The Board of Trustees announced Thursday a forensic analysis of the email conducted by FTI Consulting, a cybersecurity firm, concluded "there is a strong substantive basis for questioning the authenticity, integrity, and origin of the Disputed Emails." WAMC's Sam Dingman and Annie Bennett discussed the developments that led to the report.
Sam Dingman: Annie, I got a very interesting email last night.
It was a note from a spokesman for Dr. Leon Botstein, who is, of course, the former president of Bard College, who recently resigned from Bard in the wake of allegations that he participated in the sex trafficking schemes of Jeffrey Epstein.
Annie Bennett: Right, and that was because Congressman Jamie Raskin found what he says is an email sent by Botstein to Epstein back in 2014, where Botstein allegedly writes, "Is ____ for me, or are you keeping her for yourself?" - "her" being one of Epstein's victims.
Dingman: That's right, and that is an email which Botstein has previously told WAMC that he denies writing or sending - which brings me to this email that I got last night. Apparently, Bard College's Board of Trustees recently commissioned a cybersecurity firm called FTI to conduct a forensic review of that alleged email exchange between Botstein and Epstein, and they have now sent me FTI's findings.
Bennett: Wow. okay. So most important question: Did Botstein send the email?
Dingman: The report does not definitively answer that question. It does, however, reach two significant conclusions regarding what it refers to as "the disputed emails." Those conclusions are, and I'm going to quote from the report: one, "the disputed emails did not exist on Bard's servers at least as far back as the time of a server migration in July 2017," and two, "there is a strong substantive basis for questioning the authenticity integrity and origin of the disputed emails."
I spent a long time today reading through this analysis, Annie. And one thing I'm going to note here is that sort of infamously, when the Epstein files first came out and Botstein's name appeared in them many times, Bard's Board of Trustees commissioned a different outside investigation with this law firm called WilmerHale. WilmerHale subsequently released a relatively brief summary of their findings, just over two pages long, and the brevity of that was part of Raskin originally opening this investigation into Botstein.
Bennett: So, is this report then more substantial?
Dingman: Yes, it is very substantial. It is 19 pages long, and the details are exhaustive, but it does still leave some questions. The first thing to note is that according to this report, the disputed emails that appear in Raskin's report are not technically original copies of the email exchange. They are a PDF that purports to show an email from Botstein and Epstein, which Epstein has then apparently forwarded to himself, and that is important because it raises the question of where the actual original email is.
Bennett: And that would presumably be on Bard's email servers, right?
Dingman: Exactly, and that brings us to this first finding in the report. FTI says they cannot find a record of an email on Bard's email servers that contains that alarming text, but there's a pretty critical caveat here, Annie, which is that apparently in 2017, Bard switched email providers. They had been using this email service called Zimbra. They moved over to Google Workspace — that's like the corporate version of Gmail — and so FTI says they analyzed the migration logs, everything that was transferred from that old system over to the new email system, and they did not find the disputed emails. The disputed emails again were sent in May of 2014, so theoretically a record of them should have existed in that old email system.
Bennett: So that would then seem pretty conclusive, no?
Dingman: At first, it seems that way, but several pages into this report, there is a very interesting paragraph, and I'll just read it here: "The migration review did not establish a complete inventory of Botstein's email. A message deleted before the 2017 migration, or not successfully transferred during that process could have been absent from the migration logs and therefore would not have been available."
Bennett: Okay, so basically, if Botstein deleted the disputed email or if something went haywire during the system migration, FTI wouldn't have been able to find it, but he still could have sent it.
Dingman: Right, that is all theoretically possible, and those I think, are important caveats.
Bennett: What about the second conclusion in the report that there's reason to question the authenticity of these disputed emails?
