Paul Manafort’s lawyers filed a response to the Special Counsel’s submission in support of its breach determination. The filing was supposed to have four matters redacted. In error, only two were redacted. The error was subsequently corrected and the initial filing was replaced with a filing that had all four areas actually redacted.
However, I have tracked down the text of the two redactions. I have placed the entire filing here. The text of the two erroneous non-redactions are set in green boxes at the tops of pages 5 and 6.
The redactions make it clear that the Special Counsel is contending that there were two specific instances when Manafort, during the period in which he was Trump’s campaign chair, colluded with the Putin’s Russian-Ukranian operative, Konstantin Kilimnik. The thrust of Manafort’s filing is to deny such collusion, claiming that he “misremembered.”:
It is not uncommon, however, for a witness to have only a vague recollection about events that occurred years prior and then to recall additional details about those events when his or her recollection is refreshed with relevant documents or additional information. Similarly, cooperating witnesses often fail to have complete and accurate recall of detailed facts regarding specific meetings, email communications, travel itineraries, and other events. Such a failure is unsurprising here, where these occurrences happened during a period when Mr. Manafort was managing a U.S. presidential campaign and had countless meetings, email communications, and other interactions with many different individuals, and traveled frequently.
Manafort response at 5.
The noose is tightening.
Important Update
In a comment, Kenneth Almquist informed me how to uncover all of the redacted material in the Manafort filing. I have done so and the results can be found here. Almquist also makes the point that:
What makes the second redaction so interesting is that the filing doesn’t contest the claim that Manafort shared polling data with Kilimnik. If the Trump campaign provided Russia with polling data in order to help Russia target its efforts to help the Trump campaign, that’s collusion. I can’t think of any other reason for Manafort to share polling data with Kilimnik.
So much for no collusion.
Organizations where several people work on a document in turn often enable the Track Changes function. See here for Word and here for LibreOffice. As I understand it, this means that the changed text is stored as part of the document file. So it’s quite easy for mistakes like the one here to be made. Correction from an real expert welcome.
If you are paranoid about this sort of thing, it’s possible to wipe the history clean. If you even want to kill the metadata, save as a text file, then copy and paste into a new file and reformat. This is for people who wipe their hard drives with Boot & Nuke to defeat the Feds rather than just hitting the delete button. As any fule kno, this just erases the file index entries, not the stored data, and as the released blocks are only overwritten randomly by new data, much of the old content can still be recovered by experts.
The redactions here were made in a pdf program. The person in charge simply failed to redact all of the necessary portions.
The reason that I was able to tie the text of the passages to where they appeared in the document is that redaction using pdf merely puts a black field over the text. Then, the user “flattens” the document. While I could not get behind the black field, the text was still there. I was able to find the text by putting in the “find” function on my pdf program the words of the text. The area in which the text appeared lit up in blue.
The way the document should have been redacted would have been to block out the area to be redacted, then print the document, and then scan the resulting document.
Hum. Interesting. These are all digital artifacts. I remember back in the day when printers were kinda dumb (specifically, printers that didn’t take Postscript), we’d render PDF or PS to bitmaps, and print those. And I also remember taking a series of bitmaps, converting each to a PDF, then stitching them together.
It was a mere matter of a few scripts on top of various standard tools. It’s somewhat shocking that there aren’t little apps that do this today.
A couple of corrections:
1) The text of all four redactions is included in the document.
Whoever performed the redactions did it by drawing black bars over the redacted text, rather than replacing the redacted text with black bars. Most systems will allow you to copy text from a PDF file to another application. (This is known as copy and paste.) This can be used to view the redacted text because the black bars shouldn’t have any effect on the copy operation.
2) “The thrust of Manafort’s filing is to deny such collusion, claiming that he ‘misremembered.’”
The thrust is to deny that Manafort lied.
What makes the second redaction so interesting is that the filing doesn’t contest the claim that Manafort shared polling data with Kilimnik. If the Trump campaign provided Russia with polling data in order to help Russia target its efforts to help the Trump campaign, that’s collusion. I can’t think of any other reason for Manafort to share polling data with Kilimnik.