The US courts filing system PACER (Public Access to Court Electronic Records) crashed Thursday after the service uploaded documents unsealed by a federal judge relating to paedophile Jeffrey Epstein – which reveal plaintiff Virginia Giuffre’s attempts to call Bill Clinton as a witness.
(Demand prediction and capacity management remain a perennial challenge for IT managers, whether that’s for ecommerce demand or previously secret legal filings. IT teams can easily overspend if demand turns out to be lower than predicted, or fail to provision enough infrastructure to cover traffic spikes. The worthy 404 Media paid to access the documents before systems dropped, and has made the files available.)
The files, seen by The Stack, reveal anew the allegations against Epstein.
In one file, for example (JANE DOE #1 and JANE DOE #2 v. UNITED STATES, Document 1320-9) the plaintiffs allege that Epstein made underage girls “available for sex to politically-connected and financially-powerful people… to ingratiate himself with them for business, personal, political, and financial gain, as well as to obtain potential blackmail information…
“Epstein also trafficked Jane Doe #3 for sexual purposes to many other powerful men, including numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known Prime Minister, and other world leaders,” the 2014 document alleges.
One shows Epstein offering a reward to any “friends, acquaintances, family” of Giuffre “that come forward and help prove her allegations are false the strongest is the clinton dinner, and the new version in the virgin isalnds [sic] that stven [sic]hawking partica-ted [sic] in an underage orgy.”
Document 1320-24 meanwhile shows plaintiff Virginia Giuffre’s 2016 efforts to try and get former President Bill Clinton to testify in court. As that document says: “The only remaining witness is William Jefferson Clinton. His deposition is necessary for the following reason…
"While Ms. Giuffre made no allegations of illegal actions by Bill Clinton, Ms. Maxwell in her deposition raised Ms. Giuffre’s comments about President Clinton as one of the 'obvious lies' to which she was referring in her public statement that formed the basis of this suit. Apart from the Defendant and Mr. Epstein, former President Clinton is a key person who can provide information about his close relationship with Defendant and Mr. Epstein and disapprove Ms. Maxwell’s claims.”
Maxwell’s lawyers dismissed this as “utter nonsense and nothing more than a transparent ploy by Plaintiff to increase media exposure for her sensational stories through deposition side-show… This witness has nothing relevant to add to this case and Plaintiff has made no effort, much less one in good faith to timely secure his testimony."
In other US court system technology news unrelated to Epstein, the US Courts Service says the crashing PACER is getting a major refresh.
"An important related project is the modernization of the Judiciary’s digital case management system and the public access portal for court records, the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) service. The new system under development incorporates today’s best practices in IT and will provide the public with modern search functionality aimed at making record searches easier and more intuitive."
It is also focused on "modernizing the Judiciary’s legacy identity management system, transitioning to a cloud virtual private network, and broadening asset discovery" to enhance "technology security across the court system as part of a multi-year modernization and cybersecurity strategy. The goal is a security-first enterprise that uses secure, modern, standardized technologies to meet rapidly changing needs" says an annual report.
