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A conspiracy of absolute morons

I’m instantly suspicious of conspiracy theories, typically because believing in them requires some degree of confidence in the competence of a mob of people who somehow avoid spilling the beans. I am now faced with the possibility that if everyone involved is sufficiently below a threshold of stupidity, they can make it work, for a while at least. Now a new batch of Epstein files have been released, and they are the product of gross incompetence.

Some of the files have emerged because all you have to do is guess at likely file names, and you can access otherwise unlisted files. Some of the redactions can be circumvented by copying the text and pasting it into a separate document. This is what happens when you put Kash Patel and Pam Bondi and Dan Bongino in charge of the coverup.

Voidzilla discusses many, but not all, of the recent revelations.

There were TEN CO-CONSPIRATORS with Epstein whose names were redacted from the files? It’s true: there’s a cabal of wealthy pedophiles raping young girls, and the Trump administration is neck-deep in a cover-up to protect them.

Trump is also mentioned in some of the files.

It reads: “For your situational awareness, wanted to let you know that the flight records we received yesterday reflect that Donald Trump travelled on Epstein’s private jet many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware), including during the period we would expect to charge in a Maxwell case.

“In particular, he is listed as a passenger on at least eight flights between 1993 and 1996, including at least four flights on which Maxwell was also present. He is listed as having travelled with, among others and at various times, Marla Maples, his daughter Tiffany, and his son Eric.

“On one flight in 1993, he and Epstein are the only two listed passengers; on another, the only three passengers are Epstein, Trump, and then-20-year-old REDACTED.

“On two other flights, two of the passengers, respectively, were women who would be possible witnesses in a [Ghislaine] Maxwell case.”

Trump is also accused of unsavory behavior directly.

Among the files released on Tuesday is a letter that appears to have been sent by Epstein to Larry Nassar, the US gymnastics team doctor convicted of sexually abusing scores of young gymnasts, while he was in jail.

The letter, postmarked 13 August 2019 and sent from “J Epstein” at “Manhattan Correctional” to “Larry Nassar”, reads: “Dear L.N. as you know by now, I have taken the ‘short route’ home. Good Luck! We share one thing … our love & caring for young ladies at the hope they’d reach their full potential. Our president also shares our love of young, nubile girls. When a young beauty walked by he loved to ‘grab snatch,’ whereas we ended up snatching grub in the mess halls of the system. Life is unfair. Yours, J. Epstein.”

Ugh. Our president, ladies and gentlemen.

These revelations ought to topple the government — this is far worse than anything Woodward and Bernstein dug up that led to the resignation of Nixon. Why isn’t it? Is it because the Republican party has become a rat’s nest of corrupt crooks and apologists for criminal behavior?

On a note that seems unrelated, but is entirely relevant to the abuse of the government by a senile narcissist, Trump has now announced the construction of a huge, expensive line of battleships.

President Donald Trump’s announcement of a new class of battleships bearing his name puts a fresh spotlight on a US naval shipbuilding program that has fallen short on delivering the new warships on time and on budget in recent years, something Trump himself pointed out in his speech from Mar-a-Lago on Monday.

This is insane. Battleships haven’t been part of any modern naval doctrine since what, the Korean war? Aircraft carriers are the heart of a modern navy, but maybe not forever — I’m not an expert in military strategy, but then, neither is Donald Trump! Yet here he is, unilaterally deciding to build this gigantic, absurdly expensive, probably unnecessary, archaic battleship, and you know the appeal to him is that he’ll name it after himself.

We can later just scrape his name off the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and we can just ignore the Trump Institute for Peace, but these ships are estimated to cost $15 billion apiece, and may prove to be utterly useless to the Navy. We should not trust these ego projects from a corrupt billionaire pedophile. He’s going to ruin the country, and Republicans, once regarded as the sensible, conservative party, are not stepping up to put the brakes on this wreck of an administration.

Correction: The last US battleship, the USS Missouri, was launched in 1941. We’re done with that paradigm.

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Comments

  1. cheerfulcharlie says

    Ronnie Reagan took a battleship out of mothballs to send it to Lebanon. It was not a success. Meanwhile, Ukraine send a underwater drone across the Black Sea to destroy a Russian submarine used to launch missiles into Ukraine. A $400 million sub taken out by a cheap autonomous sea drone.

  2. laurian says

    Technically the proposed Trump Class are not battleships, they are missile frigates on steroids. Nothing new here save for a juicier target.

    These ships will never be launched. The project will be lucky to even lay a keel. No, this vaporware is this week’s project to keep Gramps happy & distracted.

