Earlier this month, the House Oversight Committee made public more than 20,000 pages of documents from the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s estate.
The documents were released as thousands of individual text files, images, and scanned PDFs, a monumental trove most wouldn’t have the time or patience to sift through. But what if you could navigate the source documents as easily as you do your inbox?
That was the thinking behind Jmail, a Gmail-style interface for accessible browsing of Epstein’s released emails launched Friday by Kino CEO Luke Igel and software engineer Riley Walz.
Walz, a serial website builder previously dubbed San Francisco’s “Tech Jester,” is also one of the masterminds behind the Panama Playlists, which earlier this year exposed the Spotify listening habits of some famous people, as well as a tool to track San Francisco’s parking cops (the project lasted just four hours).
In an The site also includes verification links to government originals.
“You are logged in as Jeffrey Epstein, [email protected],” the Jmail website reads. “These are real emails released by Congress.”
Just like a real inbox, the messages are sorted from most recent, dating up to the eve before Epstein’s arrest in 2019. There’s also a working search feature (search “Trump,” and you’ll get 1,000 results).
In the sidebar, you can sort by Inbox, Starred, and Sent. Copying Gmail’s ability to star important messages—except this time crowdsourced by the internet—the most-starred email, with 228 stars, is correspondence with Epstein’s brother, Mark L. Epstein. It contains the now infamous line: “Ask him if Putin has the photos of Trump blowing Bubba?”
The lower sidebar section is sorted into Labels, which, in Gmail, separates emails by category. In Jmail, it is a list of people who regularly corresponded with Epstein, including journalist Michael Wolff, former US Treasury Secretary Larry Summers, and Donald Trump’s former chief strategist Steve Bannon, to name a few.
The House Oversight Committee released the original emails on November 12. Since that release, the president has signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which requires the attorney general to “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice” within 30 days.
