The Worst Part Is the Redacting
- Patrick Duggan
- Mar 5
- 8 min read
# The Worst Part Is the Redacting
I don't know if any of you are following this Epstein thing. Apparently there was a fella — and I'm not gonna say he was a bad guy, because I don't want to be sued — but it turns out this particular fella, and again I don't want to speak ill of the dead, but this fella had some hobbies that were, you know. Not great.
Now, I looked into it. I'm a curious person. I run a little search engine. Nothing fancy. About eleven million, five hundred and ninety-six thousand, nine hundred and ninety-four documents. Give or take. I keep it on a computer in Virginia that costs me about five hundred dollars a month. Which, for the record, is less than a dinner at Nobu, which I mention only because I've been told Nobu is a place where important people eat, and I want you to understand the relative economics of what I'm about to describe.
So the Department of Justice — and these are smart people, I assume, they went to law school and everything — the Department of Justice had teams of lawyers. Security clearances. The most powerful classification apparatus in human history. Unlimited budget. Unlimited time. And their job was to redact the Epstein files before releasing them to the public.
Simple enough, right? Go through the documents. Black out the sensitive parts. Release the rest. A chimp could do it. I don't mean that disrespectfully to chimps.
They left Ghislaine Maxwell's email in there.
Now. I want to be clear about what I mean. I don't mean they accidentally included an email *about* Ghislaine Maxwell. I mean the actual email. From Ghislaine Maxwell. To Doug Band. Who was the Counselor to the President of the United States. At his government email address. At GSA dot gov. The General Services Administration. Which is — and I looked this up — the agency that manages federal buildings and office supplies.
So Ghislaine Maxwell, who was at the time allegedly running a sex trafficking operation for the most connected pedophile in modern history, was emailing the President's right-hand man at the office supply email address. And the Department of Justice, with all of their lawyers and all of their security clearances and all of their unlimited budget, looked at that document and said, "Yeah, that can go out."
The document number is EFTA00011434. I know this because I found it. On my search engine. In Virginia. The one that costs less than dinner.
So anyway, I got interested. Because if they left *that* in, what else is in there?
Turns out: a lot.
There's three hundred and ninety-eight thousand, five hundred and thirty-four documents in the Epstein files alone. I indexed all of them. Then I added two million offshore entities from the Panama Papers and the Pandora Papers. Then three point three million relationship edges from the same dataset. Then two and a half million federal court decisions. Then about a million indicators of compromise, which is a fancy way of saying "things hackers do." Then some other stuff. Blog posts. Paranormal sightings. You know. The usual.
All told, eleven point six million documents. Forty-four point seven gigabytes. On one computer. In Virginia. For five hundred dollars a month.
The FBI, by comparison, once spent what I can only assume was millions of dollars building a search engine on SUN Sparc 10 workstations with SYBASE databases running on something called a Massively Parallel Processor. This was in 1994. They were trying to catch the Unabomber. They indexed seven million documents. Eighty record systems. Canceled all leave. Canceled all training. Assigned ten extra agents just in Chicago. Told every field office in the country to make it their top priority and complete all leads within twenty-four hours.
They caught him. Took eighteen years, but they caught him. His brother recognized his writing in the manifesto.
Here's what I find interesting. And I use that word loosely, because what I actually find is deeply troubling, but "interesting" is a word you can use on the internet without people thinking you've lost it.
In 1994, the FBI built a seven-million-document search engine to find one man in a cabin in Montana. In 2025, the Attorney General of the United States — a woman named Pam Bondi, who seems very nice, I'm sure she's very nice — Pam Bondi requested "the full and complete files related to Jeffrey Epstein."
She received two hundred pages.
Two hundred pages. On the biggest sex trafficking case in American history. Involving victims who were children. Involving clients who were presidents and princes and billionaires and Nobel Peace Prize committee members. Two hundred pages. Flight logs and a contact list.
Now, Bondi — and again, I'm sure she's very nice — Bondi asked the FBI if that was everything. And they said yes. She asked again. They said yes again. This went on for a while, apparently, this back-and-forth, yes it is, are you sure, yes we're sure, okay.
Then — and this is my favorite part — she found out from "a source" that the FBI Field Office in New York had thousands more pages.
A source.
The Attorney General of the United States, the top law enforcement officer in the country, the person who runs the Department of Justice, which runs the FBI, found out that her own FBI was hiding documents from her... the same way a reporter at a mid-tier newspaper finds things out. Somebody told her. In confidence, presumably. Maybe over coffee. Maybe in a parking garage. I don't know the details.
She wrote a very stern letter. To Kash Patel. Who is the Director of the FBI. She said deliver everything by 8 AM tomorrow. She said conduct an immediate investigation. She said give me a comprehensive report within fourteen days with proposed personnel action.
That was February 27, 2025. The fourteen-day deadline was March 13, 2025. I searched my index. All eleven point six million documents. The report does not appear.
Now, maybe the report exists and it's classified. Maybe the report exists and it's redacted. Maybe the report exists and it's sitting in a filing cabinet somewhere in a building managed by the General Services Administration, which we now know handles both office supplies and sex trafficking correspondence. I don't know. What I know is: I can't find it. And I can find a lot of things.
