The latest release of Jeffrey Epstein documents includes an FBI report about a caller’s claim of a suspicious death in Kiefer, Oklahoma, in January 2000.

The caller said a woman was found with her head “blown off” in the small town in northeast Oklahoma days after reporting to police she had been raped by Epstein and Donald Trump. The caller described the death as a murder.

The FBI report was in the nearly 30,000 new documents released by the U.S. Justice Department on Dec. 23.

  • phutatorius@lemmy.zip
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    7 hours ago

    Rather than assuming every single news source is in league with maga or scared of them, the simplest explanation is that the claim doesn’t hold any substantial weight.

    It’s not an assumption that every single (major) news source is owned by a MAGA crony or is run by someone afraid of a Trump SLAPP suit or regulatory retaliation. And some, such as the New York Times, seem to be going through contortions to minimize Epstein’s intelligence links

    Having said that, it’s inevitable that there will be crackpot claims in any high-profile case. So check it, and if it’s bullshit, discard it. But also, don’t assume that something’s bullshit just because the person who wrote it can’t write, or has other issues. Those issues might be the reason they’re not intimidated when a more rational person would be. Someone like that can be a good source but a poor witness.

    One of the DOJ’s tactics is to flood the zone with shit. They’re deliberately releasing a huge quantity of documents with all context stripped out, to make it harder for journalists and the public to make sense of them. That’s not the way they’re organized in the DOJ, it’s malicious compliance. And the document sets are also almost certainly being deliberately filtered to make the signal/noise ratio even worse-- for example, by redacting all mentions of Trump and by adding in items mentioning Clinton, probably redacted to support false conclusions about his level of involvement.

    • jj4211@lemmy.world
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      4 hours ago

      So check it, and if it’s bullshit, discard it. But also, don’t assume that something’s bullshit just because the person who wrote it can’t write, or has other issues

      Sure thing, but thus far these two tips haven’t been meaningfully checked and corroborated.

      The two most bombshell events were both tipline fodder during the height of the 2020 election, after Epstein’s death and pictures of him and Trump became huge things.

      So yes, by all means scour current and future documents for anything corroborating these tips, but the context makes me extremely skeptical that these two tips are real. Both accounts were held back for decades, both only coming forward during his second election run, both only coming forward implicating a nefarious Trump/Epstein event after that was already a known thing…