Here's an attorney friend of mine's take on the "scrubbing" of the Epstein files:
"But something else occurred to me which may cut against the notion of scrubbing the files.
All the Epstein files in the possession of the DOJ were presumably obtained over the the course of multiple investigations and interviews, including discovery in legal proceedings, including the criminal cases against Maxwell and Epstein.
In the ordinary course of document discovery, the documents obtained are numbered - lawyers call it Bates numbering after the old Bates automatic numbering “machines” (heavy stamping devices that rotated an inked number wheel to sequentially hand-number documents.)
The way it works is that all documents are scanned into a computer, usually converted to pdf if they already exist in an electronic file format, and then a computer program like Acrobat Pro, automatically, sequentially numbers them (it could be hundreds of thousands of documents) very quickly.
The numbering app within the program also allows for other alphanumeric characters to be added as either headers or footers, to function, for example as source identifier.
So a Bates number might be GM-0000001 (first document from Ghislaine Maxwell) or JE-0000001 (from Jeffrey Epstein).
Most commonly the Bates number is placed in the lower right hand corner of every page.
It is nearly impossible to unnumber the pages. So, if there is a mass document dump, all the pages should be, at least theoretically, sequentially numbered.
If pages are pulled, there will be gaps in the sequence of numbers..
Now, the program that does the Bates numbering also allows for redactions of words or word sequences (names are words) and it is certainly possible to conceal information via redactions and claim “victim privacy protection,” as if these corrupt grifters cared about that at all. They can redact whole pages, preserving the numerical page sequence while functionally not producing any information.
We will all have a better sense of the particular subterfuge being employed later in the week."
= new reply since forum marked as read
Never mind. Too easy.
It's not like the old days when they actually used a Bates stamper to physically put numbers on hard copies of documents.
BUT, many of these documents are out there and have been seen by many people after years of litigation. If specific docs coming out of DOJ suddenly have different Bates numbers than they did previously, we will know they are tampering with docs.
