Isn’t this huge?
Like, put aside your “they can do anything” caps. Isn’t this prosecutable and actionable?
My guess is there’s other crimes/compliance failures going on.
(I posted this elsewhere already)
What documents, I wonder? It’s not like there’s going to be forms documenting “hey we killed this guy” that need to be shredded, we already have suspicious visitor logs and the medical records and so forth, like… what would they have wanted to shred? And why shred it there, instead of just taking it as part of the investigation and disappearing it like they did with so many other documents?
They could be destroying evidence of weaknesses in their security procedures, or evidence of strong security procedures that were not followed around the time of Epstein’s death. They could be destroying evidence that indicates who was around, who was responsible for his oversight, maintenance records for security cameras that “failed”, or any number of things. It could just be “we fucked up and the FBI are going to be looking into everything, so destroy everything that might suggest we’re incompetent.” Creating unclarity by destroying documents can hinder an investigation in many ways. It certainly merits attention.
Except that we have all those records. We know who was responsible for him, who was on duty, when the cameras were last supposed to be serviced, his medical records, his transfer records, the access records for the facility and his ward in particular, the list goes on. Shredded documents don’t take up that much space - to produce remarkably large amounts would require a ton of documents to be shredded, and I’m struggling to figure out what documents could be plausibly contributing to both that excess volume and at the same time be part of the coverup.
The way that government systems work is that there are a ton of redundancies and there are usually hard copies. If they had documents with just the coming and going of people who visited, in theory investigators can put together timelines. I wouldn’t be surprised if the DOGE people destroyed digital records.
If you know that a lot of this stuff may get out, destroying any trails of evidence disrupts the process.
I’m not saying I know this happened but it does make me wonder.
That’s not really how government systems work, spoken as a government data wonk. They don’t have exhaustive records on anything except the most sensitive data, and hard copy archived records are even more uncommon. I have never worked on a project where we physically archived our work - but from working with archived prison data, the only hardcopies were some limited categories of case reports, billing and prisoner records (medical, social/legal and case reports). Visitor logs, shift rosters, employee communications, memos, etc. were all required to be retained for at most a week and were never hardcopied unless they were going to be put on a corkboard or put in a binder report or something mundane like that, which is why it’s so notable that we do have those things in this case. Clearly they were saved for a reason.
I just can’t imagine what bags and bags of shredded records they could have possibly added that were part of the coverup but didn’t merit being taken as part of the investigation. Surely if they were doing this, they would have shredded everything incriminating?
Well when I worked in government we had a ton of paperwork all over the place. Was early 2000s and we were scanning everything into archives. Maybe things have changed.
I would imagine the prison holding the most notorious and infamous people would have more records than even a normal federal prison.
But maybe not. If shit was destroyed the medical and incoming/outgoing records would be the only things that I would think relevant to destroy. And destroying it all is probably better than just destroying specific items. ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
Things have for sure changed, but almost exclusively in that the attitude has become that while there’s still lots of paperwork, said paperwork is now the bulk of what’s shredded. If it’s not worth digitizing it’s not worth archiving, and once it’s digitized why do you need to keep the hard copies? It’s far easier to store a few boxes of 40TB LTO than it is the millions of documents they contain. As a result practically nothing is worth archiving as hard copies.
I don’t know why MCC would have been any different - it wasn’t a supermax or something fancy, it was mostly just a holding facility for people pending trial / a glorified jail.
Yeah. IDK. This facility holds high profile people who are indeed awaiting trial. If I was there I would probably want to keep good records. But like I said, it’s all conjecture.
I was thinking along the lines of documents within a few days of his death.
Obviously this is just my imagination at this point but if I was gonna kill someone and wanted to leave as little evidence as possible I would probably burn it all. Destroying everything I could find would be the next best thing. If I were there for nefarious reasons, I wouldn’t want even a scribble of a note in a some document margin saying I was there.
All that to say, it may be good to investigate what/if things were indeed destroyed.
While I agree, my issue here is that the investigation saved so many documents that were incriminating. There’s not much to investigate in the destruction of documents since document destruction is absolutely routine - it just seems pointless to investigate it since those documents will have already been destroyed, and we have heaping mounds of documents from that same time frame that are already massively damning and which may indicate missing records if they’re ever actually examined.
I don’t doubt the coverup, I just doubt that this is a useful avenue of investigation given the existence of so much damning information they hypothetically could have shredded along with these mystery documents.
Totally fair. But to destroy evidence they probably had to involve more people. Conspiracies collapse when there are a lot of people. If they can flip one of the lower players, they can work their way up the ladder. A random security guard probably can’t afford a lengthy legal battle. Isn’t that how investigations usually go?
