@pipeworx/epstein

Connect: https://gateway.pipeworx.io/epstein/mcp · Install: one-click buttons

Tools: 4

Full-text search over the documents the House Oversight Committee has published for its Jeffrey Epstein investigation — transcribed interviews, subpoenas and letters — plus (phase 2) a structured search over Epstein’s own pilot flight logbook. Fleet #1480, phases 1-2.

Tools

Tools are prefixed because search_documents is already taken by federal-register and riksdagen-se; a colliding tool ships unreachable while the error advertises a namespaced name that does not resolve.

Phase 2: the flight logbook

epstein_flight_log_search reads Government Exhibit 662-RR — Epstein’s own pilot flight logbook (1991-2005), admitted into evidence and unsealed in USA v. Ghislaine Maxwell, 20-cr-330 (S.D.N.Y.), hosted keylessly at a stable DocumentCloud asset URL. Phase 1’s original release note said no flight logs existed anywhere in the House Oversight corpus — true, but that was never the only public source. This exhibit is a fixed, closed 118-page historical document, not a live feed, so ingest is a one-time transcription rather than a per-request proxy call.

397 of an estimated 3,000+ logged legs are ingested — 23 of the 118 pages (fleet #1880 added pages 4-13 to the original 10-page seed, which was chosen to span the full 1991-2005 range; fleet #1881 added pages 14-16). Machine OCR of this handwritten logbook is unusable (the exhibit’s own bundled OCR text layer is illegible line noise, verified before building this); every ingested row is a direct visual transcription of the page image. epstein_flight_log_search with no filters returns the exact pages covered so an absence never reads as “did not fly” — it may simply mean the page is not yet transcribed. Completing the remaining 95 pages is follow-on work, not a blocker to shipping this slice.

Confidence convention on the transcription itself (fleet #1880): passengers_raw is verbatim per row — the same person’s name is NOT normalized to one spelling across rows even where it clearly varies (“Krestena” / “Kristena” / “Christina” all occur for what is plausibly one person). A token read with real but not total confidence carries a trailing [?] inside the word it qualifies ("Arthur Hallering[?]"); a token that could not be read at all is [illegible]. Neither is a guess standing in for a fact. A pilot’s own struck-through self-correction is omitted rather than marked [redacted] — that marker is reserved for a black-out on the original exhibit page.

Design decision C is held exactly: passenger entries are never resolved. “JE”, “GM”, “SK” and similar initials are stored and returned exactly as the pilot wrote them, never expanded to a full identity — even where that identity is publicly reported elsewhere. A black-out on the original page is stored as the literal marker [redacted]; a word the transcriber could not read with confidence is stored as [illegible]. Neither is a guess standing in for a fact.

Every row carries its own provenance: exhibit title, the page number as printed on the page itself, the DocumentCloud source_url, and the sha256 of the source PDF, so a caller never has to trust that two rows came from the same file.

What this is, and what it is not

This is one committee’s published PDFs. It is not “the Epstein files”, and every response says so rather than letting the name imply completeness.

• We already had the committee layer: search_committee_documents returns the releases, subpoena announcements and staff memoranda in which Oversight talks about this investigation. This pack holds what those releases link to.
• Court filings and dockets are not here — those are court-listener, and should be joined to rather than duplicated.
• The estate tranche is absent. The 2025-11-12 release “Oversight Committee Releases Additional Epstein Estate Documents” links a Google Drive folder that now returns 404. Those documents are not retrievable from this source. Do not add a Drive scraper to chase it; the folder is gone, not hidden.

Corpus as built: 31 documents, 505 pages, ~800,000 characters, including the Barr (129p), Tova Noel (135p) and Bondi (111p) transcribed interviews.

Every result is a citation

A match returns the document title, the page number and the committee’s own URL, because the only useful form of this material is one a reader can check:

"2025.08.05 Subpoena Cover Letters, page 33 — https://oversight.house.gov/..."

Page-level storage is a requirement, not a convenience — later phases (person profiles, connections) are built on this table, and design decision B on the task says an edge must be its citation.

What this phase deliberately does not do

No entity pages, no relationship scores, no “associate of”, no inferred connections. A name appearing in a document is a fact about the document; anything beyond that is a claim, and for people never charged with anything a loosely derived edge is defamation-shaped. Phases 3–5 (emails, person profiles, connections) are a layer over phases 1-2 and carry their own rules — in particular, people come from unsealing orders, never from name extraction over the text, because an unsealed name and a redaction failure look identical on the page. Phase 2’s passenger entries are exempt from that rule by design decision C: they are never resolved to an identity at all, so the redaction-failure risk that motivates decision A does not apply the same way — nothing is asserted as a person, an initial is returned as an initial.

Four documents cannot be searched, and say so

4 of the 31 are scans with no text layer (two subpoena schedules, two letters). They appear in epstein_list_documents with searchable: false, and epstein_get_document refuses them by name with a link to the original. Storing them as empty text would make a document that exists match nothing — which reads as “not in the corpus” rather than “not machine-readable”.

Data sources

• House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, release pages and the PDFs they link under oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/YYYY/MM/. Free, no credential. There is no bulk endpoint: the release pages are the index, so the ingest walks the committee release pages themselves.
• .github/workflows/epstein-refresh.yml re-harvests weekly. The committee adds to this investigation on its own schedule — three transcribed interviews arrived in three separate releases.
• Government Exhibit 662-RR, USA v. Ghislaine Maxwell, 20-cr-330 (S.D.N.Y.) — a court trial exhibit, admitted into evidence and unsealed, hosted keylessly at a stable DocumentCloud asset URL. A fixed, closed historical document, not a live feed, ingested once as a one-time transcription (migration 186_epstein_flight_logs.sql) rather than proxied per request.

A truncated PDF downloads as a success. Measured while building this: the Bondi transcript came back 131,072 bytes against a declared 392,928, curl exited 0, and file(1) still called it a valid PDF — it would have been indexed as a third of a transcript with nothing reporting a problem. The ingest checks Content-Length and the %%EOF trailer on every fetch, and retries.

Fetching the exhibit: the User-Agent rule is backwards here

s3.documentcloud.org answers a plain bot User-Agent with 200 and a full Chrome User-Agent with 403. Measured three ways on the same URL in the same minute: pipeworx/1.0 → 200, a normal Chrome UA → 403, no UA at all → 200. The www.documentcloud.org page and its API refuse the browser UA too.

This is the opposite of the usual rule — war.gov, dol.gov and gao.gov all need full browser headers to answer at all. Presumably a browser UA arriving from a datacenter IP with no browser fingerprint scores worse than an honest crawler does.

It matters because the 403 is a 4.7 KB Cloudflare block page, not a network error: a fetch that does not check its result records a “downloaded” 4.7 KB PDF and carries on. Send a plain honest User-Agent, and check Content-Length and the %%EOF trailer regardless.

Tools

• epstein_search_documents — Full-text search across the House Oversight Committee documents from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation — transcribed interviews, subpoenas and letters the committee published as PDFs. Returns the matc
• epstein_list_documents — Inventory of every document held from the House Oversight Epstein investigation: title, kind, page count, publication date and the committee URL. Says which documents are scans with no searchable text
• epstein_get_document — Read the full text of one document from the House Oversight Epstein investigation, a page at a time, given the document id from epstein_list_documents or a search result. Returns page text with the pa
• epstein_flight_log_search — Structured search over Epstein’s pilot flight logbook (Government Exhibit 662-RR, USA v. Ghislaine Maxwell, 20-cr-330, S.D.N.Y.) — date, aircraft, tail number, route and the pilot’s own passenger/rema