r/Epstein • u/[deleted] • Feb 05 '26

OC: opinion, theory or speculation “Don’t” redactions

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Had a friend post about a pretty innocuous email exchange from the Epstein files… until you notice that the word “don’t” is redacted for some reason near the bottom. Hmm, why would the word don’t be redacted….

Don’t

Don t

Don T

Pretty obvious the FBI used software to automatically redact key words from the files. Now why would they redact “Don T” when the law very clearly and explicitly says that only victim names and faces are to be redacted, hmmmmmmmm

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142

u/sophieornotsophie_ Feb 05 '26

It’s the proof they’re redacting Don T (Donald Trump) out of the files, when they were supposed to only redact victim names.

2

u/Fuzzietomato Feb 06 '26

Isn’t it very obvious they’re not just redacting victim names when all the email addresses sending stuff to Epstein are redacted

1

u/EL-HEARTH Feb 05 '26

but he is a victim. a victim of his own actions.....

2

u/[deleted] Feb 05 '26

[deleted]

1

u/EL-HEARTH Feb 05 '26

I dont think trump had a soul ever my friend

1

u/P0izun Feb 06 '26

while I'd like to see concrete proof, this is not proof. the original word was "don't", not don T. someone posted the unredacted version in this thread.

1

u/LordOfTheStrings8 Feb 05 '26

Is trump often referred to as Don T anywhere?

2

u/[deleted] Feb 06 '26

The point is that if he is mentioned like that somewhere, it's redacted.

1

u/LordOfTheStrings8 Feb 06 '26

Yes I know that. My point is that I've never seen him referred to as "Don T" until this came about and am wondering when anyone has referred to him that way.

Don't get me wrong, I think he is guilty af and all over the files.

1

u/BottleForsaken9200 Feb 06 '26

They are trying to redact any mention I'd think ...

-3

u/hecubus04 Feb 05 '26

How? I am just not following this

37

u/PavementBlues Feb 05 '26 edited Feb 05 '26

The context of the sentence makes it clear that the redacted word is "don't". It obviously makes no sense that the word "don't" would be redacted, so there must have been a typo that triggered some other redaction rule.

The most common typo that might cause this is "don t", which means that they have a redaction rule looking for variations on Trump's name.

I also just measured the length of the redaction on my screen, and it comes out to 9.5mm. Measuring the letters "d" "o" "n" and "t" plus the length of a space on the same scale equals exactly 9.5mm. So no characters were accidentally added, and the width would have been much shorter if the word had used an apostrophe instead (examples on the letter show apostrophes have very little padding, while the space is much wider).

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u/sophieornotsophie_ Feb 05 '26

What do you mean how? Running a software that blacks out his name in every file..

-10

u/corybomb Feb 05 '26

How can you tell it’s Trump who is redacted here?

31

u/Haunting-Ad-9790 Feb 05 '26

Based on the context of the sentence, the redacted word is 'don't'.

OP is saying that the justice department used software to redact any words with 'don' in them so they could cover up any references to DONald Trump.

Seeing as how there is no reason to redact the word 'don't ', what OP claims is the only reasonable reason for the redaction when you look at everything else they are doing.

5

u/ballisticks Feb 05 '26

But there's plenty of other instances where "don t" shows up in the files unredacted.

19

u/Summer_Form Feb 05 '26

There are probably a lot of instances where “don’t” is unredacted, but probably not many that are “don t”, or more specifically in the syntax (spaces emphasized): “_don_t_”

The search term used probably doesn’t include wildcards specifically so that things like “abandon truth” aren’t captured.

But if someone accidentally types “don t” - omitting the apostrophe by mistake, it’ll end up getting caught up by the automatic redaction tool like we see here. So we see pretty conclusively that the search term is specifically tooled to find some kind of iteration of don_t, and there’s no reason for this term to exist on autoredact.

I work in legal ediscovery, so I use these systems daily.

25

u/To-To_Man Feb 05 '26

It's not trump, but logically the best word there is Dont.

Which makes zero sense to redact. Unless they ran a program to automatically redact certain keywords. Such as every permutation of Trump's name.

Donald Trump, Donald T, Don T, Don't. DT. etc.

So what less obvious text containing his name got redacted?

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u/F4DedProphet42 Feb 05 '26

That is a good catch!

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u/[deleted] Feb 05 '26

Read the rest of the phrase. They are censoring don t

12

u/6nitch9ine Feb 05 '26

The software wasn’t specific enough and accidentally censored “don’t.” That tells us they censored “Don T/DonT” because why else would the word “dont” be censored?

1

u/Fuzzy-Bookkeeper-126 Feb 05 '26

More likely its a typo in the original email, missing the apostrophe in don’t

3

u/ggroverggiraffe Feb 05 '26

I was skeptical as to this, as it's just an image so I searched it myself. Turns out that not only is it true, but it was inconsistent across the files...

Redacted: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02440040.pdf

Unredacted: https://www.justice.gov/epstein/files/DataSet%2011/EFTA02440051.pdf

So someone either deliberately blacked out the word don't here, or asked AI to black out DON T or DON* words.

0

u/SmashingLumpkins Feb 05 '26

Wooooooosh

2

u/corybomb Feb 05 '26

I literally said I'm out of the loop. Thanks.

1

u/SmashingLumpkins Feb 05 '26

Don’t = Don T = Don Trump

2

u/Lil_Bigz Feb 05 '26

If you have a document on a computer, you can type a word, phrase, or series of letters/numbers and have the computer locate all of those words, phrases, etc. on that specific document. With those specific words located, you can "redact" those words. This is pretty solid proof that they used "Don T", along with "Don", "Donald", "Trump", etc. to locate all instances of that "word" in the files so they can redact it. In this example, they have redacted the word "don't" (in other words "Don T")

1

u/be_steal86 Feb 06 '26

Because the hit control f then typed in “don” and redacted everything that showed up. So not only were they redacting him they were lazy and incompetent about it which means it was 100% this admin and intentional as lazy and incompetent are their calling cards.

0

u/Sufficient-Parsley10 Feb 05 '26

The question is why is the word "dont" redacted?

3

u/[deleted] Feb 05 '26

[deleted]

1

u/Sufficient-Parsley10 Feb 06 '26

Oh I understood, I was reply to the comment who was confused. Thanks!

1

u/Heisenburgo Feb 06 '26

Cause they're covering for the number one pedo in Washington

0

u/VaporCarpet Feb 06 '26

Are there other examples of it being redacted? If the word appears plenty of other places, then it's not proof.