Ride the Lightning

By Public Demand: More on the Botched Manafort Redaction

January 15, 2019

Last week's blog post, and the story behind it (the botched redaction of documents in Paul Manafort's case) generated a lot of comments and questions, so I decided it was worth doing a follow-up post. Here is the "redacted document." Some people asked how you could "uncover the text." Scroll down to the portion of the document that has black highlighted text. Highlight that portion of the document, copy it, and then paste it into a blank Word document. Fast and easy, right?

So the lawyers screwed up. They might have corrected their poor attempt at redaction by "flattening" the document into an image. If they had printed the document and scanned it, it would not have been possible to uncover the hidden text. This is not the recommended way to operate, but it would have worked.

So, the next question I received was "how do I redact correctly?" I'm glad so many people wanted to make sure they were doing the right thing!  If you are using Adobe Acrobat, follow Adobe's instructions here. If you are using another product to create a PDF, you can probably search for that product and the word "redaction" – and I'm sure there are YouTube videos too!

Thanks to my friend Catherine Sanders-Reach for reminding me that Manafort has had technology trouble in the past. In February of 2018, there was a story from Ars Technica about how Manafort's inability to convert a PDF document to Word helped prosecutors.

The indictment suggested that Manafort's lack of technology savvy helped prosecutors build a case against Manafort and his associate Richard Gates. The pair allegedly submitted a variety of fraudulent documents to lenders in order to borrow money against properties purchased with overseas funds—funds that were never reported to the IRS. One reason prosecutors were able to build a paper trail against the pair: Manafort needed Gates's help to convert a PDF document to Word format and back again.

In 2016, Manafort allegedly wanted to create a fake profit-and-loss statement for his company, Davis Manafort Partners, in order to inflate his income and qualify for a loan.

"Manafort emailed Gates a .pdf version of the real 2016 DMI P&L, which showed a loss of more than $600,000." the indictment claims. "Gates converted that .pdf into a Word document so that it could be edited, which Gates sent back to Manafort. Manafort altered the Word document by adding more than $3.5 million in income."

Then, according to the indictment, Manafort "sent this falsified P&L to Gates and asked that the Word document be converted back to a .pdf, which Gates did and returned to Manafort."

By sending these documents back and forth by email, Manafort and Gates made it easy for prosecutors to pinpoint exactly who changed the documents and when.

And yes, this is the kind of chicanery we uncover in our digital forensics lab all the time. As I often tell audiences, "we get paid to play." Few things are more gratifying than being able to prove exactly how a crime occurred.

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