  4. JM says

    I have not found an article on the failures to redact correctly yet but I followed one example from Reddit into the DOJ pdf and it was true. The DOJ had the same problem in Trump’s first term. In a PDF just putting a black box over text or making the background of text black doesn’t get rid of the text, you can still select it and copy it to another document.
    At this point this is such a fundamental error that I sort of suspect it’s intentionally done wrong. 20 years ago a lawyer might make that mistake, now it’s something that should be covered in “Introduction to electronic filing 101” at law school.
    I guess a lot of this incompetence stems from the fundamental poor management of this administration. They don’t want to do this project so they rushed it and didn’t get enough technical expertise involved. A well run administration understands that an important required job that you don’t want to do requires more care because it’s easier to be sloppy.

  5. says

    I wish someone would unmask that pdf and make it widely available. After all, transparency is critical (pun intended). We are getting nothing but massive, continuous shovelfuls of obfuscatory crap from the magat and his entire administration.

  6. Artor says

    The infuriating thing is that Biden’s FBI had all these files and sat on them for 4 years, doing nothing. Releasing the files and prosecuting those 10 conspirators would have prevented the unmitigated disaster of Trump’s 2nd regime, and equally importantly, would have been the right thing to do.

  7. Walter Solomon says

    It’s now undeniable that Trump is a criminal sexual predator. The question remains what the opposition will do when they regain power.

  9. Dibwys says

    #7
    Hopefully not hold “A Day of National Reconciliation and Healing”….but someone is likely to try.

  10. StevoR says

    Jim Wright – who has relevant lived experience here has a few things to say on Trump’s Battleships and is spot on as usual :

    Hitler spent a lot of time doodling battleships too. Nations went broke building dreadnaughts. The Soviet Union quite literally bankrupted itself into oblivion building battle cruisers and giant submarines and trying to weaponize space and the ironic part is that the USSR might have survived if the communists had spent their energy FEEDING their people and paying them a decent wage.

    But I digress.

    In the early years of the last century, a lot of nations spent money they didn’t have building fleets of battleships.
    Yet, battleships really faced off only one time, in WWI, in the Battle of the Jutland Sea. After that, they essentially became support vessels, mostly providing gunfire support, command and control, and were militarily subordinate to newer more flexible more long range technology.

    Battleships were already obsolete by Pearl Harbor, they just didn’t know it yet.

    … (Snip)…

    When the Nazis launched Bismarck, Hitler called the ship the most powerful warship ever put to sea. And maybe it even was. For less than a year. Because it was a target. THE target. Yes, it famously scored a disastrous hit on HMS Hood, but next to the Japanese battleship Yamato it became the single biggest naval target of WWII and was hunted down and sunk.
    And that was a major blow, because when you concentrate your assets, your “capital” all in one vessel, its loss is a disaster. That’s the folly of battleships. They are too expensive (both monetarily and as a strategic asset) to risk in actual combat.
    But tricking a country into building them is a really great way to bankrupt that nation and make sure they can’t afford the smaller, faster, more flexible, more technologically advanced and capable weapons that ACTUALLY win wars.

    Source :

    https://www.facebook.com/Stonekettle/posts/pfbid0nTh6qZ4aygpHj4zJm7gignnHZtviK2ceBRHT8Jj8ya2eM1EkBLzUyGaQ1VUitfzvl

    Wonder what bright idea the “stable genius”C-in C of the world’s most powerful military will have next? British Redcoats inspired high vis gold coloured camo uniforms made mandatory for the infantry so the US army can really stand out better in combat perhaps?

    As for the first part of this on the child rape flights and Epstein circle of child molesting evil rich men just. .. (vomits)..

  11. Hemidactylus says

    I had heard mention of this incompetent redaction on Bluesky earlier today, but was skeptical. Now given PZ’s OP it seems to be the case. Wow. Newscycles are accelerating with this administration. But what will it take for this clown car to get permanently impounded?

  12. fishy says

    @cheerfulcharlie
    Drones are going to win some important victories during the early resistance. I hope there is a leader that can help them stay around for longer than I suspect they will.
    I live in a large country.

  13. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    Re: JM @4:

    I have not found an article on the failures to redact correctly

    Mike Masnick (TechDirt):

    some docs do appear to be straight up classic redaction fail. [Screenshots]

    Rando:

    This document, with the bad redactions, seems to have been around for a few years. Here’s an Archive.org copy from 2023. And here’s the Court Listener page for the case.

