The Epstein Email Dump Is a Mess

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Speaker 1 i'm your host joseph and with me are two of the 404 media co-founders the first being sam cole

Speaker 1 and the other being jason kebler

Speaker 1 hello hello um final reminder well

Speaker 1 if you're a paying subscriber you get this on tuesdays if you're listening to the free feed the free feed you get it on wednesdays and that is the same day as our latest foyer forum as a reminder well i even did the cadence of the intro then or the outro as a reminder.

Speaker 1 Anyway, the FOIA Forum, a live streamed event where we will teach you how to file public records requests.

Speaker 1 This one specifically, as I said before, is about our flock reporting and that of researchers as well.

Speaker 1 We're going to show you those requests, how people learned from their local police departments or sheriff offices or local government, how and why police have been using flock cameras in their local communities and what that all means.

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Speaker 1 Of course, this very important abortion story we did as well. I actually did one which I always forget to bring up, which is that flock cameras were used to monitor an immigration protest.

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Speaker 1 Jason, we should probably do the slides for that.

Speaker 1 Yeah, it's been busy. It's only Tuesday.
It's been a very, very busy week. And we have to put together a presentation for tomorrow.
But we've done a lot about this. So I'm very excited for it.

Speaker 1 We've been meaning to do this Vlock FOIA forum for like quite some time.

Speaker 1 So very excited to talk about it.

Speaker 1 And the last few FOIA forums have been

Speaker 1 like more and more people have been at them, which has been really awesome. So very excited for it.
Yeah,

Speaker 1 we will bring it all together. And of course, we will answer a bunch of questions live on the on the live stream as well.
All right.

Speaker 1 For this week's first section, we're doing something a little bit different. We're not talking about an article we wrote and published.

Speaker 1 We're talking more about something that we were maybe going to write about, but you know, then we don't have enough time or whatever. But something that's still wild and important

Speaker 1 and that we felt like talking about. And then the two other sections are going to be about articles we publish so the headline of this story isn't but could be something like

Speaker 1 the formatting on the epstein emails is crazy is what i have in the google doc jason

Speaker 1 what do you mean by that and then i'm sure we'll go back and give people context but like what's your beef Yeah, I mean, I think that we're trying to talk about something that everyone else is talking about.

Speaker 1 And as you mentioned, like,

Speaker 1 I did want to write an article about this last week.

Speaker 1 I i just got really busy but basically the house oversight committee has been uh releasing tons and tons of emails and documents pulled from jeffrey epstein's estate um it's actually been a bit of a sparring match between

Speaker 1 the Democrats in the House Oversight Committee.

Speaker 1 And the Oversight Committee is like the part of the Congress of the House of Representatives that oversees the government, government, is responsible for government accountability and various investigations and things like that.

Speaker 1 And so, as part of

Speaker 1 the sort of tussling over the Jeffrey Epstein documents and investigations, the Democrats have been releasing some files, and then the Republicans have also been releasing other files. And

Speaker 1 just as like people who go through a lot of documents for our jobs and also care about

Speaker 1 archiving and government transparency and things like this.

Speaker 1 I thought that we could maybe talk a little bit about it. So

Speaker 1 and I guess just before you go ahead, these also aren't, in case it wasn't clear to people who've been following, this isn't like the Epstein files either.

Speaker 1 The Epstein files, quote unquote, are the FBI investigative files, which lawmakers may actually vote to release now? These are like the Epstein emails, in a way, right?

Speaker 1 So

Speaker 1 there are many, many, many, many, many, many Epstein files. And I think that when we're talking about like,

Speaker 1 I don't even want to call it conspiracy theories, but when people are saying like, release the Epstein files, I think that they are talking about the FBI's investigative files, as you said.

Speaker 1 That said, the FBI and the Department of Justice have released various Epstein files.

Speaker 1 It's just that many of them are redacted and many of them have come out as parts, different parts of court cases over the years.

Speaker 1 And that's another kind of issue with this is that there has been many, many different times where documents related to Jeffrey Epstein and his sex crimes and pedophilia.

Speaker 1 crimes and sexual abuse and all the people that he interacted with, his playing records, like all these sorts of things have come come out as different parts of different court cases over the years.

Speaker 1 And now what's being released, as I understand,

Speaker 1 are subpoenaed records from the House Oversight Committee,

Speaker 1 from the Epstein estate.

Speaker 1 But there are also some Department of Justice records that got released somewhat recently in this same chaotic, insane way that we're about to talk about.

Speaker 1 And so I think, yes, like the Epstein emails is probably the correct way to think about it, as you said.

