis before he's out of office in a bid to maintain control. I believe he will have learned from Bush Jr. that a simple war isn't good enough, and it needs to be a genuine emergency.
I believe he'll do whatever he can to make that happen. Native born terrorist, or war with a close country, or absolutely over the top financial crash. Something awful that lets him invoke some obscure rule that lets him stay in power with congressional approval - he'll just skip the congressional approval part like he already does.
> Something awful that lets him invoke some obscure rule that lets him stay in power with congressional approval
There is literally no such obscure rule, and a new Congress will be seated two weeks before the 2029 Presidential Inauguration.
Elections, and the compulsory ends of terms, inauguration of new Congresses, etc, happen on schedule without regard to any exceptional cases, including Civil War.
If he can get a majority of the Electoral College for a third term, and a majority in both houses of Congress in 2028, then things get much more complicated.
But there is no other path. Elections matter, and don't let anyone discourage you from believing that they don't matter enough to vote.
The pendulum swings. It always does. And all the powers SCOTUS gave the executive branch will eventually be in the hands of the Loyal Opposition.
If it swings as far back you might even see universal health care, sane gun laws, fair wages, campaign finance reform, reproductive freedom, science based policy making, reigning in billionaires, etc.
I have very little faith that scotus will have any consistency in their decisions going forward - they seem to be nakedly political, and backing trump. If the elections swing the other direction (despite their aid in gerrymandering), expect them to cry about the power of the presidency and start rolling it back as fast as they can push decisions through the shadow docket.
> The pendulum swings. It always does. And all the powers SCOTUS gave the executive branch will eventually be in the hands of the Loyal Opposition.
That sounds reinsuring, but it is completely false. The idea that the pendulum swings is just regression to the mean: sure, after a terrible president, the next one is likely to be less terrible. But there is nothing that implies that after a far-right regime will come a far-left one. In fact, if you look at History in various countries around the world, this seems very unlikely.
> If it swings as far back you might even see universal health care, sane gun laws, fair wages, campaign finance reform, reproductive freedom, science based policy making, reigning in billionaires, etc.
Don’t count on it. In all likelihood it will regress to the centre. The American culture hasn’t changed that much and American leftists did not suddenly become competent at getting popular support.
> But there is nothing that implies that after a far-right regime will come a far-left one. In fact, if you look at History in various countries around the world, this seems very unlikely.
Looking at the history of left wing movements in countries post-WWII, can you think of a reason why they wouldn't be successful and far-right ones would? The Cold War may have been a factor.
> Don’t count on it. In all likelihood it will regress to the centre.
The center doesn't exist anymore. The right-wing has labeled the US Democratic Party as extreme left. There should be a term for 'forcing your opposition to materialize because you are unable to distinguish between propaganda and reality'.
> And all the powers SCOTUS gave the executive branch will eventually be in the hands of the Loyal Opposition.
They will find excuses to reverse. There will be some technicality, made up historical precense or some actually untrue fact about the world that wil totally make the situation different.
Conservative heretage foundation group has outcome in mind ... and "opposition" is not their preffered outcome.
Well, I'd do a guess and say at least since the Congressional Office of Technology Assessment got deep-sixed back in the 95. Either that or they never had them.
I'd love to limit the semi-auto rifles like the infamous AR-15. Useless for hunting, useless for self-defense. In exchange for country-wide reciprocity for concealed carry and firearm transportation.
Its exactly equivalent to a dictatorship by the head of the CIA, unless the CIA is effectively answerable to some other authority despite not being answerable to the law, and then it is equivalent to a dictatorship by that higher authority.
It seems insane that nobody at the other end runs something as simple as MAT or imagick (twice) over it to take the text layers out before uploading though. I hope this is at least partially intentional.
My understanding is that many people were fired and replaced by loyalists at the FBI. I think there are a lot of incompetent people working there right now.
Any major documents/files have been removed all together. Then the rest was farmed out to anyone they could find with basic instructions to redact anything embarrassing.
Since there's absolutely zero chance anyone in the administration will ever be held accountable for what's left, they're not overly concerned.
The thing that I've been waiting to see for years is the actual video recordings. There were supposedly cameras everywhere, for years. I'm not even talking about the disgusting stuff, I'm talking security for entrances, hallways, etc.
The FBI definitely has them, where are they?
What about Maxwell's media files? There was nothing found there? Did they subpoena security companies and cloud providers?
The documents are all deniable. Yes video evidence can now be easily faked, but real video will have details that are hard to invent. Regardless, videos are worth millions of words.
