- Soon after the U.S. Department of Justice released a batch of documents related to the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in late December 2025, social media users claimed the text hidden by redactions in the documents could be revealed by copying the text and pasting it into another program or document.
- Snopes was able to confirm this was true of at least one document, the same one used as an example by many of the social media accounts sharing the claim. Snopes did not find any other documents in which a simple copy and paste revealed the text hidden by redactions, but that doesn’t necessarily mean there weren’t any other documents in which this method would reveal redacted text among the thousands of documents released as of Dec. 26, 2025.
- Some posts suggested that this method revealed hundreds of previously redacted mentions of Trump’s name, many referencing a screenshot that included text naming Trump and the number of the file that contained the text. Of those documents Snopes was able to check, the mentions of Trump’s name were not redacted. However, Snopes could not check every listed mention of Trump to confirm this with certainty.
In December 2025, the U.S. Department of Justice began releasing documents, many of which were heavily or entirely redacted, in batches after it failed to meet the Congressionally mandated deadline to make public all documents pertaining to its investigation of the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Justice Department released three batches of documents within several days of the deadline, then declared it may need a few more weeks to release the entirety of its Epstein files.
After the Justice Department released its third batch of documents on Dec. 23, people across social media began sharing a “hack” that supposedly revealed the contents of some or all retractions in the files. Popular posts on TikTok (archived), Facebook (archived), Bluesky (archived), Instagram (archived) and X (archived) shared the hack, which amounted to copying the document’s text and pasting it into another file or program.
Some popular social media posts on Threads (archived) and X (archived) said this method revealed more than 600 instances of the name “Trump ” (empty space included) in the latest batch of documents.
Ok. Now had a chance to check and, well, at least some docs do appear to be straight up classic redaction fail. And there are some *interesting* bits here.
www.justice.gov/multimedia/C…
— Mike Masnick (@mmasnick.bsky.social) December 22, 2025 at 11:10 PM
It was true that at least one document in the third batch of the Epstein files could be unredacted with a simple copy and paste. However, Snopes could not identify how widespread this easily undoable redaction mistake was, nor could we confirm that “hacking” the redactions like this revealed hundreds of mentions of President Donald Trump. Therefore we are not putting a rating on this story.
Many of the social media posts sharing the trick use portions of the same document as their example: a 2022 court document regarding Epstein’s estate. Testing by Snopes confirmed copying any redacted portions of that particular document and pasting them elsewhere — Snopes tested in Microsoft’s Notepad and Google Docs — shows the text that was intended to be redacted.
For example, the entirety of paragraphs 203, 204 and 205 were redacted from Page 41 of the file. However, when Snopes copied the paragraphs and pasted them else, the text read:
203. Defendants also attempted to conceal their criminal sex trafficking and abuse conduct by paying large sums of money to participant-witnesses, including by paying for their attorneys’ fees and case costs in litigation related to this conduct.
204. Epstein also threatened harm to victims and helped release damaging stories about them to damage their credibility when they tried to go public with their stories of being trafficked and sexually abused.
205. Epstein also instructed one or more Epstein Enterprise participant-witnesses to destroy evidence relevant to ongoing court proceedings involving Defendants’ criminal sex trafficking and abuse conduct
Snopes found little success attempting this method on other documents. The Instagram post sharing the trick posted a screenshot from Page 61 of a file with court documents from United States v. Maxwell. However, any redacted text in that document, including the portion on Page 61, remained redacted when pasted elsewhere. Other documents Snopes tried, including a court document and an email exchange from the most recent batch of released files, remained redacted after copying and pasting the text elsewhere.
So while Snopes can confirm that this method works for at least one document and can confirm it doesn’t work on all of them, it is unknown how many other documents, if any, have redacted text easily revealed through copy and paste.
Trump mentions
Snopes could not confirm whether the copy-and-paste method revealed hundreds of mentions of Trump in the documents, although it appeared examples of these mentions shared on social media were already visible.
By reverse image searching the screenshot of Trump mentions in the X post to find higher-quality versions, Snopes found the source of the screenshot appeared to be a thread by the Faytuks Network X account (archived). Faytuks Network began the thread by sharing the same copy-and-paste method of revealing redacted text as other social media posts had done. However, when it posted the screenshots of the Trump mentions, the text of the post just included a list of file names and then the sentence, “All the files with the word ‘Trump’ in dataset 8.”
Despite the post appearing in the thread that began with sharing the copy-and-paste trick, it did not state that the snippets in which Trump was named were revealed by this trick. In fact, Trump’s name wasn’t redacted in the corresponding files Snopes was able to track down.
The Faytuks Network’s screenshot noted the words “Trump traveled on Epstein’s private jet many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware)” apparently from the file ending with the numbers 17337. Snopes found those same words without DOJ retractions in a file ending with the numbers 16732. The Faytuks Network also made note of nine Trump mentions in a file ending with 1504. Although Snopes could not find that file, another file, 14263, contained all nine of those Trump mentions without any redactions.
For many of the other files listed in the screenshot, Snopes either could not find the file number or found what appeared to be an entirely different file using the same number. This was an issue not unique to Faytuks Network’s post about the third document dump. Time magazine (archived) also referred to a file, 20518, in a story about Trump mentions in the DOJ’s third batch of documents.
The Washington Post described how the third batch of files was initially released the afternoon of Dec. 22, 2025, and taken down by 8 p.m. The files were then re-released shortly before midnight. The Post, which downloaded the full set of documents from the initial release, wrote at the time that “it was not immediately clear whether officials had done any further redactions of the documents before posting.”
Therefore it is likely the mismatches between the files listed by Time and Faytuks Network and the files available from the third release in the following days could be explained by the DOJ removing documents or changing how the documents were numbered between the initial release and re-release hours later.
That left Snopes unable to check many of the documents listed in the screenshot for redacted Trump mentions. In the two documents Snopes was able to check, Trump’s name was not redacted.