Speaker 1 But then again, it's like, I actually just got a push alert as we're recording this that the House voted overwhelmingly to release the Epstein files, demand that the Justice Department release all files tied to its Jeffrey Epstein investigation, is how the New York Times words it.

Speaker 1 And it's like, now that'll go to the Senate. Who knows if the Senate takes it up? Who knows if Donald Trump will sign it? It's like, we don't really need to get into it for this podcast.
But

Speaker 1 these document dumps that have been happening over the last few months and then very notably last week have been released on google drive

Speaker 1 with a backup on dropbox um

Speaker 1 and it's like and who sends that google drive link out is it like in a is it like an official congressional email like where does this google drive come from so on november 12th there is a press release from the Committee on Oversight and Government Reform.

Speaker 1 And here's the entirety of the press release. Okay.
It says, Oversight Committee releases additional Epstein estate documents. Then it says Washington, where they're located, Washington, D.C.

Speaker 1 The House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform released an additional 20,000 pages of documents received from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein. Documents can be found here.

Speaker 1 And it's a link to a Google Drive with no title, no anything. And then it says a backup of the documents can be found here and it's a link up link to the Dropbox.

Speaker 1 First of all, it's like pretty insane that Congress is releasing files via Google and Dropbox.

Speaker 1 And it's also kind of crazy that they are like having a backup link, like a mirror, as though they are worried that.

Speaker 1 Google is going to delete these as though they are like an adult actor who's like, follow my, follow my backup backup account here. Like, it's kind of odd, I would say.

Speaker 1 I guess, kind of, given what we know about PACER, which is the

Speaker 1 court systems

Speaker 1 file system, which is a shit show and very hard to search and very expensive, like, I guess the House Committee on Oversight doesn't have its own server to upload these to.

Speaker 1 Maybe this is actually,

Speaker 1 I mean, we can debate it. Maybe this is not the worst way to release these sorts of documents, but

Speaker 1 uh, basically, it's like you click a link and it and it's just called Epstein Estate Documents, and then there's four folders, and the folders are data, images, text, and natives,

Speaker 1 and then there's a bunch of subfolders that are just like zero zero one, zero zero two, so on and so forth.

Speaker 1 And

Speaker 1 I'm like, really

Speaker 1 it's not sorted at all, like chronologically or anything like that. Not from what I can tell.

Speaker 1 It really, honestly, when it came out, it felt to me like I was playing Jeffrey Epstein email lottery or slot machine because you open up like the image folder 006

Speaker 1 and then you click into something and then it's just like screenshots of articles or like it's just random stuff. Like there's PowerPoint presentations.

Speaker 1 there's you know many many emails there's emails in different formats um

Speaker 1 i i don't even know if that's necessarily like that bad like you know some of the emails have or some of the images have thumbnails and things like that um

Speaker 1 but it is just like an incredibly chaotic way to release something that has so much uh public interest I guess I would say and then

Speaker 1 one of the earlier documents just had a bunch of JPEGs of emails that were not OCR'd in any way. OCR means optical character recognition, meaning

Speaker 1 you can search them, like CtrlF, you can search through them. That hadn't been done on anything.
And I guess I'm curious what you think, like why this is the case.

Speaker 1 I have a few theories, but from a usability perspective, from a like, hey, I'm interested in this as a normal person,

Speaker 1 it's very, it's not the best.

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Speaker 1 My guess is it sounds like a raw export.

Speaker 1 in response to the subpoena in that when the subpoena is issued and then it's received by the target, they will, you know, maybe the legal department will do it in

Speaker 1 conjunction with the IT department. I don't know about the Jeffrey Epstein

Speaker 1 IT department. It could be, you know, lawyers or whatever, right? But they will have software to produce the correct records in response to a subpoena.
And

Speaker 1 the fact that it hasn't been, it sounds really curated in any way, it sounds like it's just like a raw export, especially our natives folder.

Speaker 1 so maybe it's just that you know and they didn't really i mean maybe they read them obviously for their congressional investigation but it doesn't sound like they then went and curated them at all to then publicly release them it's more like a dump and it's weird because yeah

Speaker 1 the argument for it being on google drive i mean pretty accessible Everybody has a Google account.

Speaker 1 And even if you don't, you can usually download stuff from a public Google Drive link, even if you don't have a Gmail, right? I guess it's also not going to get hugged to death,

Speaker 1 right? It's likely to stay up

Speaker 1 a ton of that, and then so I can see the argument for it.

Speaker 1 It's just funny where been covering data dumps for like 10 years at this point, and sometimes like hackers are more organized than this, you know, like young,

Speaker 1 sometimes reckless hackers, you know, they'll put more effort into their press release with their ASCII art than it sounds like the committee did here in getting these documents online.