    I’m neither a lawyer nor a reporter, but it seems like there’s something more going on here than “Trump’s DOJ screwed up the redactions” […] I’m wondering if they just looked at it and said “it’s already redacted” and threw it in there, and if there aren’t other previously available files that had similar things happen

    Nicholas Slayton (Journalist): “Wait so it wasn’t just unsourced grifter bullshit? That’s real?!”
    Mike Masnick: “Might be fairly limited, and this doc in question had been released a while back (with the same redaction problem). Still looking to see if any new docs have this.”
    Nicholas Slayton: “Prior to your post I’d only seen a few grifter resist type accounts (krass brothers included) make a claim without any sourcing.”
    Mike Masnick: “Yup. Same. Which is why I went looking. But this is confirmed, but probably a lot more limited than people are hoping for.”

    Mike Masnick: “If you don’t have experience in redacting, you might not realize there are dedicated redaction tools, and just go with the ‘easier’ black highlight”

    Kel McClanahan (National Security Counselors):

    Allison Gill and I are currently in the middle of FOIA litigation to get training videos created to train people how to redact the Epstein files. It’ll be VERY interesting to see what those videos say about making sure to remove OCR text.

    Mike Masnick:

    Anyway, curious what possible rationale the DOJ could have for redacting those sections saying that Epstein paid off witnesses to their “criminal sex trafficking and abuse conduct,” threatened harm, to “release damaging stories about them,” and telling them to “destroy evidence.”

  14. CompulsoryAccount7746, Sky Captain says

    The Onion – CIA realizes it’s been using black highlighters all these years (2005)

    sections of the documents—”almost invariably the most crucial passages”—are marred by an indelible black ink that renders the lines impossible to read, due to a top-secret highlighting policy that began at the agency’s inception in 1947.
    […]
    CIA Director Porter Goss [said, “] I would have suggested the traditional yellow color—or pink. […] There was probably some really, really important information in these documents.”

    When asked by a reporter if the black ink was meant to intentionally obscure, Goss countered, “Good God, why?”

    Goss lamented the fact that the public will probably never know the particulars of such historic events as the Cold War, the civil-rights movement, or the growth of the international drug trade. “I’m sure the CIA played major roles in all these things,” Goss said. “But now we’ll never know for sure.”
    […]
    “I don’t see how the field operatives and commandos were expected to decipher their orders.” […] “It is unclear exactly why CIA bureaucrats sometimes chose to emphasize entire documents […] Perhaps the documents were extremely important in every detail, or the agents, not unlike college freshmen, were overwhelmed by the reading material and got a little carried away.”
    […]
    “I was once ordered to feed documents into a copying machine in order to make backups of some very important top-secret records, but it turned out to be some sort of device that cut the paper to shreds.”

  15. John Morales says

    StevoR @10, you are wallowing in it.
    A useful fool, diluting the message.

    The topic is EPSTEIN files, not battleships.

    ref: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Flood_the_zone

    “Flood the zone” is a political strategy in which a political figure aims to gain media attention, disorient opponents and distract the public from undesirable reports by rapidly forwarding large volumes of newsworthy information to the media.[1][2][3][4] The strategy has been attributed to U.S. president Donald Trump’s former chief political strategist Steve Bannon.[4][5][6]
     
    The strategy came to public light after Bannon told Michael Lewis in 2018 that “The Democrats don’t matter… The real opposition is the media. And the way to deal with them is to flood the zone with shit”. Trump adopted the strategy during the 2016 presidential election,[3][7] followed by other right-wing political figures such as Éric Zemmour and Elon Musk.[8][9][1][10]

    —

    In short, you got distracted by that other shit. there will be more every fucking time.

  16. Hemidactylus says

    John Morales @15
    Dude take a chill pill. Why are you dragging StevoR for reacting relevantly to something PZ added to the OP? The thread can be both. Jeez. It wasn’t Bannon’s flooding the zone. It was PZ covering more than one topic in his OP as is his prerogative. Asking you to apologize for calling StevoR a “useful fool” might be expecting a bit much from you.

  17. raven says

    …but these ships are estimated to cost $15 billion apiece, and may prove to be utterly useless to the Navy.

    We stopped building battleships because they were too expensive and not very useful. Quite a few were sunk during World War II using 1940s weapons and technology.
    It was 28 or so.

    Google search:

    Around 28 battleships were sunk in WWII, but the number varies by definition, with major losses at Pearl Harbor (USS Arizona, Oklahoma) and later by air/sub attacks, though many damaged ones were repaired; significant losses included French, British, and Japanese ships like the Bismarck, Hood, and Japanese fleet battleships sunk by air power late in the war.

    Most were sunk by airplanes dropping bombs and/or torpedoes. It just turned out that battleships were vulnerable to air attacks.

    I’m sure nothing has changed in that way since World War II.

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