When the U.S. Department of Justice late last month released more than 3 million new files from convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, its redactions — widely criticized for being haphazard and sloppy — left many questions.
This week, members of Congress were able to visit the Department of Justice in Washington to review the unredacted documents in person, but had to make an appointment.
Democratic Rep. Maxwell Frost of Orlando snagged a 2-hour slot Wednesday.
Frost’s staff knew they needed a targeted approach if they wanted to find something new.
So they asked Reddit for help.
“What specific files have you all seen that I should review unredacted?” Frost posted to the R/Epstein thread on Tuesday, putting the word “specific” in bold.
Within hours, he had hundreds of replies.
“It’s overwhelming the response that we got,” said Ariana Orne, Frost’s communications director.
The post went viral on the site, making it to the r/popular thread and becoming one of the top posts Tuesday. It generated more than 30,000 upvotes— a sign of approval from other Reddit users — and 2,700 comments, with many linking to specific files that the Department of Justice redacted.
“This entire file is completely blacked out, it’s ridiculous,” posted one user with a link.
“A law firm report with photographic evidence that is about a 5 year old girl being abused at Epstein’s NY house during a party,” another wrote.
“This is terrific. I was hoping a member of congress would approach this in such a collaborative way. Thank you in advance for this. I have a few,” another offered, linking to documents with dialogue “between redacted individuals saying things about children that I don’t want to repeat.”
Frost’s staff was glued to the thread for hours, Orne said, collecting document numbers for his visit.
“We kept hearing about the same documents, so we were interested in hearing from folks who were tracking ones that were different than what we’d been seeing,” she said.
They compiled 11 pages of file numbers for Frost to review at the Department of Justice. He was only able to get through the first two.
“I definitely just scratched the tip of the iceberg,” Frost said in an Instagram post Wednesday night about his visit. He said many documents remained redacted even when he clicked to unredact them.
He said the documents he was able to see left him confused as to why they were redacted in the first place.
“A lot of these did relate to Donald Trump,” he said.
He said he plans to return to review more and lay out what he saw on the House floor in the coming days.
Until then, he is waiting for the Department of Justice to approve his next appointment request, he said.
“The public has such a strong interest in this, obviously because it’s so egregious. If anything, that was the thought process behind the Reddit, just crowdsourcing,” Orne said. “We had no expectation it was going to land how it did.”
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https://www.sun-sentinel.com/2026/02/12/reddit-sleuths-are-allies-for-congress-on-epstein-files/