Speaker 1 I just clicked three files that are next to each other. One is an email from 2016, one is an email from 2018, and the other is an email from 2017.

Speaker 1 It's like they're not in any sort of order,

Speaker 1 really, from what I can tell. And so I think that you're correct.

Speaker 1 And I think also, so this entire like case or a huge part of this entire situation is built on the idea that we can't trust the government.

Speaker 1 We can't trust the official narrative of what happened here or the investigation. And there have been instances where the government has been accused of altering files.

Speaker 1 For example, the surveillance footage of his

Speaker 1 jail cell when he died. There's like, you know, Wired did a story where there's like the metadata shows that there's missing footage.

Speaker 1 So I do think that it's, I actually think despite everything that I said, it's good that they did a raw dump or what seems to be a raw dump of the files. What I don't understand

Speaker 1 is why, and like maybe

Speaker 1 this is like getting too political, but like

Speaker 1 why did the Democrats who wanted to release this not spend more time curating these emails and creating a website or somewhere that you can read them in like a way that makes sense in addition to the raw dump, like from a political political narrative.

Speaker 1 Like, why are they like, here's a bunch of random files with random formats in no order? Good luck. Like, do you think that it's just like a, hey, have fun with this?

Speaker 1 Like, go, go crazy, read these, read this stuff. Like, does it feed into

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 conspiratorial nature of it or the like, you know?

Speaker 1 I don't know. Maybe, maybe this is like a better way of releasing it because things did then seem to like

Speaker 1 come out slowly over the weekend as journalists and people on Blue Sky and Twitter and Reddit started finding interesting emails. But I don't know.
It just, it feels like not very calculated, I guess.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And Sam, I'm going to ask you something without revealing what you're working on, but you're working on something at the moment where you have to go through a lot of data.

Speaker 1 to figure out who you're going to reach out to the story, that sort of thing. um

Speaker 1 how would if you were covering this epstein story how would you prefer that was delivered to you rather than this

Speaker 2 um

Speaker 2 i don't think i would want

Speaker 2 like a i don't think i would want like a neat organized version because it would make me wonder what they

Speaker 2 if they left anything out or like what they cut or like if they were like oh that's not important but maybe it was important. Like, I don't know.

Speaker 2 It's like, I don't, I think like, don't touch it and just dump it is probably the smartest way to do it. That said, I don't think this is, I don't think they're thinking that hard.

Speaker 2 I don't think there's a smart way and a not smart way that they've considered. I think this is just like

Speaker 2 chumming the water, like just like get it out and let journalists and whoever and whatever like talking head wants to deal with it at a cable news network can go through it like i don't i just don't think anyone's like

Speaker 2 spending that much time thinking about how to do this which is probably why we end up with it the way that it is

Speaker 2 um i don't know i mean i guess you could go down various rabbit holes and like wonder if it's a mess on purpose if it's hard to go through on purpose but it's also like

Speaker 2 i don't know it's like you click I have barely touched it, but like you, it's like, you can just throw a dart and end up with like a billionaire admitting to like horrible crimes which is also like its own bizarre

Speaker 1 you know it's like you can't really go wrong clicking around on that thing it's there's not really a boring file in there because it's all horrible that's part of what is so horrifying where it's just like oh click one email it's something terrible from peter teal saying like had a good time

Speaker 1 hanging out then it's like the next one is like larry summers and then it's just like

Speaker 1 behind every door a new horror um so I mean yeah maybe the the slot machine aspect of it is actually like smart um so I guess how would you organize it anyway it's like I guess chronologically would be chronologically would be the only way that I would think would make any sense but

Speaker 2 then if you went to organize it more than that it would be like what would it be like by

Speaker 2 billionaire

Speaker 2 by

Speaker 2 estate that they're located in during the email. It's like, how do you kind of go more granular than just like by date? But even by date would be helpful, I guess.

Speaker 2 Um, but I don't know, it's like I don't really need them to be helpful. It's like, I don't be helpful, honestly, just let

Speaker 2 the people who are actually doing the process do the process. But

Speaker 2 I don't know.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And as you say, journalists have been going through it, and there's, you know, a few stories that come out of it.
There's the Michael Wolf stuff for those who don't know.

Speaker 1 I mean, a very famous journalist slash writer. And in the emails, he's seen giving a quote heads up to Epstein that, hey, CNN is working on something.

Speaker 1 They're planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you. And then Epstein replies, if I were to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?

Speaker 1 And Michael Wolf, again, apparently the journalist says, oh, you should let him hang himself.

