Ex-Air Force officer reveals trick to 'literally read the redactions in the Epstein files'

Newly revealed video shows Trump and Jeffrey Epstein ogling cheerleaders at Mar-a-Lago party (Image via Screengrab / NBC News)

On Tuesday, the Department of Justice (DOJ) released another tranche of files relating to the two federal investigations into convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein. The documents are heavily redacted, though one expert recently discovered a trick to read some of the redacted materials.

In a video posted to his Bluesky account, Jake Broe — a veteran of the U.S. Air Force who worked as a nuclear and missile operations officer — discovered that certain redactions can be read by simply copying and pasting them into Microsoft Word.

"The people at Trump's Justice Department are so stupid they used Adobe Acrobat to black out the documents," Broe wrote in his post.

Broe's video showed him copying several paragraphs from one document in the DOJ's Epstein library from the "Court Records" section. While the paragraph Broe selected includes several redactions, all of the redactions were removed after Broe pasted the paragraph in question into a Word document. AlterNet was able to confirm that that specific document's redactions could be read in Word, as well as in Mac's Pages application and in Google Docs.

"Apparently it's really easy to see what the redactions are," Broe said. "This doesn't work for every document, it only works for the documents where whoever redacted them was an idiot and didn't know what they were doing."

"If we scroll down to anything that was blacked out, all you have to do is copy it, and then open a Word doc, and then paste it in, and that is the redacted amount right there," Broe explained in the video. "... Why would they black out those dollar amounts? I don't know. But you can literally read the redactions in the Epstein files if you just copy and paste it into a Word doc."

"That's how stupid the people are working for Trump, and those are the people that Trump put in charge of this," he added. "... It's not every document, but it's pretty hysterical."

Watch Broe's video below:

Anyone can read the redactions of the Epstein Files by just copying and pasting them into a word doc. The people at Trump's Justice Department are so stupid they used Adobe Acrobat to black out the documents.

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— Jake Broe (@realjakebroe.bsky.social) Dec 23, 2025 at 12:04 PM

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