Todd Blanche told a federal judge the handwritten pages behind Jane Doe 4's FBI interviews could not come out — too duplicative of the typed reports, too dangerous to redact by hand. Reporters at three newsrooms already had them, unredacted.
Rye Howard-Stone laid out the sequence at Document Zero. On March 6, Washington Examiner justice reporter Kaelan Deese uploaded the unredacted notes to his public Scribd account, reportoftheday, describing them as classified. They sat there five months.
The next day Deese published "What's still missing from Epstein files? DOJ begins restoring removed documents," quoting an anonymous senior Justice Department official who conceded "some mistakes were made" but said the Department got it "99% right." He never mentioned posting the pages the day before.
Every other document there sits beneath a story Deese wrote. The Jane Doe 4 notes are the exception. He never wrote about them.
A stranger cold-texted him. Deese answered, "That's me!" Asked where the documents came from, he said most of it "was sent to me by a source within DOJ." He moved to Signal, dug out a third file and sent it — "I found the missing file from scribd... It should be this one, right?" The stranger said he would censor identifying details first. Deese: "No credit needed. This is public now I believe."
It was not public. Katie Phang has been suing Blanche for those pages.
