from the lol-DOJ-lol dept

DOJ Temporarily Deletes Trump Photo From Epstein Files, Ensuring Everyone Knew About The Deletion

Imagine having all the power but none of the brains. That’s the current administration, the one that behaves like a blind, enraged bull set loose in its own china shop. “We can always get more china,” says the administration, shortly before realizing it really can’t, thanks to tariff efforts that ensure China won’t be buying from the US any time soon, much less selling replacement china at the expected price point.

This is worse than the inmates running the asylum. This is more akin to a bunch of Nurse Ratchets running the asylum. The asylum becomes more cruel and less competent with each passing day. Cruelty isn’t generally associated with intelligence. And that truism remains unbothered during Trump’s second ascendance to the Oval Office.

Trump and his fans spent years stoking conspiracy theories about Democratic party members and the wholesale sexual abuse of children. These conspiracy theories led to actual violence that those participating in these conspiracy theories refuse to take responsibility for.

New York financier/pimp Jeffrey Epstein was apparently a friend to everyone rich or powerful. And he gave them what they couldn’t get elsewhere: sexual access to minors. Some of this remains alleged. But some of it was the supporting evidence for Epstein’s conviction. Epstein is dead and I can imagine lots of his friends and acquaintances breathed a sigh of relief when it was reported he had (allegedly) died by suicide in jail.

A resurgence of interest in Epstein’s files posed a unique problem for Donald Trump. On one hand, Trump had spent years stoking interest in these files, claiming they would expose a vast Democratic party cabal solely interested in sexually exploiting minors. But he also knew these files would reveal things about his own relationship with Epstein and, very likely, contain implications about Trump’s interest in much younger women.

After a period of proclaiming the Epstein files to be something no one was interested in (blatantly false, no matter which side of the MAGA you fall on), Trump and his DOJ decided to move forward with a staggered release of these documents. Congress actually managed to get in on the governance game (something lately completely subsumed by Trump’s desire to rule solely from the confines of the Oval Office via executive orders) and passed a bill that required a full release by December 19.

This didn’t happen. GOP leaders made sure it wouldn’t happen by declaring a Congressional holiday recess well in advance of the holidays to ensure GOP reps would be safely back in their home states before the release of additional Epstein files.

We got whatever the DOJ chose to release. And that release was a combination of stuff we’ve mostly already seen, some (heavily-redacted) stuff we hadn’t seen yet, and more than 200 pages of fully-redacted documents. We already knew we were in for a whole lot of opacity. What we possibly didn’t expect was the DOJ attempting to hide stuff after the fact.

At least 16 files disappeared from the Justice Department’s public webpage for documents related to Jeffrey Epstein — including a photograph showing President Donald Trump — less than a day after they were posted, with no explanation from the government and no notice to the public.

The missing files, which were available Friday and no longer accessible by Saturday, included images of paintings depicting nude women, and one showing a series of photographs along a credenza and in drawers. In that image, inside a drawer among other photos, was a photograph of Trump, alongside Epstein, Melania Trump and Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell.

Trump’s DOJ is either too dumb to know or too stupid to care about the Streisand Effect. The quickest way to draw attention to something you don’t want people paying attention to is to perform a hasty deletion.

Anyone who was paying attention to this release had already saved the documents to a bunch of cloud services and static storage devices. Those who were paying attention past the initial release would know if the government decided to bury something after the fact.

Of course, the government did try to do that. The people with the most power and money seem to think they’re the smartest people walking the earth because they’ve fully bought into the meritocracy illusion. And they’re always wrong. Being rich or powerful doesn’t make you smarter. It just makes it easier to shrug off your losses.

The DOJ tried to do that after people outside of the imaginary “meritocracy” pointed out this post facto deletion.

Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche early Sunday said the image was removed from the website after learning there were concerns about women in the photo, “so we pulled that photo down.”

“It has nothing to do with President Trump,” said Blanche on NBC’s “Meet the Press.

That’s impossible to believe because everything this particular federal government does has everything to do with Donald Trump. It’s a system of supposed checks and balances manned entirely by people who demand that the moment Poochie isn’t on screen, everyone should be asking “Where’s Poochie?”

Here’s the most high profile image the DOJ deleted (albeit temporarily) just in case it tries to do it again. Take a look in the drawer to find a photo of the current president next to someone the DOJ now implies was “a victim.”

After everyone noticed this premature burial, the DOJ restored the files, pretending this was all about protecting victims of crimes committed by Epstein and his associates (Donald Trump among them), rather than a misguided attempt to rewrite history while this particular history was still being published.

The Department of Justice on Sunday restored online a photo from the Jeffrey Epstein files that contained images showing President Donald Trump after backlash over its removal.

[…]

“The Southern District of New York flagged an image of President Trump for potential further action to protect victims,” the DOJ said in a post on the social media site X.

“Out of an abundance of caution, the Department of Justice temporarily removed the image for further review. After the review, it was determined there is no evidence that any Epstein victims are depicted in the photograph, and it has been reposted without any alteration or redaction.”

I’d love to be able to take the DOJ at its word. But it has steadily destroyed that option ever since [gestures at the long history of the DOJ, but emphasizing its recent actions with much more demonstrative hand gestures] it has been the (alleged) Department of Justice. But it gets even less of a benefit of a doubt here because we are absolutely right to assume this DOJ considers Donald Trump to be the victim of any criminal acts he may have actually perpetrated while getting cozy with Mr. Epstein.

At some point, the Trump DOJ is going to insist that if Trump ever participated in the rape of underage women, he was forced to do by Antifa protesters backed by billions in George Soros funding. He will have been the victim of a “woke” cabal that recognized him for the sexual predator he is and then used his predilections against him.

This move by the DOJ to temporarily bury a photo of Trump makes it clear it will always do whatever it thinks might please Trump even when it’s immediately obvious it cares more about fluffing Trump than serving the nation.