DOJ Issues Official Denial Of ‘Redact Every Republican’ Epstein Files Statement Via Apps Note Screenshot

Failures

from the implausible-deniability dept

This is the sort of thing any organized government would consider truly embarrassing. We don’t have one of those at the moment, so if there’s any embarrassment to be had, it has to be experienced on behalf of the Trump administration because this administration is thoroughly incapable of feeling shame itself.

Let’s lay a bit of groundwork quickly. Trump gets elected again for some fucking reason. He hires Elon Musk to run a government-destroying government agency for some fucking reason. Trump signs a big ugly budget bill that makes a mockery of the extremely mock-able (and hideously destructive) “work” performed by Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (or D.O.G.E. to those who like cheap laughs and mass layoffs). Musk quits, gets in a social media fight with Trump, and suggests there’s a good reason Trump won’t release the Epstein files despite leveraging claims of a Democratic party underground sex fight club (or whatever) to get himself elected, but this time with bit more of the popular vote.

Trump, after spending months claiming the files are filled with evidence of Democratic pedophiles preying on minors, suddenly decides there’s nothing to see here. Some members of his vocal fan base are far from amused by this sudden reluctance to release the files they’ve been assured for months, if not years, will finally bury the opposing party once and for all.

The more Trump avoids the issue, the more guilty he looks. But the entire government works for Trump now, and that means the agencies involved in the Epstein investigation are now obliged to act as though there’s nothing Trump to see here.

Enter James O’Keefe and his quasi-journalistic enterprise. Project Veritas has mainly been used as a “gotcha” effort to lead unsuspecting victims into saying things Project Veritas can then edit into proverbial smoking guns, even if that means employing further deception while engaging in the editing process.

Trump’s refusal to release the Epstein files has apparently rubbed O’Keefe the wrong way. Project Veritas engaged in some undercover work that apparently resulted in acting deputy chief of the DOJ’s Office of Enforcement Operations telling a woman he wanted to fuck (but in the sexual sense) that he and the DOJ were going to “redact every Republican” from any future release of Epstein investigation files.

While that is all very hilarious, what’s even funnier is the DOJ’s attempt to distance itself from this mini-scandal while somehow hoping to salvage a bit of its Trump-tainted reputation. You won’t believe it unless you see it with your own eyes, but here’s the DOJ’s official response, which appears to be a dying phone’s screenshot of a Notes app note that looks for all the world like a digital approximation of a forced confession… especially when a separate font is used to denote who’s confessing to this egregious error in judgment.

If you can’t see the embed, I truly feel for you. Click the blue link above and transport yourself to Bluesky to see the original. Trust me, it’s worth it.

But here’s the text contained in the (deep breath) DOJ’s X post of a screenshot from a phone with 30% battery life, repeated verbatim:

Acting Director Pollak:

I met a woman named Skylar on Hinge, a dating app, in July 2025, her profile is no longer findable. We had two dates (August 4 and August 16). She claimed to be an au pair in Georgetown. She gave no clues that she was a reporter or recording our dates. Had I a clue, the first date would have ended immediately and there never would have been a second one.

Let’s pause here briefly to consider what’s being said here and who it’s being said by. This is the Acting Director for the DOJ’s Office of Enforcement Operations. And the defense he’s offering is this: had I known I was being tricked, I never would have agreed to continue being tricked. That’s something that (1) should go without saying no matter who’s saying it, and (2) a pretty stupid thing for someone in his position to be saying after they’ve already been successfully snowed.

Back to the alleged confession:

My profile indicated I did “Government” work but did not specify for which agency. I have never discussed what I do at DOJ.

We’ll stop here as well. The recording shows Schnitt not only telling “Skylar” that he has worked at the DOJ for “twenty-three years” but also telling her he’s going to be the “acting deputy chief” for the “next few months” and that he works closely with federal law enforcement, US attorneys’ offices, and DOJ prosecutors. So, that’s just a lie stuck in the middle of a “I was thinking with my dick” confession.

But before I ride Schnitt any harder, let’s continue with the alleged apology/confession:

The comments I made were my own personal comments on what I’ve learned in the media and not from anything I’ve done or learned via work. I have no knowledge of the circumstances surrounding [Ghislane] Maxwell other than what is reported in the news. I also never divulged anything about what I do at work. I recall that she asked if I had any knowledge about Maxwell and I specifically said I only know what’s been reported in the media.

Obviously, they’re his “personal” comments. He didn’t think he was speaking on the record. And, given Trump and the DOJ’s extreme reluctance to engage in a substantive release of the Epstein investigation files, there’s no way he ever would have been cleared to speak on the record about the case. But he definitely said stuff that hasn’t been reported in the media, most particularly the stuff no member of the administration would dare to state on the record: specifically, the whole “redact all the Republicans” thing.

I don’t doubt that Schnitt is en route to the DOJ exit doors, but it’s hard to believe this is something he wrote himself and handed over voluntarily to his superiors at the DOJ. An official statement generally is delivered via a press release or emailed memo.

This is a screenshot of an app — one so carelessly made the people posting it didn’t even bother to crop the screenshot. And the font used for Schnitt’s alleged signature is a completely different font than the body of the post, which suggests someone else entirely composed this statement and copy-pasted Schnitt’s email signature block into the Notes note.

But even if this is all on the up-and-up and this is actually Schnitt’s confession, why was it handled this way? The DOJ is a multi-billion dollar enterprise and lapses of judgment like these should be treated with firings, not the casual uploading of phone screenshots to the government’s official social media accounts. And no matter what the DOJ says or Schnitt has to say for himself after being suckered into a honey trap, the general public knows better than to believe Trump’s DOJ is going to do anything other than protect the president and party officials from being exposed as committing the sexual crimes they’ve spent years accusing Democratic party members of engaging in.

Filed Under: clown car government, david epstein, doj, fbi, james o'keefe, joseph schnitt, trump administration
Companies: project veritas