Show HN: Epstein Files Organized and Searchable

267 pointsposted 12 hours ago
by searchepstein
(searchepsteinfiles.com)

40 Comments

elif

9 hours ago

This is a noble gesture but you should know that this is a deliberate "drip" tactic that is utilized to soften the impact gradually, making the consumption and analysis of this data part of a broader social normalization process which works ironically against the interests of any substantial response that could occur.

Essentially we are helping them brain hack the masses into accepting the status quo.

accrual

9 hours ago

I have heard it framed as a slow drip to keep the pressure on those who signed on from recinding their support. Like a one-way parking ramp - making it more and more painful to reverse course.

kace91

8 hours ago

Weird that you could argue for the opposite effect.

Slow drip and fight the quick news cycle forgetfulness by taking a front page spot for each drop.

throwup238

8 hours ago

IIRC the slow drip was an explicit tactic used during the Snowden revelations and that seemed much more effective at getting everyone talking about it than Drake’s revelations or Congressional inquiries.

zulban

7 hours ago

What do you propose instead?

malcolmxxx

6 hours ago

To bury the evidence that some of us—including ourselves—could become monsters under the right circumstances.

ganelonhb

7 hours ago

Yeah you’re so right! We should not even look at them at all or analyze them because they are being released in the way you don’t agree with… bro really?

exasperaited

7 hours ago

I mean, people should look, of course.

But don’t be blind to how effectively that strategy works.

exasperaited

7 hours ago

Exactly this.

This week: not answering questions. Three weeks time: it’s old news.

This pattern was used particularly effectively to escape scrutiny throughout Trump 1.

dpkirchner

7 hours ago

They're just going to say they can't release them because they've opened new investigations in to Democrats (and only Democrats) that appear in the trove.

ks2048

8 hours ago

Zeteo News published some searchable archive. It seems this links the original (?) PDFs and provides a Google-based search.

https://journaliststudio.google.com/pinpoint/search?collecti...

b0ner_t0ner

6 hours ago

Just search for "erection" (in quotes) for some hard evidence.

stirfish

7 hours ago

I was expecting all emails, but there's some really grim stuff in here:

https://journaliststudio.google.com/pinpoint/document-view?c...

legitster

6 hours ago

Can we just take a moment to appreciate the sloppy/lazy redacting going on here?

> ______ and husband, NASCAR driver Brian Vickers, arrive on the red carpet at the 141st running of the Kentucky Derby at Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky.

Gee, I wonder who that could be without a difficult investigation.

g-b-r

4 hours ago

That horrific thing has nothing to do with any Epstein proceeding, it's a filing from 2016. What is it doing there?

https://www.yahoo.com/news/unsubstantiated-trump-child-rape-... seems a surprisingly good article about it, despite it being Yahoo.

I imagine it's still possible that it really happened, but it seems more likely that it was false

theultdev

2 hours ago

That's from 2016 and it's widely accepted as being a hoax. She may or may not even exist as she's never been seen publicly or by reporters trying to verify the claim.

The court documents referencing Johnson were filed in California and New York but were dismissed or withdrawn due to lack of credibility and proper legal standing. The plaintiff provided false contact information, including the address of a foreclosed home, and repeatedly failed to appear for scheduled press conferences despite promises to do so.

The claims were tied to Norm Lubow, a former producer for "The Jerry Springer Show," who used the pseudonym Al Taylor to promote the allegations.

Lubow admitted to Snopes in 2024 that he was behind the Al Taylor persona and had helped draft the initial lawsuit and publicize the claims, though he maintained the story was true.

https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-3914012/Troubled-wo...

CamperBob2

6 hours ago

Note that this particular document was made public before the 2016 election, much less the 2020 election.

As usual with Trump, nobody who cared had any power, and nobody who had any power cared. I expect that's how it'll play out this time... just another missed swing at the mad king.

estearum

4 hours ago

Eh I disagree. This is breaking through to more and more MAGA.

It doesn’t feel like it because with each fracturing off of the moderate end of MAGA (insofar as that exists), the core gets more committed, more extreme, and therefore more vocal.

