SARAH MCCAMMON, HOST:
If you've spent any time on the internet over the past few years, you've probably heard the name Jeffrey Epstein and the mystery surrounding the files tied to his case. Last month, just a few days before Christmas, some of those records were officially released. Not a handful of documents, but tens of thousands of pages - court filings, emails, photos, all landing at once and instantly lighting up social media, cable news and conspiracy theories.
STEPHEN FOWLER, BYLINE: When the first batch of files were released, well, the thing that I thought was something that I can't say on the radio.
MCCAMMON: That's Stephen Fowler. He's a political reporter based in Atlanta. We worked together on NPR's Washington Desk.
FOWLER: There are a few of us that had started combing through the documents as soon as they came out. We had to download them. We had to file, organize them and sort them and make sure we didn't miss anything, count the total number of pages and documents to see if there was anything missing or anything that needed to be formatted a different way.
MCCAMMON: Sorting through that kind of data is exactly what Stephen does. He's become our go-to reporter for digging into large document dumps from government data to the Epstein files to figure out what they actually show and, just as importantly, what they don't show. And I'll admit, I picked up that beat for a day or two during the holidays when everybody was kind of jumping in on whatever needed to be done, and it is a lot of work. So for this week's Reporter's Notebook, I wanted to ask Stephen about his process. Where does he start when these files are released, and how does he go through them? It turns out the work starts long before those documents drop.
FOWLER: We did have a story ready to go, saying, hey, the Justice Department has started releasing Epstein files, that we already had in advance of the backstory of how we got to this point, what the law said, directing the release, the political fallout for it. So we didn't really start from scratch.
MCCAMMON: How do you go about going through these tens of thousands of pages and just figuring out what's there and what is important?
FOWLER: So that prep work that I talked about was important because we didn't know what was going to be released, when it was going to be released, how it was going to be released - things like what file format it would be, if there were going to be pictures or PDFs or videos or anything like that. But we did know that there were tens of thousands of other files that had been made public already - court cases, Freedom of Information Act requests from other agencies. There were files on the FBI's vault and Epstein's private files that were turned over to Congress through a subpoena. So those of us that were looking methodically through these pages had a baseline to look at to understand what was already out there, what it looked like, and to be able to determine, is this new? Oh, this is redacted. Oh, that's a copy of the same email chain that we saw 10 pages ago, so move on to the next thing.
There was a spreadsheet that we had and a Slack chat of notable pages and mentions and files that were being uncovered so that we could go back and track and document. And so everything that you saw online or heard people talk about on the air about the Epstein files, there was somebody that personally laid eyes on that document and what it said and made sure that it is, in fact, what it said, and here's where you could find it.
MCCAMMON: Yeah, I mean, that was one of the challenges, at least that - during that brief time that I was working with some of these files. You know, a lot of it - I mean, this was taken - these were files that the Justice Department had received from all kinds of people in all kinds of places, right? And just even figuring out what's legitimate was tough.
FOWLER: Yeah. I - this is where there were a lot of challenges because the files that were released were not in any sort of order, any sort of organization. There was no road map. There was no table of contents. There was no asterisk or disclaimer to say, hey, by the way, we have to release this by law, but it's actually something that's not true, which is actually something we ran into. There were files that were in there that were submitted tips from the public that contained conspiracy theories about Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein and other things that were completely unverifiable and unvetted, but they were part of the case file that were supposed to be released by law, so they were released. So it made it really, really hard to know what exactly we were looking at.
Another thing that made it hard to look at, Sarah, was the sheer volume of things that were redacted. I mean, there were pages and pages where all you could see was black boxes. There was no hidden word there or, you know, this part here. There were just complete pages that were just completely blacked out and blank. So it was difficult to glean information from black rectangles.
There was, however, an email sent by federal agents after Epstein was arrested in 2019 for allegedly sex trafficking minors. It mentioned 10 possible co-conspirators, including Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell. Most of the other names on that list are redacted, and the law made it clear that information like that should be released if it was there. So really, the big story coming out of the Epstein files ended up being all of the information and files and possibilities that were not released.
MCCAMMON: Now, it wasn't just the Epstein files. You also got to dig through some files from DOGE, which I think we all still remember was the so-called Department of Government Efficiency. You were really active in sorting through those during the first few months of Trump's second term. And you broke some news. I mean, tell me more about that. How did you go about looking through those DOGE files?
FOWLER: Well, it's a lot different looking at federal government data than a bunch of disjointed documents and files from court cases and things. I mean, the federal government - I don't know if people realize this - has one of the richest and most thorough and easily accessible datasets for things you could imagine. Anything you think of that the government does or thinks about, there is probably a dataset probably sitting there waiting for you to download it. The trick is knowing what you're looking at and how it's used.
So over the course of last year, I tracked the change in federal spending data, tens of thousands of alterations to federal contracts under DOGE. There was federal leasing statistics, other things like that that I looked at to understand how the government was working or wasn't working and if DOGE was actually doing the things it claimed it was doing. I mean, showing your work looks a lot different, too, because with the Epstein files, you can say, hey, on this page with this file number, this thing was said.
With DOGE data, there were so many spreadsheets. I mean, my editors can tell you - spreadsheet on spreadsheet on spreadsheet that had meticulous calculations that came from on-record and background interviews with all these different experts in these areas to make sure that I understood what I was looking at. And did I mention there were spreadsheets? And so it took a lot of effort to be able to show the work and make sure that I knew what I was looking at so then I could tell the audience what we're looking at.
I think the biggest example of that was DOGE's infamous wall of receipts. It was the website where DOGE still claims to track how much taxpayer money it saved through its changes. The data DOGE was putting out there didn't match the source data that the federal government put out. There were overstatements and errors and inaccuracies, and that took a lot of time and effort to kind of - to sort of compare these data sources to get to the truth behind things.
MCCAMMON: What else has all of this data reporting during this first year of Trump's second term - what has it taught you about how to cover this moment in politics and what it might mean?
FOWLER: I think it's even more important to show the work, to bring receipts and to give people those primary sources that I've been using to do this coverage. One, I want people to trust the reporting and trust what I have to say, and they can see for themselves how I got there and also kind of peel back the curtain for the public to learn how to look at this information on their own. And also, numbers are hard to bring to the radio. If you put too many of them out there, people's eyes start to gloss over. If you have too few, you risk kind of underselling your findings and leaving out important context.
So spending the last year really grounding a lot of my reporting in this data - even if not every story starts out with a, here's this insert number fact here to use - I mean, it does help contextualize the scope or the scale or significance of what's going on in politics, whether it's the small fraction of Epstein files or the 58th lawmaker retiring or federal spending.
MCCAMMON: That's Stephen Fowler, a political reporter with NPR's Washington Desk. Thanks, Stephen.
FOWLER: Thank you.
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