Henry Giardina December 23, 2025 (queerty.com)
The Epstein files are out—partly—and while everyone is scrambling to figure out exactly what got redacted in the latest drop, certain canny Internet sleuths have already gone a step beyond.
We know that the DOJ did an extremely poor job not only at releasing the files (we were supposed to get the full release on Friday, not just a partial drop) but of protecting the identities of the victims. They also—oops!—missed a few appearances of That Man in the White House that managed to slip by unnoticed. Not to mention those photos of Melania’s close filmmaker friend.
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But their biggest mistake of all means that we might be able to unredact these files ourselves—or at least certain parts of them.
The Krassenstein brothers have been sticking it to Tr*mp ever since his first term, and they aren’t letting up now. As explained by the brothers on TikTok, the DOJ fully goofed after they sloppily redacted the files for quick release.
“They use the improper formatting for redactions,” Brian explains in an upload from last night, explaining that all you have to do to un-redact them is copy and paste into a new document, and the black bars will go away.
However, this only works on certain parts of the text. “It’s malicious compliance!” One commenter posited. “It doesn’t work on victims [sic] names but works on other things that were not allowed to be redacted.”
That would make sense—we want the victims to stay protected. What we don’t want, however, is for That Man to be protected from being exposed for the gross pest we suspect he is.
Luckily, by doing the ol’ copy-paste trick, we’re already learning more than they probably intended for us to know. After the Krassensteins started doing this trick, they found some even more damning evidence hiding in plain sight.
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“This is 100% proof that Tr*mp tried to cover up the existence of other participants in Epstein’s crimes,” Ed explains in a new post, bombastically calling it the “biggest cover up” in American history. “It says right here that they paid large sums of money to participant witnesses in order to keep them quiet.”
That’s not all. In the newly released files, we get a scene of Tr*mp bragging to Epstein about—what else?—abusing young girls. There’s also a story about Tr*mp and Epstein abusing a young woman together. The young woman later ended up taking her own life.
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Again, it’s nothing that we didn’t know, but it’s still stark to see it in black and white. It’s also hard to know that even with all this evidence, people will still cape for that man. Whether or not the improperly redacted files count as malicious compliance on the part of whistleblowers or simply a result of Tr*mp’s people being idiots who are bad at their job, we’re about to learn all the tea. But will it change anything for the better? It’s hard to say.
As Brian tells us, nothing about this is strange, but it is edifying. “This is what happens,” he says, “when you hire a criminal as president.”
Related*
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Henry Giardina (he/they) is an Assistant Editor at Queerty. Past publications include the New York Times, The Believer, The New Yorker, The Paris Review Daily, The Atlantic, Film Comment, and Gizmodo. He is @punkgroucho on Twitter.
