Worried that the volume (and DOJ redactions) make it impossibly burdensome for Congress’s investigative units to get through them, let alone find the smoking guns?<\/p>\n
Instead of worrying, watch Dark Waters<\/em>,<\/a> a brilliant legal thriller from 2019, starring Mark Ruffalo as lawyer Robert Bilott. It’s the true story of how one dedicated lawyer brought DuPont to a reckoning over their “forever” chemicals, the toxic waste from which poisoned at least one town in West Virginia.<\/p>\n A few things to note here. While it took Robert Bilott<\/a> 20 years to pursue his case, he faced some obstacles Congress does not re the Epstein matter. The chemicals used in Teflon had not been tested and condemned by the Environmental Protection Agency because DuPont, which knew of the dangers, had kept their knowledge secret.*<\/p>\n And Bilott was prosecuting a massive corporation which was of the nature of all corporations, entirely profit-driven and amoral. And DuPont had lawyers in abundance to shrug the whole thing off.<\/p>\n Although Trump’s Department of Justice has been thoroughly corrupted, no one who’s followed their creepy and breathtakingly incompetent courtroom shenanigans can believe any DOJ lawyer is intelligent enough to protect any villain from the Epstein files.<\/p>\n As for the scary number of one million pages, it won’t be surprising if, after the DOJ turns over all the documents to Congress, the pile is out of order, not even chronological. It’ll probably be a mess of documents.<\/p>\n Rather than retell my own experiences with a mess of discovery documents,<\/a> let’s go to my favorite scene in Dark Waters.\u00a0<\/em>DuPont has finally delivered discovery documents to Bilott: boxes and boxes and boxes piled up in one room. He and an assistant open the boxes and immediately understand there’s no order at all to the documents.<\/p>\n I can’t remember whether they get down on the floor (which is my favorite sorting discovery surface) to organize the documents chronologically, but whatever the surface, they organize the documents. And then they read…every…single…page. Thoroughly, word for word. And they find the single piece of paper they need: verification that DuPont knew their chemical mix was dangerous.<\/p>\n And that’s what Congressional investigators will do with the Epstein files: put them in chronological order and read every single page. Word for word.<\/p>\n It’s not going to take 20 years.<\/p>\n \u03a9<\/p>\n *What happened in the DuPont case reinforces my belief that the EPA protects not only us ordinary people from dangers but also protects corporations like DuPont from such huge lawsuits. When the EPA was questioned about those brand new chemicals, they had no research on them and hadn’t regulated them. DuPont had kept that secret.<\/p>\n Since the EPA had been deliberately ignored by DuPont, DuPont was fully financially liable for the deaths and damages it had caused.<\/p>\n The Trump deregulation mania to free corporations from restrictions will make those corporations liable for huge class-action lawsuits. And I do think that in our current Gilded Age mini-era, none of the oligarchs is going to find asylum from us. I mean, would you not sue Elon Musk because, I dunno, he’s Elon Musk?<\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Worried that the volume (and DOJ redactions) make it impossibly burdensome for Congress’s investigative units to get through them, let alone find the smoking guns? Instead of worrying, watch Dark Waters, a brilliant legal thriller from 2019, starring Mark Ruffalo … Continue reading