Former CNN anchor Jim Acosta said he’s alarmed by the redactions in a recently released Ghislaine Maxwell prison transfer form.
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In a Wednesday episode of “The Jim Acosta Show,” former Justice Department pardon attorney Liz Oyer spoke to Acosta about the redactions in a transfer application given to Bloomberg investigative reporter Jason Leopold earlier this week. Maxwell was moved from a federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security facility in Texas shortly after then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche paid her a visit.
“What they’re trying to do for Ghislaine Maxwell is really, it’s just unconscionable,” Acosta told Oyer. In a video posted earlier this week, Oyer explained that “almost every single part of the form is redacted.”
Maxwell’s name is highlighted at the top of the form, “and then literally everything else is whited out,” Oyer said in her video, which Acosta played before they discussed it.
“Legally, this is highly dubious,” Oyer said in her video. “Under the Freedom of Information Act, privacy claims have to be weighed against the public’s interest in knowing the truth, which is very strong in this case.”
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Acosta then reacted by saying what Oyer revealed “is pretty disturbing, and again, they find new and inventive ways to cover this up.” Oyer explained that the Bureau of Prisons made it difficult for Leopold to obtain the document in the first place.
“It should have been very easy to locate this document and turn it over,” Oyer told Acosta. “But they dragged their feet for a year. It was not until a court got involved that they even gave over the document at all. And then when they turned it over, they redacted all of the parts of any substance.”
“Somebody needs to sue to get a hold of those documents to find out what was being redacted there,” Acosta said. “I would assume somewhere we have the, I guess, original documents that don’t have the redactions involved.”
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