Reporting is that they had a basically impossible deadline and they took lawyers off of counterintelligence work to do this. So a conscious act of resistance is possible, but it's a situation where mistakes are likely - people working very quickly trying to meet a deadline and doing work they aren't that familiar with and don't really want to be doing.
It seems like a common tactic by this administration is to just not do what they are required to do until they have been told 50 times and criminal charges are being filed. I suspect the actual truth here is 'don't do this' turned into 'you have 1 day to do this and keep my name out of the release' which led to lots of issues. They probably spent more time deciding the order of pages to release, and how to avoid releasing the things damaging to the administration, than actually doing the work needed to release it. Now they will say 'look, see! You didn't give us enough time and our incompetence is the proof'
Given the sheer number of people they had to pull in and work overtime to redact Trump's name as well as those of prominent Republicans and donors as per numerous sources within the FBI and the administration itself, incompetence is likely for a chunk of it.
It’s funny that this effort, the largest exertion of FBI agents second only to 9/11, seems to be unprepared to redact. Cynically, I’m prepared for it to be part of a generative set of PDFs derived from the prompt “create court documents consistent with these 16 PDFs which obscure the role of Donald Trump between 1993 and 1998.”
For context, lawyers deal with this all the time. In discovery, there is an extensive document ("doc") review process to determine if documents are responsive or non-responsive. For example, let's say I subpoenaed all communication between Bob and Alice between 1 Jan 2019 and 1 Jan 2020 in relation to the purchase of ABC Inc as part of litigation. Every email would be reviewed and if it's relevant to the subpoena, it's marked as responsive, given an identifier and handed over to the other side. Non-responsive communication might not be eg attorney-client communications.
It can go further and parts of documents can be viewed as non-responsive and otherwise be blacked out eg the minutes of a meeting that discussed 4 topics and only 1 of them was about the company purchase. That may be commercially sensitive and beyond the scope of the subpoena.
Every such redaction and exclusion has to be logged and a reason given for it being non-responsive where a judge can review that and decide if the reason is good or not, should it ever be an issue. Can lawyers find something damaging and not want to hand it over and just mark it non-responsive? Technically, yes. Kind of. It's a good way to get disbarred or even jailed.
My point with this is that lawyers, which the Department of Justice is full of, are no strangers to this process so should be able to do it adequately. If they reveal something damaging to their client this way, they themselves can get sued for whatever the damages are. So it's something they're careful about, for good reason.
So in my opinion, it's unlikely that this is an act of resistance. Lawyers won't generally commit overt illegal acts, particularly when the only incentive is keeping their job and the downside is losing their career. It could happen.
What I suspect is happening is all the good lawyers simply aren't engaging in this redaction process because they know better so the DoJ had the wheel out some bad and/or unethical ones who would.
What they're doing is in blatant violation to the law passed last month and good lawyers know it.
There's a lot of this going on at the DoJ currently. Take the recent political prosecutions of James Comey, Letitia James, etc. No good prosecutor is putting their name to those indictments so the administration was forced to bring in incompetent stooges who would. This included former Trump personal attorneys who got improerly appointed as US Attorneys. This got the Comey indictment thrown out.
The law that Ro Khanna and Thomas Massey co-sponsored was sweeping and clear about what needs to be released. The DoJ is trying to protect both members of the administration and powerful people, some of whom are likely big donors and/or foreign government officials or even heads of state.
That's also why this process is so slow I imagine. There are only so many ethically compromised lackeys they can find.
Fine, but the teeth of this act belong to some future justice department. I predict Trump will issue blanket pardons for everyone involved, up to Bondi; and that none of them will respect a congressional subpoena.
The discharge petition to all the bill that forced this release was going nowhere until President Trump declared that he was onboard, and then it happened. Until then it was going nowhere.
My guess is that someone suggested to Trump that they could redact most of the bad bits and plausibly deny that they were doing that, and he decided that this was the path of least resistance.
So I don't think there is any chance that he will easily allow any more votes to go the way of putting more pressure. Unless the pressure gets so bad that he has no choice (read: Newsmax and FoxNews both start pressure campaigns).
The GOP are masters of using parliamentary procedure to avoid votes that would pass that they don't want to pass, nominations and bills that they can't defend voting against.