Speaker 1 Metaphorically, actually, a really poor choice of words looking back uh retro uh back in time but obviously what the hell are you doing you you're like giving pr advice to

Speaker 1 you know a paedophile and then even if he wasn't you shouldn't be giving pr advice to anybody you're a journalist what the hell are you doing anyway there was that and there was some stuff like you know times writer that's like a whole other thing there was um

Speaker 1 I think a Democrat on a committee during a Michael Cohen hearing was texting with Epstein.

Speaker 1 So there's definitely interesting stuff in there, but as you say, Jason, it took a few days for it sort of to come out because it required people to really dig through it and then probably do additional reporting

Speaker 1 as well.

Speaker 1 When Epstein documents have come out before, we've even published them. I think.

Speaker 1 The most traffic we've ever got is when we published some Epstein docs, right?

Speaker 1 It was very funny.

Speaker 1 We were the Google Drive in this instance because

Speaker 1 there's a big dump of epstein documents soon after we launched like within a couple months of us launching i think um

Speaker 1 and i downloaded them all off of pacer we bought them we paid for them and then we uploaded them to our own site and

Speaker 1 i think it is still our highest trafficking article of all time yeah i think it's literally to be honest it's probably more sketched than the google drive it's literally a link at the bottom of the article.

Speaker 1 It's like, do you just want to download the PDFs? It's like raw straight from our server, basically. But

Speaker 1 it's actually not. It's not the biggest anymore.

Speaker 1 It was the biggest for a while, but we passed it many times this year. But that was at the, that was like soon after we launched.

Speaker 1 So it was like a bunch of articles that had just a few thousand people read them. And then like

Speaker 1 tens of thousands, hundreds of over

Speaker 1 well, 200,000 people

Speaker 1 looked at this one.

Speaker 1 And crucially, those court documents were probably OCR'd or capable of being OCR'd, right? Like you just download them and you can kind of search them if you have the right tools, right?

Speaker 1 They were all PDFs, which is like helpful. There's like not a PDF to be found,

Speaker 1 honestly.

Speaker 1 In the latest stuff, yeah. Not that, I mean, there's some, but they're, they're mostly in just like weird formats.
Um,

Speaker 1 the

Speaker 1 interestingly, on that first one where we upload them, we like upload them to our website.

Speaker 1 And I did hear from Ghost, our

Speaker 1 service provider, after that, that it was like, they were like,

Speaker 1 that was like very expensive for us

Speaker 1 to host those files because they got downloaded so many times. Uh, and that was like when we were smaller, when they were smaller.

Speaker 1 I just don't think that anyone was kind of like expecting an influx, like downloading gigabytes and gigabytes of data data from our website.

Speaker 1 But, anyways,

Speaker 1 well, what I mean, two things. Obviously, we're joking a bit, but there is also like a serious element to this in that it's really important to be able to access information.

Speaker 1 So, why do you think that's so important? Because, you know, journalists will figure out eventually we have these stories. Like, why does it really matter that it gets delivered more easily?

Speaker 1 And how would you prefer it?

Speaker 1 Well, I i was gonna say there actually have been a few projects um immediately after these documents have been released to ocr them so to run them through uh you know optical character recognition uh software and then to upload them in a more searchable format um

Speaker 1 i think zetteo which is another independent media company made a tool that allows you to search things.

Speaker 1 And then there's been a few projects, one of which we wrote about a few weeks ago, that tried to use AI to do it.

Speaker 1 And so they would like OCR it, but then they also had AI summaries of different documents and things like that. It's like

Speaker 1 interesting project, like interesting attempt at AI, especially because he used like an offline AI, like he used one that he had, like an open source one that he had on his computer.

Speaker 1 And those you can, those websites allow you to search like

Speaker 1 all documents that mention Trump, all documents that mention Larry Summers, all documents that mention Michael Wolfe. Like you can search by,

Speaker 1 I don't know, like type of document, things like that.

Speaker 1 But I've heard like pretty mixed things about

Speaker 1 how well they are OCR'd, just because there's so many documents and these projects are really rushing. And so there is maybe a loss of fidelity in that process.

Speaker 1 I think that those projects are cool and are like needed. And I think we love an archive project.
We've talked a lot about different archive projects. I do think that

Speaker 1 I don't know, like,

Speaker 1 I don't know what the best way to do it is, but I kind of wanted to just bring it up because

Speaker 1 we have been talking a lot about ice on this podcast over the last few months. And we're going to talk about it.

Speaker 1 But I think it was just like, let's do something that's not like another show that's entirely about ICE. And this is something else that people are talking about.

Speaker 1 That and Olivia Nuzzy, which I think we probably won't talk about.

Speaker 1 But that's like the thing that is like going on at this juncture in the discourse.

