Yes, it has been redacted far in excess of what the law allows, and the material is a tiny fraction of what the administration was required by law to release by this date
It doesn't belong into the Epstein Files, and doesn't need to be censored either, but the way it is framed in the DoJ release implies guilt where there is none.
How can you be sure the image wasn't part of the files collected during investigation? What makes you so sure Epstein didn't have the file saved somewhere on a device, server, or account that was collected?
I don’t think I expressed a particular opinion here, I just stated where the suspicion comes from.
That being said, I think we can demand a level of due diligence from public institutions that entails only censoring actual victims on actual pieces of evidence, instead of mindlessly placing black squares on the faces of news article pictures found on his computer. Nevermind that nobody can explain yet how this particular picture ended up in the grand jury files anyway.
This is the same DOJ that released the edited Epstein jail video as "raw", with the attorney general claiming the missing minute was from how the video system reset for a new day, when they had the actual raw video with the missing minute.
That's not the exact same image, though. It's a separate image, from the same time and place. The one released may have been in Epstein's possession and therefore part of the files. Either some DoJ drone just redacted all children and non-celebrities due to procedure, or it was deliberately done in such a way as to make Clinton and Jackson look suspicious. Whatever the reason, this was not a Getty stock image planted in the files.
I know what picture we're talking about. 1) it's not the same as the Getty stock image everyone seems to mistake it for. 2) we don't know if the redaction is erroneous or intentionally misleading, but either way the non-celebrity faces were redacted even though another image of them exists in the public domain. Probably easier to just apply a blanket policy when handling all these images rather than observing edge cases.
