Recovering Hidden PDF Attachments from the Epstein Document Release
Following a challenge posed by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi, I set out to build an automated pipeline for recovering base64-encoded email attachments buried inside the DoJ’s Epstein document release. Here’s what I found. The Problem When the Department of Justice released thousands of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, they made a peculiar choice: rather than preserving email attachments digitally, they printed the raw email source — including base64-encoded binary attachments — and then scanned those printouts as JPEG images embedded in PDFs....