This is on its way to being a very small but extreme group of citizens and a fairly large and extreme group of politicians (since backing up isn’t as easy as removing a yard sign and avoiding the topic in social engagements).

MangoToupe

4 hours ago

Even having so much clear evidence why this is so absent from national discourse (namely, so many people from such a wide swath of society have been named, even if not in a directly incriminating manner), I'm shocked that there hasn't been more if a push to discuss the potential implications. The kind of money that could be made just speculating outside of partisan discourse is.... jaw-dropping.

But it's really just independent people here and there, and mostly framed around some (typically partisan) polemic. Really leaves me scratching my head.

cartoonworld

3 hours ago

The chilling effect of the executive. The current admin leverages government agencies against the corporation who will report on this if not to their liking.

And more!

CamperBob2

3 hours ago

Hopefully you're right. Assuming that the rift that just opened up between Trump and MTG isn't just a bunch of kayfabe, it may actually hurt Trump more than Greene. It'll make it easy for others to break with him.

I also wouldn't be surprised if Trump's order to open an investigation into Democrats named in the documents, in a blatantly-transparent attempt to get them back under seal, turns out to be a bridge too far. At some point, maybe even the most diehard MAGAs will realize that he's insulting their intelligence.

Meanwhile, reports say that he has been cowering in the White House all day, blasting show tunes at high volume, as he is apparently wont to do when stressed.

garciasn

11 hours ago

I would say these are 'tagged'; organized is a bit of a stretch, IMO.

This is some sort of searchable index that reminds me a lot of what the web was like prior to Google; the Altavista days. It's just a jumble of poorly formatted text that isn't really contextually aware and is largely useless for the volume of textual documents.

Then there's the whole 'I landed on an email that offers the text of an email that, I assume, the pertinent information is in the attachment listed, of which I cannot easily access.

--

I'd be more interested to see how you enhance this in v2.

searchepstein

10 hours ago

Thanks for your feedback. Agreed it's not perfect and can be improved. That said, I wanted to put it out there in case it did help someone, even in it's imperfect state.

Marked improvements incoming...

baby_souffle

10 hours ago

> It's just a jumble of poorly formatted text that isn't really contextually aware and is largely useless for the volume of textual documents.

I did a quick spot check and the lack of _clear_ date field is going to make contextualizing a bit trickier. It looks like most of the `email` have them but other types like `report` may have an unknown "first, created/circulated internally" date and a broader "the public can see it" date.

Nevertheless, it's only a matter of time before this gets loaded into a graph DB so the context becomes more apparent similar to what the journalists did for the panama papers.

sema4hacker

6 hours ago

This is the kind of web site that makes we wish searches were encoded in the URL (...search?page=40), so URL edits allow me to jump anywhere, especially to the last page.

tacker2000

10 hours ago

Great job!

Would be nice if the messages are formatted with just date, sender and message and the metadata is hidden in a popup or whatever.

searchepstein

9 hours ago

Thank you for the feedback.

Unfortunately it's several thousand raw text files, and determining a single relevant date, sender and message for each file is a bit more complex than I had time for this week. Next week we'll make the files more readable, ingest & display the images, amongst other usabillity improvements.

mickael-kerjean

6 hours ago

Would love to know more about the underlying tech

legitster

10 hours ago

Thanks for putting this together.

The stuff I am coming across in here is WILD.

If you could find a way to make some of this more easily searchable/readable/etc. (Minimize headings/convert links/fix line breaks etc)

BTW, the chat logs of other parties anonymous, but you can clearly tell these are with Steve Bannon:

https://searchepsteinfiles.com/file/text/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_025... https://searchepsteinfiles.com/file/text/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_027...

searchepstein

9 hours ago

Nice finds!

Yep, I've had a snoot-full of this project this week - but next week I'll start pulling in the images and making improvements. Thank you for the feedback!

berbec

9 hours ago

Looks great and terrifying, as expected.

deadbabe

8 hours ago

You need an AI to go through each one and assign a score of how damning it is so we can sort all files by that.

CactusBlue

8 hours ago

How long until people build EpsteinGPT that does semantic search on this?