"The Dog That Hasn't Barked," Chewed On By A Dog in 2017—Plus, Who's Russel Balasco, What Are He and Mar-a-Lago's Natural Gas Usage Data in the Epstein Estate Documents Released by House Oversight?

The House Oversight Committee released the Epstein Estate Documents last week, Wednesday, November 12, 2025, announced in this Press Release from the House Committee on Oversight. In this post, I report my preliminary analysis of the Documents.

I believe this material could be from criminal investigations, and that they could expose much more than just Epstein and sex trafficking. I suspect that analyzing the social dynamics of Epstein’s contacts and the content of their communications could tell some secrets that have yet to surface about the time between 1994 when Trump began preparing to open Mar-a-Lago, and July 23, 2019, when Epstein died.

To this end, I’ve made my own version, publicly available on Google Drive, with some records relating to the only other property/person, other than Donald Trump and Mar-a-Lago, whose information is not redacted.

Russel Balasco is included with unredacted information about his property, a house at 136 Woodbridge Road, neighboring Mar-a-Lago and neighboring another property owned by Trump, 124 Woodbridge Road. Deutsche Bank initiated a foreclosure in 2007 to recover nearly $250k from Balasco and his wife in unpaid principal, interest, and other fees and penalties. The foreclosure judgement against the Balascos is in my version of the repository, along with a history of the 136 Woodbridge Road land parcel, which I retrieved from the Palm Beach County Official Records Search.

• The Epstein Estate Documents include tax assessment and natural gas billing records that include…

  • Information about Donald and Mar-a-Lago, including natural gas use information and property valuations.

  • A mysterious, unredacted record in the tax assessments: a property neighboring Mar-a-Lago to the north that was bought in 1994 by Russel Balasco from the estate of a movie star who died that year at age 94.

    • The house was foreclosed upon in 2007, apparently forfeited to Deutsche Bank via litigation against Balasco and his then-wife—but Palm Beach records show that Balasco’s eventual ex-wife sold the house in 2014.

    • Maybe it’s nothing, but it seems strange to me.

• There is a strange video of a dog nibbling on a Donald Trump chew toy that was recorded June 29, 2017. It was added to the data repository April 29, 2020! So this dataset was a work in progress, but not released until now. Republicans controlled House Oversight starting January 2023, so if they accuse the Biden admin of not doing anything with this, here is one more response that could be effective: Republican House Oversight did nothing with these files either!

  • It’s curious, let’s say, that the very first email the Democrats sent as a preview was the “dog that hasn't barked is trump.. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him,” which Epstein sent to Ghislaine Maxwell on April 2, 2011.

  • Only asking questions, no solid evidence of this of course, but I imagined that maybe this movie was sent as an implicit threat to Trump in 2017 perhaps with some inside reference about dogs eating people—maybe part of what precipitated Epstein’s arrest—again just asking questions.

Next I will explain how to access the data so you can follow along with my analysis. You can download a .zip archive of the directories by clicking the vertical three-dots to the right of the file name in the list view (as shown below).

Please don’t hesitate to ask via email if anything is unclear, or if you want any help poking around the data yourselves! I would also very much appreciate any feedback: negative or positive, constructive or not :) Thanks for reading! Subscribe for free to get updates and support my channel if you appreciate my work.

To access the Epstein Estate Documents - Seventh Production, released by the House Oversight Committee, click here: link to Documents on Google Drive.

Sensitive information about anyone other than Trump or Trump’s companies is redacted in all but one sheet in the NATIVES/001 directory—except for one: NATIVES/001/HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_016552.xls.

Here there is one additional row where a property owned by one Russel Balasco is also included. The property: 136 Woodbridge Road, which neighbors Mar-a-Lago to the north, and 124 Woodbridge next door to the east, which is also owned by Trump. The house has a potentially suspicious history.

The property was originally bought by Balasco in 1994 after the former owner passed away, an actress named Lili Damita, at age 94 (see West Palm Beach map and NYT article below).

In 2007, Balasco and his wife/ex-wife Cidalina were sued for foreclosure by Deutsche Bank, a long-time lender to Trump despite internal opposition to maintaining him as a client (access Foreclosure Judgement PDF on Drive). This is the same Deutsche Bank that Trump sued in 2019 to block the bank from complying with subpoenas from the House Committee on Financial Services and the House Committee on Intelligence.

Somehow, the Balascos apparently kept the property, but I found no record of how. I found that the Balascos kept their house by checking West Palm Beach public records using the Parcel ID of 136 Woodbridge Road, 50434335050000191 (see screenshot below; access deed history data in CSV). The Balascos apparently retained the deed until they sold the house on July 27, 2014, to Gary and Monique Silvi, who still own it.