Speaker 1 But with the FOIA forum coming up tomorrow and things like that, like the ways that governments release documents is pretty interesting and is

Speaker 1 it's crazy. It's like all over the map.
Like if you filed public records requests,

Speaker 1 I think everyone has some sort of story about a weird file format or like a proprietary file format or a password protected PDF that they don't tell you the password for that they've gotten, things like this.

Speaker 1 Like I got a floppy disk from a government like maybe three years ago. It's just like they are they're sending stuff out in really bizarre ways very often.

Speaker 1 And this is a function of

Speaker 1 different local governments using different computer systems, different filing systems. A lot of them use Outlook, but they don't know how to export Outlook

Speaker 1 email boxes, things like that.

Speaker 1 Gotten a lot of corrupt files, things like that. And so, part of being a journalist is figuring out how to open up all of these file formats and how to search through them and all that.

Speaker 1 And this just seemed like a good opportunity to talk a little bit about that.

Speaker 1 I've learned how to open up Windows,

Speaker 1 like Windows-only files on a Mac more times than I would like to count.

Speaker 1 And it doesn't go very well very often. But yeah,

Speaker 1 dealing with my small farm of virtual machines, I have to tend to, you know,

Speaker 1 I think I just gave up. Well, no, I used to do that a lot, running various Linux virtual machines, then Windows ones, to open all different files.

Speaker 1 Now I'm just like, Emmanuel, could you just open this on your Windows machine and just send a screenshot to me? I don't have time to fucking do all of that.

Speaker 1 Okay, we will leave that there there unless, well, I know we're going to finish this podcast and maybe they have dumped the documents. I guess we're going to see.

Speaker 1 When we come back after the break, we're going to talk about a fun recruiting effort on LinkedIn. I'll put it like that.
We'll be right back after this.

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Speaker 1 Okay, and we're back.

Speaker 1 Joseph, this story you did about ICE, we're going to continue writing writing a lot about ice by the way what i mentioned in the first section was just like you know we care very deeply about it it's just that we want to talk about something else for at least one section of the pod um

Speaker 1 contractor recruiting people on linkedin to physically track immigrants for ice will pay three hundred dollars

Speaker 1 uh joseph this all started with a linkedin post uh what was the post yeah i'm looking at it now so it's from a guy called jim brown who is the president at Feds United.

Speaker 1 Feds United is a federal contractor consultancy. So it is a contractor in some ways, but it's more they work with other contractors to figure out their contracts.

Speaker 1 It's probably the most, you know, DC Belt. Virginia, Maryland thing you could probably think of that a company exists to do the contracts for the contractors, blah, blah, blah.

Speaker 1 Anyway, Jim posted on LinkedIn,

Speaker 1 While I was writing this, it was three weeks ago, and now it's a month.

Speaker 1 So, you know, basically, bang on a month ago, he writes this LinkedIn post and he says, hello to my LinkedIn retired law enforcement and military friends.

Speaker 1 He then goes on to say that Feds United is looking for around 20 more of these retired or former law enforcement or retired military personnel in DC or Northern Virginia to participate in what he calls a quote 90-day pilot project that is expected to kick off within the next few weeks, end quote.

Speaker 1 And he says that the project is to assess whether contractors can validate addresses associated with subjects of interest. You're to only observe and report.
That's it. All

Speaker 1 pretty vague, you know, not a lot of details.

Speaker 1 But he says, if you're interested in true LinkedIn fashion, if you're interested in the opportunity, please contact me here via LinkedIn messaging or share it in your

Speaker 1 wider network. He doesn't have hashtag hiring in his LinkedIn profile photo.
I didn't see anybody with hashtag open to work in their profile photos, even though Jason made that pretty good joke.

Speaker 1 So yeah, it all started there, basically. Yeah.

Speaker 1 One of the worst LinkedIn posts I've read in quite some time.

Speaker 1 So basically, you see this LinkedIn post,

Speaker 1 and then you spoke to some people who had been briefed on the plans. Like,

Speaker 1 what did you learn? Yeah, so as you heard, that LinkedIn post, as I said, was vague. It didn't say what exactly the work was,

Speaker 1 who exactly they would be working for. But I then spoke to multiple people who have been briefed on those plans, and they said that it is verifying information for ICE.

Speaker 1 So, Feds United,

Speaker 1 or the contractor they're working with, that we'll probably talk about in a minute, they would provide addresses from ICE of immigrant targets, undocumented people, alien targets, alien, obviously being the US government's term for somebody who's in the country who's not a citizen.

Speaker 1 And they will be tasked with: here are some vehicles, you have to go verify

Speaker 1 whether this address belongs to this person or not.

Speaker 1 So we can figure out: yes, this undocumented person is at this location, that gets reported back to ICE, and then presumably that is going to be so then ICE can act on that information.

