Two things come to mind:
* Some things Indyke did fall outside the scope of lawyer-client privilege. It would be bad for certain people to get him on a stand and force him to spill the beans. He was never interviewed re: Epstein [1]
* He's a very talented lawyer, insofar as a competent lawyer with, at least, extreme discretion, is talented.
[1] https://www.finance.senate.gov/imo/media/doc/letter_to_doj-f...
Yep. I think this sort of thing is actually their biggest concern with releasing the docs. They can redact or lose documents that say anything directly incriminating about Trump and his associates and dismiss everything Epstein and testimonies from the 2020s say about him as confabulation, but there are other people who might want to take the administration down with them if they get caught or even just get fed up of being doorstepped by the media, and some of them might have receipts.
It's why deleting documents outright is something we aren't really seeing. Those docs can still be floating around and, worse, there can be references to missing docs within the released docs.
And with just the sheer volume of documents that are being released, it's clear to me why the Trump admin didn't release anything sooner. There's simply too much and the effort to prune it down to a specific narrative is too much of a monumental undertaking. It'd involve too many people which ultimately means it's more likely to leak out.
You can open up any popular conservative forum/watch any mainstream conservative pundit and they are all saying the same thing: “there’s nothing here it doesn’t matter, Trump is just being photographed with women sometimes who cares?” Then some deflection about Bill Clinton, making sure to bring up the hot tub photo.
The reason it hasn’t gone away though, despite this often being a very effective approach, is because too many of them hung their hats on Epstein conspiracy theories from 2020 to 2024. It made a lot of people a lot of money and catapulted more than a handful of political careers. Now they have the means to be transparent and they can’t make an acceptable excuse not to be since they were all so loudly chest pounding about it, including the vice president himself.
I think almost all the discussions about Epstein are incredibly crass and gross. It’s not about the victims or justice, it’s about politics. I think there are obviously legitimate reasons to redact portions because we don’t want to ruin more lives (not that this was a real good faith attempt at that). But there is still a small part of me that can’t help but enjoy watching the Trump administration simmer in the pot they so clearly made for themselves over the last five years.
It's clear from early on when they just re-released the same already public docs that the Trump admin thought "Ok, this is over, we can just move on now". But that basically backfired, especially because the expectation from conspiracy theorists was that every single democrat would be implicated. When nothing new came out it drove for more questions and kept this alive as an issue.
Now, I think they are continuing a bungled approach. These partial releases with aggressive redactions are only serving to keep the story alive. Ironically, if they'd complied with the law I could totally see the "this is a nothing burger" defense being something they'd pull off. But now with the seemingly daily revelations of "oh wow, Epstein was friends with famed abuser Nadler! And he said that Trump shared a taste in women!"
These sorts of revelations really mostly only work because they are tied to being "new information just released".
This also puts all conservative media on a backfoot. It's very hard for them to craft any sort of good narrative when every other day we are seeing wild and unexpected things like "Trump may have participated in murdering a baby".
From the Guardian UK https://archive.md/lO08a
> [Indyke] was hired by the Parlatore Law Group in 2022, before the justice department settled the Epstein case. That firm represents the defense secretary, Pete Hegseth, and previously represented Donald Trump in his defense against charges stemming from the discovery of classified government documents stored at Trump’s Florida estate.
So I don't know about "not a Washington person", but clearly connections exist to the current administration.