@jasongorman
Sometimes it doesn't even need to be a “no”.

Back in the last millennium, when in many smaller companies computers where not that common a friend was asked to create a time recording software for a small company. What the manager requested very much felt like a surveillance machine. So the programmer asked: you need this to make it easier for your employers and freelancers to track their time, right? So I would create something where everyone can record time, review, edit, and if everything is fine send it to the server (kinda what they did on paper before). And the manager just said: yeah, great, sounds fine to me. And this was built.

We are often tempted to build something more invasive (i.e.: worse) than requested, just because we don't think about what's needed.

Well, that certainly escalated. After months of stalling, the Trump's Department of Justice finally allowed (sort of) members of Congress to review what were supposed to be its full, unredacted (more on this later) "Epstein Files." And within a matter of hours, all hell broke loose in American politics and among our increasingly repugnant ruling class.

We'll be talking in more detail about what the Congressional representatives found in the files as this story evolves, but the big picture view is: the pedo trafficking ring is real, the Justice Department is still covering up for wealthy men who raped and abused women and girls as young as nine, Donald Trump's name has been *heavily* and illegally redacted from the DoJ's investigation files, and the Trump administration is still refusing to un-redact huge portions of the documents, even for restricted private viewing by members of Congress. The coverup is simultaneously ongoing, and completely in the open now.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/epstein-files-unredacted-viewed

‘There’s a Bunch of Sick F*cks’: Lawmakers in Both Parties Stunned and Disgusted After Viewing Unredacted Epstein Files

"The FBI closed its investigation into Epstein in July, concluding that while the financier himself abused several underage girls, along with his partner Ghislane Maxwell—who is currently serving 20 years in prison—he was not running a sex-trafficking ring that included other powerful figures.

Rep. Jared Moskowitz (D-Fla.) said the files he and other lawmakers reviewed yesterday told a much different story.

“It’s disgusting,” he said. “There are lots of names, lots of co-conspirators, and they’re trafficking girls all across the world.”

Rep. Becca Balint (D-Vt.) put it more succinctly when a Drop Site News reporter caught her on the way back from the DOJ office and asked what she learned from viewing the files.

“There’s a bunch of sick fucks,” she said."

There is a lot going on in this article, which talks about the reality that Pam Bondi and the DoJ are still withholding at least 3M files, that in less than two hours of browsing Congressmen Massie and Khanna had turned up the names of 6 prominent, ultra wealthy businessmen credibly accused of committing prosecutable crimes against women and girls, and a series of brazen redactions revealing that Trump lied about kicking Epstein out of his club Mar-a-Lago.

The focal point of this piece however, is the clear and obvious evidence that both through intentionally restricting access to the files, and willfully redacting them in violation of the law, the Department of Justice is still engaging in an illegal coverup to protect President Trump and billionaire rapist pedophiles in the Epstein circle.

First up, the Trump regime has made it effectively impossible to see all the unredacted files:

"They are required to sift through the files in a tightly-secured DOJ office and are barred from making copies available to the public, though they are allowed to take notes.

"Raskin said that the office contains only four computers, making the process of sorting through more than 3 million files agonizingly slow.

“Working 40 hours a week on nothing else but this, it would take more than seven years for the 217 members who signed the House discharge petition to read just the documents they’ve decided to release,” he wrote in a post on social media."

Additionally, numerous elected officials including Congressmen Massie, Khanna, and Raskin made it clear that even though the DoJ is only legally allowed to redact the names of victims, they were willfully protecting Epstein associates and indeed people who committed crimes against women and girls with him.

“We didn’t want there to be a cover-up, and yet, what I saw today was that there were lots of examples of people’s names being redacted when they were not victims,” Raskin told CNN. “There are thousands and thousands of pages replete with redactions. There are entire pages in memos where you can’t see anything.”

Finally, as Congressman Ro Khanna noted during multiple interviews this week, the reality is even the supposedly unredacted "Epstein Files" the members were (barely) allowed to see by the DoJ, were already previously redacted back in March to protect Trump, and haven't been unredacted since.

"Donald Trump had the FBI scrub those files in March,” he said. “And the documents we saw already had the redactions of the FBI from March. So we still have not seen the vast majority of documents unredacted that have the survivor statements of the rich and powerful men who committed these crimes.”

Folks, if it looks like a duck, walks like a duck, and talks like a duck, there's a pretty good chance you're just looking at a duck. We know without a question of a doubt that Trump's Department of Justice is engaging in an illegal coverup, and given Trump's vast web of connections to Epstein, we can all guess why. The Pedophile President must fall.

#Epstein #Trump #CoverUp #JusticeDepartment #PamBondi #Raskin #Khanna