Speaker 1 From what I was told, ICE does not have,

Speaker 1 doesn't always have a good address for the people it is trying to go after.

Speaker 1 I think there's a lot of different reasons for that, probably. One might be that ICE's targets might be mobile, maybe they use some services and not others.

Speaker 1 And I think a very interesting one, which came up in some of my conversations, is that DHS has repeatedly been cut out of a lot of tools that they used to have access to.

Speaker 1 So stuff like utility bill data.

Speaker 1 I remember in the first Trump administration, there was a big story in the Washington Post, which I think came after a Widen office investigation about how utility companies were selling personal data and that was ending up with DHS.

Speaker 1 As far as I know, that got cut off. So what is this pilot trying to do?

Speaker 1 Well, we have all these addresses and other people can go verify them with the tools they have, which, you know, different tools in private industry, or simply there's just a lot of work to do, like going out and verifying whether somebody lives here or something and observing them.

Speaker 1 That is a lot of manual

Speaker 1 work,

Speaker 1 for lack of a better way of pulling it. But that is what this plan was.
Start with a LinkedIn post, then write up to you, verify these addresses, and we'll give you $300

Speaker 1 per address up to a maximum of 30K. Yeah, so this is part of a bigger ICE initiative to work with skip tracers, which are bounty hunters, essentially, which basically.
I actually

Speaker 1 saw, and private investigators, I think it is fair to say. Like, I didn't

Speaker 1 know that bounty hunters was a real job, honestly, outside of Star Wars, until a few years ago when you did an article about the bounty hunting industry where we tracked ourselves using a tool that they had access to.

Speaker 1 And that was a huge, huge story. I did not understand that this was a thing.

Speaker 1 So maybe it would be helpful just to like talk about the ICE project, but also just a little bit about the skip tracing industry.

Speaker 1 Yeah. I mean,

Speaker 1 I learned they're not just Dogs the Bounty Hunter. That was my one, not just the Star Wars one.

Speaker 1 But yeah, I had to learn this all pretty quickly back in 2018 when we did that story, as you said, where it turned out bounty hunters and skip tracers had access to the basically real-time location data of I think most phones in America sold by T-Mobile, Sprint, AT ⁇ T at the time.

Speaker 1 And I didn't really know what a skip tracer was.

Speaker 1 So then I ended up speaking to a few, pretty sure before I published that, and then definitely after. I've been speaking to a lot of these people for years at this point.
And

Speaker 1 a skip tracer will do a few different things.

Speaker 1 I mean, a lot of it comes down to finding people who skipped bail.

Speaker 1 That's where the term comes from. A skip tracer is somebody who finds somebody else who has skipped bail, and then you need to, you know, locate them and you'll be paid for those services.

Speaker 1 They also do stuff like finding stolen vehicles

Speaker 1 where, and that'll be on behalf of, I don't really think an individual, but more like an insurance company or something like that. And they'll go find those vehicles, find people as well, as I said.

Speaker 1 And I think, to be fair to that industry, we and others sometimes use the terms skip tracer and bounty hunter basically interchangeably,

Speaker 1 because I think

Speaker 1 people know what a bounty hunter is. And I know skip tracers won't agree with this, but they're kind of the same.

Speaker 1 You are being paid a commission to go find a person or find an item or something like that, right?

Speaker 1 But whenever I speak to somebody who says, no, I'm specifically a skip tracer, obviously I respect that and I will attribute it as such in the article.

Speaker 1 But what I learned through doing that phone location story is that bounty hunters, skip tracers, and private investigators,

Speaker 1 and of course, in many states, you have to get a license to be a private investigator. And I believe sometimes a skip tracer as well.

Speaker 1 They have access to all sorts of different technologies and tools and data. So that's sometimes phone location data.
It's stuff like TLOXP, which is a powerful data tool that we've covered actually

Speaker 1 way back when we first launched in 2023, where it has

Speaker 1 the personal data from the top of a credit, from a credit report, so name, address, that sort of thing.

Speaker 1 And that can be really, really useful for tracking down somebody because presumably they put their real address on their credit card bill so they can receive it, even though they might not give their address elsewhere, something like that.

Speaker 1 So skip tracers, they have access to all of that sort of stuff. Smartphone location data as well, potentially, and license plate readers, which are all over the country.

Speaker 1 We actually covered one recently, which

Speaker 1 we were going to talk about in detail today, but like the Motorola Thompson Reuters one and the Vigilant one. There's all of these cameras

Speaker 1 all over the country. And law enforcement can use a tool to search those.
Private investigators can as well.

Speaker 1 And years ago, a private investigator source showed me that tool in action and actually tracked someone with their consent.

