Zeteo journalist Prem Thakker went nuclear on the Trump administration on Tuesday after alleging a top official is “playing games” around a particularly disturbing email to Jeffrey Epstein about a supposed “torture video.”
In 2016, Epstein wrote to an unidentified individual that he “loved the torture video.” The unidentified recipient of the email wrote back the next day that they were "in china" but would "be in the US 2nd week of may."
Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who co-sponsored the legislation that forced the DOJ to release its files on Epstein, flagged the email Monday and called for the recipient’s name to be made public. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche proceeded to — “perhaps accidentally,” Thakker wrote – reveal the identity of the recipient to be Emirati billionaire Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem.
Carried out on social media, the exchange between Massie and Blanche, Thakker argued, was wildly inappropriate given the "disturbing" nature of the matter being discussed, involving the potential torture of a victim.
“It appears that as the DOJ defended its stonewalling, it may have walked into a rake, perhaps accidentally revealing the identity of an individual whose identity was previously redacted. Or were they playing games?” Thakker wrote in a report published in Zeteo Tuesday.
“Whether intentional or not, Blanche gave us the near feeling of transparency regarding a disturbing email — but it very well could have just been out of an instinct coursing through this administration’s veins: when in doubt, tweet and attack. The DOJ did not immediately respond to Zeteo’s request for clarification about what Blanche meant, [but] the possible horror abounds far beyond that.”
After the passage of Massie’s Epstein Files Transparency Act, the Trump admin is legally compelled to release all of its files on Epstein, and with redactions limited to protecting the identity of minors and victims. Instead, the DOJ has admitted it intends on withholding millions of files, and of those it has released, redactions beyond the scope of what the law permits have been made.
“With these redactions, [the Trump administration] continues to try haphazardly covering up whatever it can, while also incompetently tripping over itself online,” Thakker wrote. “Instead of transparency, more than one year in, we’re left deciphering tweets. About a torture video.”
