[HN Gopher] A graph explorer of the Epstein emails
       ___________________________________________________________________
        
       A graph explorer of the Epstein emails
        
       https://github.com/maxandrews/Epstein-doc-explorer
        
       Author : cratermoon
       Score  : 178 points
       Date   : 2025-11-15 07:27 UTC (2 days ago)
        
 (HTM) web link (epstein-doc-explorer-1.onrender.com)
 (TXT) w3m dump (epstein-doc-explorer-1.onrender.com)
        
       | wnevets wrote:
       | where is bubba?
        
         | analog31 wrote:
         | Retired from public office.
        
       | liotier wrote:
       | "Brad Edwards" and "Bradley Edwards" might be the same
       | individual.
        
         | GuinansEyebrows wrote:
         | Likewise for instances of "Larry" and "Lawrence" Summers...
         | probably a lot of those.
        
         | tovej wrote:
         | Yes, the dataset also has three entries for Virginia Giuffre,
         | "Virginia L. Giuffre", "Virginia Roberts Giuffre", and "Jane
         | Doe Number 3 (Virginia Roberts)"
        
         | DrewADesign wrote:
         | I'm sure some developer/archivist is working on a name
         | authority as we speak.
        
         | cyrusradfar wrote:
         | great use case for using AI to suggest mergers and clean up.
        
           | specproc wrote:
           | LLMs are awful for this. I've got a project that's doing
           | structured extraction and half the work is deduplication.
           | 
           | I didn't go down the route of LLMs for the clean up, as
           | you're getting into scale and context issues with larger
           | datasets.
           | 
           | I got into semantic similarity networks for this use case.
           | You can do efficient pairwise matching with Annoy, set a
           | cutoff threshold, and your isolated subgraphs are merger
           | candidates.
           | 
           | I wrapped up my code in a little library if you're into this
           | sort of thing.
           | 
           | github.com/specialprocedures/semnet
        
       | jrochkind1 wrote:
       | Why are they all moving, what does the time axis represent?
        
         | alhadrad wrote:
         | Its because the layout system has also a physics system.
        
         | piyh wrote:
         | >A force-directed graph is a technique for visualizing networks
         | where nodes are treated like physical objects with forces
         | acting between them to create a stable arrangement. Attractive
         | forces (like springs) pull connected nodes together, while
         | repulsive forces (like electric charges) push all nodes apart,
         | resulting in a layout where connected nodes are closer and
         | unconnected nodes are more separated
         | 
         | https://observablehq.com/@d3/force-directed-graph/2
        
       | ivape wrote:
       | I'm curious which LLM tools actually handled all 23k emails well.
        
         | zeld4 wrote:
         | it's done one by one in Claude.
         | 
         | https://github.com/maxandrews/Epstein-doc-explorer/blob/83ee...
        
       | ChrisMarshallNY wrote:
       | Oh Cthulhu, this is like a periscope into a septic tank...
        
         | bamboozled wrote:
         | Yes almost no one has been held accountable for any of it,
         | "weird"?
        
       | theultdev wrote:
       | This is the best rendition I've seen so far.
       | 
       | The Bill Clinton entity is interesting.
       | 
       | > 2009: Bill Clinton discontinued association with Jeffrey
       | Epstein
       | 
       | > 2010: Jeffrey Epstein provided flights on jets to Bill Clinton
       | 
       | > 2010-2011: Jeffrey Epstein traveled via private aircraft with
       | Bill Clinton
       | 
       | > 2011: Ghislaine Maxwell piloted helicopter for Bill Clinton
       | 
       | > 2014: Bill Clinton alleged presence at sex parties
       | 
       | > 2015: Bill Clinton distanced relationship from Jeffrey Epstein
       | 
       | Wasn't very good at discontinuing the relationship it seems.
       | 
       | Guess there is precedent for him lying about sexual activities
       | though.
       | 
       | I think a sentiment analysis between the friendliness and social
       | meetups between Epstein and other individuals would be useful.
       | 
       | Who were his friends after 2008 when he was first convicted?
       | 
       | Those who were still friends with him after 2008 were in on it or
       | guilty by association, if not legally, socially.
       | 
       | Friends like Reid Hoffman and Larry Summers...
       | 
       | > From: Reid Hoffman
       | 
       | > Sent: 7/6/2015 5:04:31 PM
       | 
       | > To: jeffrey E. [jeeyacation@gmail.com]
       | 
       | > Subject: RE: ICYMI
       | 
       | > slow progress.
       | 
       | > planning to see you in August.
       | 
       | > Hope you're well.
       | 
       | Larry Summers has too many to list. Doesn't look good though
       | digging through them.
        
         | tinyplanets wrote:
         | I'd take a look at Trump. He's on a whole different level. Lots
         | of rape and sexual abuse of minors... wow.
        
           | theultdev wrote:
           | Of course, deflect discussion to Trump. Does that make any of
           | those other people look better to you?
           | 
           | Trump gave information against Epstein in 2009 and unlike
           | Bill and others _did_ cut ties after learning he was poaching
           | girls from Mar-a-Lago.
           | 
           | I _specifically_ made the point to look into those who were
           | friends with Epstein even after knowing what he was doing.
           | 
           | Nice whataboutism though. Feel free to reference source
           | materials to support your claims.
           | 
           | Btw are you a bot or is that just a canned statement you use?
        