Speaker 1 So I've always been drawn to the skip tracers and the bounty hunters and the private investigators ever since like 2018, because I don't think people understand they basically have the same capabilities as cops, like technologically and data-wise.

Speaker 1 It's just that, you know, potentially there's far less accountability because although, yes, a PI might be licensed and yes, they could use their license,

Speaker 1 they're much closer to a member of the public than a cop, right? Now, of course, these people don't have always the authority to arrest you, but they can get pretty damn close if they can't.

Speaker 1 Yeah. And so now ICE is

Speaker 1 reaching out to this industry. They're giving contracts to this industry and they are saying, hey, you

Speaker 1 know, largely do this for private purposes or like sometimes for courts, perhaps

Speaker 1 now do it for ICE.

Speaker 1 Yeah, that's basically, yeah, that's basically right.

Speaker 1 Where we already have this massive private industry of skip tracers who their entire thing is finding people's addresses and finding their physical location.

Speaker 1 Why don't we essentially outsource that part of ICE's mass deportation effort to skip tracers and bounty hunters?

Speaker 1 And I'm pretty sure this pilot that this article is about paying the Randos off LinkedIn 300 bucks, I'm pretty sure it is part of this broader plan, which was first reported by the Intercept in October, where on a Friday night, ICE publishes a procurement document.

Speaker 1 I think I was already several beers down, and then I saw the Intercept piece. I was like, damn, I should have seen that.
Intercept publishes that. Very, very interesting.

Speaker 1 We then cover, I think a couple of weeks later, that we find that ICE has

Speaker 1 allocated as much as $180 million to this effort. I then speak to PIs and skip tracers and they say, well, some of them are horrified.
Some of them are like, yes, I will do this work.

Speaker 1 And one of them says, well, the budget is so big that this is probably going to be for like large scale government contracts.

Speaker 1 It's like it's probably not going to be a random like family run PI business. Although, you know, I imagine ICE will probably take all the help they can get.

Speaker 1 So we publish that and then somebody reaches out about this latest contracting effort. And,

Speaker 1 you know, our style very much is to do story after story after story after story. Like we don't wait to do like one big 3,000 word article or something.

Speaker 1 Sometimes we do, but I much prefer this cadence because it leads to these sorts of stories where people reach out. And for me, and I guess I'll just leave it here.

Speaker 1 For me, this is a story not just because it provides some specifics of what's going on. It's like, oh,

Speaker 1 it started with ICE being like, yes, we'll get skip traces and probably licensed PIs and that sort of thing. Now they're getting randos off LinkedIn.

Speaker 1 And to me, I think that was really, really crazy, you know.

Speaker 1 Jason, last thing. I think we changed the headline on this.

Speaker 1 Why did we do that? I mean, we just added LinkedIn on it

Speaker 1 because the origin story of it being

Speaker 1 these people being recruited off of LinkedIn is just so crazy. It's like the whole thing is so dehumanizing and upsetting.
And, you know, ICE's mass deportation campaign is.

Speaker 1 It's bad for all the reasons that we've talked about. And it's just like when the government is doing it, I mean, when this government is doing it, there's not a whole lot of

Speaker 1 like care and guardrails and restraint and all that sort of thing. But

Speaker 1 at least, I guess at least it is like the government. And now it's like subcontractors of the government

Speaker 1 finding people on LinkedIn to do this type of work. It's just like, what could possibly go wrong? You know, like

Speaker 1 any number of things could go wrong. And I think there's been a whole controversy about,

Speaker 1 you know, ICE officials identifying themselves and that sort of thing. And now it's like, yes,

Speaker 1 apparently this project, there's not supposed to be altercations. It's like these people are supposed to, quote, observe and report is how you put it in the article, or I think how the

Speaker 1 LinkedIn post put it. Yeah.

Speaker 1 But what happens when someone's observing and reporting and then someone asks, like, what the hell are you doing here? Vibes. Like that, it's hard.

Speaker 1 It's easy to say that, uh, but then who knows what happens? And it just like raises all these questions about,

Speaker 1 you know, like you sort of expect law enforcement to identify themselves. And there's already been cases of people impersonating ICE agents and FBI agents and all that sort of thing.

Speaker 1 And this just like raises that to a 10, I think. Yeah.

Speaker 1 So very not, not good. This of like, I say this all the time, but of the many, many stories that we've done about ICE, like this is one that is very alarming.
I feel this is very alarming.

Speaker 1 Yeah, actually, I'll just add that

Speaker 1 Spencer Ackerman

Speaker 1 mentioned this on Blue Sky after we published, but like there has been these sorts of pervasive rumors.

Speaker 1 for months and months and months on Blue Sky and other social media platforms where it's like, oh, that ICE official you're filming, he's actually a bounty hunter.

