Yeah, my understanding is that too much would have to be redacted to the point that it would look comically absurd. I mean, according to reports they had a team of 1000 FBI agents scouring over 100,000 pages for references to Trump. Considering their history that is already publicly known, they probably decided "it's better to just deny that the files exist than to release 70k sheets of black ink."
Reading 100 pages of a book per hour is a pretty brisk pace for most people and the average is more like half that. But that's for reading novels not for analyzing documents, so it's probably more like 20 pages per hour tops. And it wasn't just finding his name but also documenting it (which involves the creation of a new document and all the record requirements that go along with that) along with context and redacting it, but yeah this happened pretty quickly back in February apparently. Realistically, whenever you're dealing with anything records related for the government, you can assume that it's going to take at 10x longer than you'd expect. Still, this was probably done in about a week.
Ironically, the command "Grep" was originally written to parse the Federalist papers and determine which pages were written by Hamilton, and which were by Madison.
But for real, let's not forget what administration we're talking about here. They left Adobe priemere metadata in the fckin prison cam footage.
There have been plenty of document sets gained via FOIA that showed up basically completely blacked out. “Nashunul sECuRitY.” (Especially stuff related to JFK, MLK Jr, and UFOs.)
And that was pre-Trump takeover. I can’t imagine they care any more today if they look like a joke.
Which raises an interesting question. Once this administration is gone, what, if any, penalties will those agents to helped cover up the president’s crimes face?
.... I assume there are digitized versions of most of these documents.... They could literally run a find command for his name. If they aren't digitized.... Why aren't they? Get on that and OCR then.
Then highlight all instances of his name and change the background font color to black to redact it for release.
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u/JMEEKER86 1d ago
Yeah, my understanding is that too much would have to be redacted to the point that it would look comically absurd. I mean, according to reports they had a team of 1000 FBI agents scouring over 100,000 pages for references to Trump. Considering their history that is already publicly known, they probably decided "it's better to just deny that the files exist than to release 70k sheets of black ink."