Dingman: So, in that case, FTI basically raises a bunch of questions about the formatting of these disputed emails. For example, timestamps. On an email that Epstein sent to Botstein, the timestamp says "sent Thurs 6 a.m." Whereas on the email that Botstein sent, the "is ____ for me" email, the timestamp is a little bit more formal. It says, "sent Thu May 15, 2014 at 12:45 a.m." So there's a few things that are important to consider here. There's two different ways of abbreviating Thursday, "Thurs." vs. "Thu." This sounds pedantic, but it's important, right? And also the fact that one email contains the complete date and time where the other one does not. It just says 6 a.m.
Bennett: Okay, so why is that important, and what would explain that discrepancy?
Dingman: According to the report, "multiple email clients or devices may have been used." Basically, the differences could be attributed to the fact that hypothetically, one person could be emailing from an iPhone, the other person could be emailing from an email program on their computer. But critically, FTI says that the date formulation in that Epstein email "sent Thurs 6am" — that does not exist in any email platform that they are aware of.
Bennett: What exactly is the idea here then, that Epstein doctored the email?
Dingman: That is the implication. You know how when you forward an email to somebody, you can go into the text of the email that you're forwarding and change it?
That would be a pretty unethical thing to do, obviously. But it is technically possible. That said, by this logic, the text that Epstein would have altered is the date, not the actual message contents.
Bennett: Does the report say anything about the message contents?
Dingmna: Sort of. I'm sorry to be hedging so much, but this is the way this thing is written. There's this whole section where they go through and they try to figure out whether there's any evidence that this PDF version of the disputed emails has been doctored, and they say essentially no, there is no evidence of that.
But, they write, "Modifications may have occurred before the PDF was created." There's also a note in there about the formatting of the text. Anybody who's looked at these Epstein emails, there's a lot of bizarre spacing and weird punctuation. That is very much true in the back and forths between Botstein and Epstein. But the report basically does not take a position on that. It says, "no broader statistical analysis of writing style or linguistic patterns was performed."
Bennett: So, what questions does this report bring up for you, Sam?
Dingman: So many, and I sent a list to both Bard and F.T.I. For me, there are two critical ones here. The first being, according to a Times Union analysis, Botstein's name appears over 2,500 times in the Epstein files. So, I would like to know if he disputes the authenticity of any of those other messages that he exchanged with Epstein, or just this one.
I would also like to know if he recalls deleting any messages that he sent to Epstein. That seems like a pretty important question here. I also would like to know why Bard's Board of Trustees commissioned this report and not Botstein personally, since Botstein is no longer an employee of the college, and since he is the one being accused of federal crimes.
Bennett: So, what have we heard from Bard about all of those questions?
Dingman: We have an emailed statement from Botstein about the report, which reads, "As I previously said, I did not author or send that email. I appreciate the effort to find the truth." And I actually spoke on the phone with a Botstein spokesman earlier today, and he said that of all those 2,500 mentions in the Epstein files, many of which contain very ugly details, this email, the disputed email, is the only one Botstein disputes the authenticity of. I should say Bard also published a statement about the report on its website, which reads in part, "Bard is a community that believes in transparency and the right to due process. We are committed to establishing the facts."
Bennett: Well, finally, Sam, this is not the only news from Bard today.
Dingman: That's right. The school also announced today that they have hired a new president to replace acting-President Jonathan Becker. His name is Marvin Krizlav. He's been the president of Pace University since 2017, and was previously the president of Oberlin College. In the press release announcing his appointment, Bard writes in part, "Following the transformative 51-year tenure of Leon Botstein, Chryslov's appointment comes at a pivotal moment of growth and expansion at Bard College."
I do want to say here just quickly, Annie, just before we got on air, I received a statement from acting-President Jonathan Becker about Marvin Krizlov.
Becker writes in part, "I met with Marvin Krizlov earlier this week. We have both done work in the area of voting rights, and I had read his testimony before Congress on student voting from when he was president at Oberlin, he is particularly committed to Bard's public interest programs, early colleges, micro colleges, prison education, and international education, which constitute the majority of our nearly 7,000 degree candidates in the U.S. and abroad. As I told a recent faculty committee meeting and the board of trustees, Bard is not neutral on the importance of the arts and humanities and liberal arts education on the whole, Bard is not neutral on democracy."
