Can Trump's Flying Monkeys Conceal the Bad Parts in the Epstein Files?

Didn't you kind of assume -- as I did -- that if Trump was suddenly willing to sign on to the release of the Epstein files, he must have gotten assurances from Pam Bondi and others that those files would be scrubbed of the stuff about him? Didn't that thought cross your mind?

I was somewhat relieved of that particular creeping suspicion by something Jay Kuo published on his Substack column, The Status Kuo:

The “Epstein Files” isn’t some centralized database. They comprise a host of electronic and physical evidence collected by the FBI, held under seal by the courts, used in civil proceedings, and held by third parties. The core investigative files, gathered by the FBI, are subject to strict chain-of-custody controls, meaning they have electronic timestamps, evidentiary IDs, digital authentications and audit trails. That’s very hard to mess with, at least not without someone noticing.

The Epstein files are also not centrally located, but rather exist in multiple forms across multiple facilities, often sealed by court order. And there are working copies out there, as well as logs of who has what.

I very much doubt Kash Patel—who can’t even avoid headlines for using the FBI jet to visit his girlfriend—could tamper with gigabytes of cryptographically encoded, read-only data without triggering alarms and landing in prison. Anyone asked to assist in such an endeavor knows the chances of being caught are quite high, while the chance of succeeding is low.

So while it’s understandable for folks to raise the alarm about the Epstein files being messed with before they are produced, my real concern is over-redaction or withholding of key items, not actual evidence tampering.