Speaker 1 He's actually somebody from the Proud Boys who's pretending to be ICE so then get paid money. And frankly,

Speaker 1 it's an unsubstantiated myth, right? I think people are kind of just buying in into that for whatever reason.

Speaker 1 I mean, maybe it's easier to believe that than, no, that's a federal government employee and they're not identifying themselves and they have the full power of the state behind them and a culture of impunity and there's nothing you can do about it.

Speaker 1 Maybe that's a little bit scarier. But that said, that was a myth for months.

Speaker 1 now it's like oh they actually did it they actually hire the bounty hunters now and it became real i just don't think it was really real

Speaker 1 before october or it wasn't a formal policy before october is my understanding

Speaker 1 before you end the podcast may i simply go back to epstein for a second and ask

Speaker 1 what happened no it's just like the the donald trump blew bill clinton are we not even going to even discuss at all well Emmanuel's not here, and he's obsessed with it.

Speaker 1 Yeah, I feel like, Sam, like, you, what, where do you come down on this? How do you feel? How do you feel about this?

Speaker 2 Is that even? I didn't even know if it was a meme or joke or real, and which is kind of how I'm engaging with this entire

Speaker 2 news cycle. So, is it real?

Speaker 1 It's a meme, it's a joke, and it's real.

Speaker 1 No,

Speaker 2 is there video?

Speaker 1 No, I would like to see it.

Speaker 1 Can you explain it, please, Jason? So I don't have the exact email in front of me, but there is an email. I believe it's from Jeffrey Epstein's brother to someone where he says that Trump blew Bubba

Speaker 1 and Bubba is like a nickname for Bill Clinton.

Speaker 1 And so, you know,

Speaker 1 it's sort of become like the J.D. Vance couch

Speaker 1 meme situation.

Speaker 1 But there is an email claiming that Trump blew Bubba and Bubba, perhaps Bill Clinton.

Speaker 1 There's been some reporting that Bubba actually is not Bill Clinton, but is a private citizen, is like another person. But it raises like many questions.

Speaker 1 It raises questions just in terms of like what's going on here.

Speaker 1 I've seen some very good jokes.

Speaker 1 This is obviously like extraordinarily upsetting stuff and like very dark and terrible. However,

Speaker 1 some of the jokes are funny, I must say.

Speaker 1 I would say that, I mean, it's basically,

Speaker 1 and it's not going to be as big as this, but it's basically P-Tape 2, right? Where people are like, yes, yes, yes. If this happens, it will come out.
And then I'm talking about like...

Speaker 1 you know, the hashtag resistance

Speaker 1 mullah she wrote or whatever, X accounts and blue sky accounts or whatever. Like, yeah, if this comes out, finally

Speaker 1 it'll be over for Trump and he'll be out or whatever. And it's like,

Speaker 1 dude, absolute delusional copium. Like, that is not happening.
We already know that there isn't like a single story that

Speaker 1 changes things like post-2016. I just, that just doesn't happen, you know?

Speaker 1 So Snopes has fact-checked this and has rated it true.

Speaker 1 True.

Speaker 1 Here is what the email says. The email says from

Speaker 1 Epstein's brother to Jeffrey Epstein.

Speaker 1 It says, ask him if Putin has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba. Question mark.

Speaker 1 And then

Speaker 1 Epstein, then they make like various jokes about it,

Speaker 1 of which I can't really understand.

Speaker 1 Epstein says back, and I thought I had serous t-s-u-r-i-s.

Speaker 1 Uh, and then

Speaker 1 one of the reasons why some of these emails are so like difficult to parse is because they're all boomers who don't know how to type. It's crazy.
It's just like worth mentioning.

Speaker 1 It's just like these people email how you think that they would email. It's like they're one, they're like confessing to crimes, like left and right.
Like

Speaker 1 I saw a good joke that it was like

Speaker 1 teenager downloading anime from piracy website uses like six VPNs, you know, tour network, et cetera. And then it's just like Jeffrey Epstein discussing pedophilia and sex crimes.

Speaker 1 It's just like, just talks about it in the open on emails. It's, it's very crazy, but they also like can't type at all.

Speaker 1 Yeah, billionaires are.

Speaker 1 incapable of sending like a cogent email, it seems.

Speaker 1 All right, we'll leave it there. If you're a billionaire who can read, can write a cogent email, please send once in and we'll take a look.

Speaker 1 If you're listening to the free version of the podcast, I'll now play us out.

Speaker 1 But if you are a paying 404 media subscriber, we're going to talk all about this new code of conduct in the adult industry that Sam has covered, which has been, frankly, a long time coming.

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