Perhaps the disclosure would cause prosecutors or defense attorneys to change their strategy or even taint the ongoing investigation.
#Redacted text manafort pdf
Other ways include taking a photo of the document and making a PDF out of that or printing the document, using a felt pen to redact and scanning it back into a PDF.Īn ethical question, largely ignored by the media, is whether reporters should have disclosed the sensitive information as it was not intended for public consumption. flattens) content, also shown in the above video. However, on page 5, either his attorneys or Mueller’s staffers did not “flatten” the PDF so that the redacted passages could not be read.Īdobe has a tool that properly redacts (i.e. In this case, Manafort’s lawyers had filed a response to an allegation that he lied to prosecutors. Just select the passage and use a white background, exposing the text. Often a staff person or official uses black boxes that can be moved or removed from a document or selects and conceals passages with black background, which of course and be removed. It’s a common error. Tech experts will tell you that thousands of redacted documents online can be easily manipulated to view content. Reporters hungry for more information about Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s investigation checked to see if a mistake was made in redacting a sensitive document prepared by Manafort’s attorneys. You’d think court filings on convicted Trump-campaign associate Paul Manafort might have been properly redacted. Or otherwise risk becoming the subject of late-night comedy routines.In the 2016 presidential campaign, digital subterfuge was a key component, from creation of fake news to sale of Facebook user data. At a minimum, if a law firm is going to insist on using Acrobat Pro-generally from a misguided effort to save money-a substantial investment must be made to train users to avoid this critical error.
#Redacted text manafort pro
Using litigation support software (and not using Acrobat Pro for redactions) is a sensible approach. If the program saves a file when the user hits the delete button, that’s an issue. But ultimately, it is a real problem when users *think* they used a feature in software when what happened is opposite of the user intention. Additionally, it does have warning dialog boxes when users access features that could be mistaken for fully redacting. The software does provide alternative tools that meet these requirements. And, it’s fair to debate what Adobe could do to prevent users from making this mistake.
Lawyers often ask us how we can help prevent this from happening during eDiscovery. It’s an educated guess but given the ubiquity of Acrobat Pro usage in law firms, it makes sense. The proper workflow is to use Acrobat’s purpose-built Redaction tools Adobe provides in the Protection menu. Examining the underlying document, it appears the law firm used Adobe Acrobat Pro’s markup tools to draw a black box over the text. Did they want the information out? Perhaps, seems like an awfully blunt method to leak information. Why did Manafort’s lawyers fail to redact properly? Not insurmountable, but a curve nonetheless. The images can be produced as is or combined into a new PDF file.Īlternatively, Acrobat Pro does offer tools to redact PDFs properly - but as we have seen these are hardly failsafe. When this isn’t feasible, it is possible to export the PDF into an image file format (aka going from vector to raster), redact the image, and produce the flattened image.
When lawyers need to redact parts of documents, the best, most foolproof way to do so is to delete the text in the underlying document and replace it by typing in. It has been and remains the standard format for electronically sending a document. PDFs have played a critical role in the move from physical paper to digital formats. It is designed to be a software agnostic format to view documents as they were initially designed and intended by their authors.
#Redacted text manafort portable
PDF is the file extension and abbreviation for Portable Document Format. This format was developed by the Adobe Software corporation in the early 1990s. We do not know who prepared the PDF and what method was used to finally render it. They submitted a PDF that had black boxes drawn over the text to be redacted but without deleting the actual text underneath it. But it’s Manafort’s lawyers who made a mistake here.
It is now well-established that Paul Manafort is not good with technology. The admissions contain facts that the OSC alleges Manafort continued to make false statements after signing the plea deal. The admissions are located deep in a court filing prepared in response to Special Counsel ripping up the plea agreement. The lawyers did not intend to release this evidence. Lawyers working for former Trump Campaign manager and convicted felon, Paul Manafort filed a document yesterday that contains the clearest public evidence to date of coordination between the Trump’s 2016 presidential campaign and the Russians.
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