             | sanktanglia wrote:
             | Trump was with Epstein in 2017, he didn't cut ties at all
        
               | theultdev wrote:
               | That's a lie that has already been proven false since
               | Trump's entire trip was documented.
               | 
               | Love how we have actual evidence against people but
               | discussions always devolve into some conspiracy related
               | to Trump.
               | 
               | ----
               | 
               | Based on the available evidence, there is no confirmed
               | meeting between Trump and Epstein in 2017. While both men
               | were in Palm Beach during Thanksgiving week 2017, there
               | is no direct evidence they met.
               | 
               | Here's what we know about their presence in Palm Beach
               | that week:
               | 
               | - Trump was at Mar-a-Lago from November 21-26, 2017
               | 
               | - Epstein owned a mansion in Palm Beach and was known to
               | be in the area
               | 
               | - Epstein mentioned both Trump and himself being "down
               | there" (Palm Beach) in an email exchange on November 23,
               | 2017
               | 
               | While there were claims circulating online that Trump
               | spent Thanksgiving with Epstein in 2017, these claims
               | have been thoroughly investigated and found to be
               | unsubstantiated
               | 
               | Trump's official calendar for that week shows his
               | activities included:
               | 
               | - Thanking military members on a virtual call
               | 
               | - Visiting Coast Guard members at Lake Worth Inlet
               | Station
               | 
               | - Playing golf with Tiger Woods and Dustin Johnson
        
             | timeon wrote:
             | > Trump gave information against Epstein in 2009
             | 
             | Does it matter? Like there are dozens of photographs of
             | him, Epstein and underage girls.
        
           | bamboozled wrote:
           | Seems to get away with it all, meanwhile, we all pay our
           | taxes, don't break any laws and just be "good people".
        
         | beepbooptheory wrote:
         | This obviously the correct lens but note that the 2008 plea
         | deal was so neutered by the time of settlement it made it
         | somewhat easy to stay friends with him.
         | 
         | This is of course ontop of the 2006 Florida prostitution charge
         | though.
        
           | theultdev wrote:
           | Especially when Epstein was paying off journalists at the NYT
           | and intimidating other outlets.
           | 
           | But point being those people that were friends with him _had_
           | to know. Whether it was socially acceptable by the elite
           | because the public wasn 't aware isn't very relevant.
        
       | pickpuck wrote:
       | What if we extended this idea beyond one dataset to all discrete
       | news events and entities: people, organizations, places.
       | 
       | Just like here you could get a timeline of key events, a graph of
       | connected entities, links to original documents.
       | 
       | Newsrooms might already do this internally idk.
       | 
       | This code might work as a foundation. I love that it's RDF.
        
         | j-pb wrote:
         | If it's RDF it won't work as the foundation.
        
         | axus wrote:
         | One wonders what the US government agencies use.
        
           | abnercoimbre wrote:
           | I think you meant one _shudders_. And yeah, Snowden made it
           | clear there 's orders of magnitude more data than this graph
           | explorer for them to sift through.
        
           | PaulHoule wrote:
           | Isn't that what Palantir's product is?
        
           | cjohnson318 wrote:
           | They probably use Excel, maybe Microsoft Access.
        
             | ToucanLoucan wrote:
             | Microsoft Access form that connects via IIS to an Excel
             | spreadsheet acting as a database. Also the server it's
             | running on is sitting on a wooden table.
        
           | fancy_pantser wrote:
           | Software like i2 Analyst's Notebook.
        
           | dboreham wrote:
           | Internet search engines have their origins in government
           | projects fwiw. They had search engines before Alta Vista,
           | used for searching data sets that pre-date the internet, and
           | some of the people involved in those went to work on the
           | original commercial search engines.
        
         | VikingCoder wrote:
         | Sci-Fi Author: In my book I invented the Torment Nexus as a
         | cautionary tale
         | 
         | Tech Company: At long last, we have created the Torment Nexus
         | from classic sci-fi novel Don't Create The Torment Nexus
        
         | FanaHOVA wrote:
         | One co trying: https://www.system.com
        
         | jandrewrogers wrote:
         | This has been attempted many times. They all fail the same way.
         | 
         | These general data models _start_ to become useful and
         | interesting at around a trillion edges, give or take an order
         | of magnitude. A mature graph model would be at least a few
         | orders of magnitude larger, even if you aggressively curated
         | what went into it. This is a simple consequence of the
         | cardinality of the different kinds of entities that are
         | included in most useful models.
         | 
         | No system described in open source can get anywhere close to
         | even the base case of a trillion edges. They will suffer
         | serious scaling and performance issues long before they get to
         | that point. It is a famously non-trivial computer science
         | problem and much of the serious R&D was not done in public
         | historically.
         | 
         | This is why you only see toy or narrowly focused graph data
         | models instead of a giant graph of All The Things. It would be
         | cool to have something like this but that entails some hardcore
         | deep tech R&D.
        
           | babelfish wrote:
           | I don't have any experience on graph modeling, but it seems
           | like Neo4j should be able to support 1 trillion edges, based
           | on this (admittedly marketing) post of theirs?
           | https://neo4j.com/press-releases/neo4j-scales-trillion-
           | plus-...
        
         | johongo wrote:
         | Emil Eifrem (founder of Neo4j) has a talk about them doing this
         | with the Panama papers
        
       | yndoendo wrote:
       | After seen this I interested in a map of each person to assist
       | with knowing who they are, who they worked for during the email
       | date, and who they currently work for.
        
       | rapnie wrote:
       | Oof, browser freeze, computer slowdown, then sudden crash reboot
       | of my ubuntu dev machine, upon loading the graph in firefox.
        
       ___________________________________________________________________
       (page generated 2025-11-17 23:00 UTC)