So then I found the FBI FOIA Vault. Which is a website — vault.fbi.gov — where the FBI releases files under the Freedom of Information Act. And I downloaded four of them. Because I was curious. Remember. I'm a curious person.
The four files were: Ivana Trump. Kushner Companies. NXIVM. Ted Kaczynski.
Now, these seem random. Four files that have nothing to do with each other. A former First Lady. A real estate company. A sex cult. A mailbox bomber. But I'm a curious person, so I read them.
Ivana Trump. The FBI had a SECRET file on her. Classification: FCI-CZ. That stands for Foreign Counterintelligence — Czechoslovakia. The FBI maintained a secret counterintelligence file on the woman who would become the First Lady of the United States. I want you to sit with that for a second. The woman who lived in the White House was the subject of a foreign intelligence investigation by the FBI. Sixty-four percent of the file is deleted. A hundred and seventy pages, gone. The surviving pages mention the Genovese organized crime family, a guy named Jiri Mucha who was the son of the Art Nouveau painter, and something called Tel-Com Wireless that connects to Russian organized crime.
She died on July 14, 2022. She was buried at Trump National Golf Club in Bedminster, New Jersey. Which, and I only mention this because I find it interesting — there's that word again — which receives property tax exemptions for cemetery use under New Jersey law.
Kushner Companies. FBI Case 194A-NK-109145. Opened February 13, 2003. Public Corruption squad, Newark. Three point one million dollars in political donations laundered through approximately one hundred and fifty real estate partnerships. Contributions made in partners' names without their knowledge. One point five million to Jim McGreevey's governor campaign. An FBI-to-SEC records request. A Blackberry 6510 seized and sent to Quantico for forensic analysis. Seventy-one court-sealed pages that a federal judge won't release even twenty years later.
Grand jury subpoenas were issued twelve days after the case opened. Twelve days. The FBI came in with a target list. They knew what they were looking for before they started looking.
The prosecutor was Christopher J. Christie. He convicted Charles Kushner. Fourteen months in federal prison. Charles Kushner's son, Jared, later served as Senior Advisor to President Donald Trump. Christie was passed over for Attorney General. Reportedly at Jared's urging.
I'm sure that's a coincidence.
NXIVM. The sex cult. The FBI opened a file in 2003. A Special Inquiry. Someone walked into the Albany field office and said, hey, there's this group called Executive Success Programs, and the president is Nancy Salzman, and the developer of the course of study is a man named Keith Raniere, and — and then the rest is redacted.
The FBI had NXIVM on radar in 2003. Raniere wasn't arrested until 2018. Fifteen years. Clare Bronfman — heiress to the Seagram's fortune, which you may know from the liquor aisle — pled guilty in 2020.
Eighty-three percent of the NXIVM file is deleted. Three pages redacted under something called b7D, which means confidential source protection. Somebody inside the organization was talking to the FBI. In 2003. Fifteen years before anyone did anything about it.
You know what the Epstein non-prosecution agreement was? 2008. Eleven years before his arrest. Both prosecuted in the Southern District of New York. Both funded by dynastic wealth. Both ran for years under federal awareness.
And Ted Kaczynski. The Unabomber. The one they actually caught. Because they actually tried.
Now here's the thing that keeps me up at night. And I don't sleep great to begin with, so this is really saying something.
When you run these four files against my search engine — all eleven point six million documents — they stop being four stories. They become one story. Czech intelligence connects to Ivana Trump, who connects to Donald Trump, who connects to Jared Kushner, who connects to Kushner Companies and a hundred and fifty partnerships and three point one million in laundered donations, which connects to Chris Christie, who connects back to Trump when he gets passed over for Attorney General.
Meanwhile, in the Epstein files, the DiIorio whistleblower thread maps Apollo Global Management to Leon Black to Schwarzman to Trump and Kushner to Epstein to Putin. Separately, NXIVM and Epstein were parallel sex trafficking prosecutions, both funded by inherited wealth, both running for over a decade under FBI awareness. And the UNABOM Task Force's seven-million-document data infrastructure was the ancestor of the tools the FBI would later use on the Epstein investigation.
Four FOIA files. One graph. Every edge is government-sourced data.
I didn't connect these dots. The government's own documents did. I just made them searchable.
I'll leave you with one more thing. And then I'll stop. Because I know you're busy. You have lives. Jobs. Maybe a dinner at Nobu to get to.
The FBI released 752 pages across these four files. They deleted approximately 1,176 pages. The deletion rates: Ivana Trump, sixty-four percent. Kushner Companies, sixty-nine percent. NXIVM, eighty-three percent. Kaczynski, unknown, because they didn't bother deleting much from the file about the guy they actually caught.
The government chose what to release. They chose what to redact. They chose the exemption codes. They chose which pages to seal. And even after all of that choosing — even after the most powerful classification apparatus in human history did its best work — the filtered version still draws the graph.
That's the worst part. It's not the trafficking. It's not the money. It's not the foreign intelligence connections or the sealed court documents or the eighty-three percent deletion rate on a closed federal case.
The worst part is the redacting. They had unlimited resources to hide it. And they still couldn't.
*Search it yourself: https://epstein.dugganusa.com*
*DugganUSA LLC — "We found the .gov email. What else you got?"*
*Her name was Renee Nicole Good.*
*His name was Alex Jeffery Pretti.*
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