This was a big issue in the Obama era where Mitch McConnell was determined to make Obama a one term president and decided to "obstruct, obstruct, obstruct" on things that historically never been obstructed, or at least not to the degree they were under Obama. For example, judicial appointments would get stuck in committee and never come up for a vote because the vote would pass. The most famous example of this was the Merrick Garland Supreme Court nomination that was never given a vote for 11 months, which was completely unprecedented.
The GOP has a narrow working majority in the House. The House, unlike the Senate, has the discharge petition process where if a majority of House representatives sign it, it forces a vote. All the Democratic reps signed on so it only took about 4 GOP reps for it to pass.
The lengths Mike Johnson went to to avoid this were unprecedented. 3 Democratic reps have died in office this Congressional session. Texas has consistently delayed a special election to avoid a replacement. Arizona had a special election. A Democrat won and Johnson avoided swearing her in for 7 weeks because she would be the 218th and final signature on the discharge petition.
4 GOP reps signed on and the White House and the Speaker both put incredible pressure on them to change their mind. It was a big part of why Trump fell out with Marjorie Taylor-Greene (she was one of the 4).
Why go to all this effort? Because Epstein was core foundational mythology for MAGA, reps couldn't defend voting against it and everybody knew it.
Johnson then tried to use a procedure to pass a vote called unaminous consent. Basically, rather than go through a roll call of up to 435 members, the House is given the option to object. If anyone does, it forces a vote. Why would he do this? Because there's no voting record for unanimous consent. It gives members cover to say they did or didn't vote for something. A roll call is an official record. Democrats objected and thus we got an official vote with only 1 "no" vote (Rep Clay Higgins).
The SEnate passed it with unanimous consent.
This was a veto proof majority. So if it was so popular, why just not schedule a vote to begin with?
And the obstruction continues. Johnson again put the House in recess 1 day before the 30 day deadline. Coincidence? I think not.
And now we're getting illegal redactions, not meeting the 30 day deadline and a drip feed of document releases because (IMHO) they can't find enough ethically-challenged lackeys to do doc review and redact the names and images of Trump and powerful people, many of whom are likely donors.
Johnson may well lose his position over this. The Attorney General has a non-zero chance of being impeached and removed over it.
There is no putting this genie back in the bottle. It's not going away and at no point was the Trump circle comfortable they could redact their way out of it. They are in full on panic mode right now.
MAGA is a cult and every cult has a mission. MAGA's mission is to uncover the elite pedophile ring. A cult can only be sustained so long as the mission is incomplete. Epstein is core foundational mythology. It's going to be really difficult if not impossible to redirect this.
You'll notice that Mike Johnson once again has put Congress in recess to avoid it taking action, this time a day before the 30 day deadline. The last time was for 7 weeks to try and get Republicans to remove their names from the discharge petition to avoid all this. Republicans know what a core problem this is.
So it's politically damaging with his base for Trump to pardon attorneys involved in obstructing this. But even if he weathers that, it doesn't solve his problem.
For one, any attorneys despite any pardon are subject to disciplinary proceedings (including disbarment) as well as possible state charges.
For another, this stuff is simply going to get out. Where previously a DoJ attorney would be committing career suicide if they got caught leaking things like grand jury testimony and confidential non-prosecution agreements, now they're obligated to. So they're not leakers anymore, they're whistleblowers who are following the law.
Congress will eventually have to come back into session and Pam Bondi may actually face a real risk of impeachment. If that happens, who is going to want this job when the key requirement is being such a loyalist that you have to break the law?
Congress will also seek compliaance from DoJ and hold investigations as well as drip feed their own documents from,say, the House Oversight Committee.
And in the wings we still have Ghislaine Maxwell who is clearly operating under an implicit understanding that she will get a pardon or, more likely, a commutation. Her move to a lower security prison that isn't eligible for her type of offenses was (IMHO) clearly a move to buy her continued silence until it became politically possible to free her. I don't think that's ever going to be possible other than maybe a lame duck pardon when leaving office.
> My point with this is that lawyers, which the Department of Justice is full of, are no strangers to this process so should be able to do it adequately. If they reveal something damaging to their client this way, they themselves can get sued for whatever the damages are. So it's something they're careful about, for good reason.
> So in my opinion, it's unlikely that this is an act of resistance. Lawyers won't generally commit overt illegal acts,
Political redaction in this release under the Epstein Transparency Act is an overt, illegal act.
Does that reconfigure your estimation of whether DoJ attorneys that aren't the Trump inner-circle loyalists installed in leadership roles might engage in resistance against (or at least fail to point out methodological flaws in the inplmentation of) it?