Bean

What the fuck are they hiding in the financial records?! "Attorney General Todd Blanche has spent most of a year telling the country that nothing in the Epstein files was being held back for national security reasons. CBS News has now published documents that appear to contradict him directly. When the releases began last winter, Blanche said, “There’s not some tranche of super-secret documents about Jeffrey Epstein that we’re withholding, we’re actually not withholding anything based upon [national defense information].” CBS found at least three documents in the released material indicating that classified information was in the files the Justice Department collected. One shows that Blanche’s own Office of the Deputy Attorney General received classified Epstein material in March 2025, when he was deputy attorney general. That document is an eight-page FBI timeline listing 16 Epstein items delivered to his office on March 25, 2025. Two of them are described as “Epstein Transparency Project - Classified Material” and “CDs with classified materials (x2).” By law, material can only be classified for national security purposes, which is the exact basis Blanche said wasn’t being used. The same day, the unit chief of the FBI’s National Security Classification Operations Unit sent an email with an attachment titled “Epstein - Classified Document Memo.docx.” The email said three documents had been “identified that remain classified.” The descriptions of two of them are redacted, and so is the name of the person who received it. The second finding is about scale. CBS analyzed the numbering system the Justice Department stamped on every released page and found gaps in tens of thousands of places, where the numbers jump and pages that were there earlier are simply gone. Among the missing pages are Epstein’s own financial records, collected as evidence in a federal prosecution. In one set of roughly 4,500 images of checks from his accounts, 66 check images are missing. “Financial records were not a permissible category for removal,” said Barbara McQuade, the former U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan. “It’s the reason you have Bates numbers, so you notice something like that.” In one section alone, the gaps add up to 1.2 million pages, mostly emails to and from Epstein. They include exchanges with young women who later accused him of abuse, with his business associates, and with Ghislaine Maxwell. Part of this may have an innocent explanation. The attorneys doing the redactions were allowed to mark earlier messages in an email chain as duplicates, since the last message usually contains the whole exchange. But CBS notes that duplicate emails still show up throughout the files, so if that was the plan, it was only half carried out. The Justice Department didn’t respond to CBS. It has said before that everything the Epstein Files Transparency Act required was released, and the rest was privileged, duplicative or unrelated. It has also already been caught removing, then restoring, a photo of now Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick on a 2012 visit to Epstein’s island, a photo that contradicted what Lutnick had said about his contacts with Epstein. Independent journalist Katie Phang is suing for the rest of the files and an explanation of the removals. A federal judge has ruled in her favor several times, and the Justice Department is appealing. “If it wasn’t intentional, then was it gross negligence? Were you just lazy? If it was intentional then I think there’s [expletive] there that they don’t want people to see,” she told CBS." BREAKING: Trump Accused of Hiding Epstein Files as Republicans Move to Oust Hegseth reallyamerican.substack.com/…