You can check for yourself by navigating to the file, then click the arrow for the D column that allows you to sort the sheet. Select “Sort sheet from A to Z” (first screenshot below)—you’ll first be prompted to save this as .xls, select OK which will create a temporary file just for you.

You will then see 15 unredacted rows (2-16), mostly for Mar-a-Lago. Apparently a row was added when new construction was added to Mar-a-Lago. The 136 Woodbridge Road entry is the only non-Donald data row to be unredacted (second screenshot below).

Not sure what this means, but from the bit of research I did, data about natural gas use can be used to see if gas consumption is not consistent with the property type—for instance, if a private residence reported the same usage as a nearby hotel this could be a red flag it’s not actually a private residence. So, data like this could be included as part of evidence investigation of mortgage fraud—and I’m reminded of the saying that with these folks, every accusation is a confession.

Currently Trump’s MAGA crony Bill Pulty is the director of the Federal Housing Finance Agency, which controls mortgage data that the Trump DOJ is using in corrupt calls for targeted investigations of enemies. At the end of last week Rep. Eric Swalwell appeared to be the latest target of such an investigation. Rep. Swalwell served on the January 6th Committee, and represents California’s 14th congressional district, which is part of the East SF Bay that includes Livermore, Hayward, and parts of Fremont to the south and San Leandro to the north.

I also wonder, does this have anything to do with Trump’s obsession with low-flow faucets? Perhaps there is some kind of criminality that would lead to inflated gas-to-water use ratios, that could be a red flag to investigators. Perhaps all this about low-flow plumbing is a preemptive coverup. I only read a little on this and don’t understand how energy audits work—maybe someone will read this and know, comment or contact me if you do!

So, maybe this indicates that from 2007-2008 there is reason to believe that Trump was being investigated as well.

There is a strange video in the NATIVE directory: a dog is lying in its dog bed, gnawing on the head of a Donald Trump chew toy, with a Hillary Clinton chew toy nearby. There are two remarkable facts about this video beyond the weirdness of it:

1. The movie was recorded June 29, 2017

2. The movie was uploaded April 29, 2020, long before the document dump on November 12, 2025. It’s not clear what else was happening then for House Oversight to upload them at that time—but note Oversight was controlled by Democrats at that time.

It may be just a coincidence, but it’s intriguing that the very first email the Democrats sent as a preview of the larger document dump was the “dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him,” email, which Epstein sent to Ghislaine Maxwell on April 2, 2011. Recall that Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt outed who the victim actually was, saying someone else already said it was Virginia Guiffre—but it’s not clear if anyone really had broken the redaction before she did.

I found the movie was recorded at 4:48PM on June 29, 2017—I found that by checking the files metadata, or data about the data: in this case, the creation time is part of the metadata.

I read that metadata using the following command in my computer’s terminal program for programmatically interacting with your computer, files, etc., shown here:

This is apparently some time after a beef started between Epstein and Trump, as evidenced by Epstein’s correspondence with Michael Wolf from 2015 that I pasted below (email #3 in the Democrat’s preview). Note how Epstein sees himself as in a position where he could craft a response for Trump, and apparently confident that Trump would consider it, that it would be worth the effort.

There is even more metadata that can be accessed by the following command: ffprobe -show_streams -show_format -v quiet HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_026678.mov. On reviewing that metadata we can conclude:

1. The movie was probably recorded on an Apple device, like an iPhone or iPad. This comes from the metadata keys for the video and audio “handlers”, which are “Core Media Video/Audio”—these are the handlers that Apple devices use to encode movies, video & audio (TAG:handler_name=Core Media Video; TAG:handler_name=Core Media Audio).

   1. If it was a phone it was the iPhone 6, SE, or 7 series.

   2. These phones recorded at 4K maximum resolution, or 1080p or 720p if recording was downscaled.

2. The file is low resolution, 640x352. This means it was re-encoded, possibly to be sent electronically via email, social media, messaging apps, etc.

3. Re-encoding for electronic transmission using common apps does not change the creation_time metadata entry, so we can be confident that the movie was in fact recorded at 4:44 PM on June 29, 2017.

To connect more of these clues I want to collect and analyze behavioral dynamics as captured in the email collection. This time-resolved dataset stretches over almost two decades, represents who Epstein was communicating with, and about what. There have been some interesting analyses so far, but I haven’t seen the social networks analyzed over time yet.

I am envisioning a data exploration web app as a first analysis where you can observe timelines of changes in Epstein’s social network, and look at what specific emails said using the interface.

This is an opportunity for me to prototype a component for a new app I’m developing currently called FutureShaper for planning and analyzing social change efforts.

Below is a detailed overview of the Epstein Estate Documents repository intended to help you get started if you want to poke around or analyze the data.

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There are four directories in the Documents repository. Here is what I understand about each:

• IMAGES: Contains a set of 12 directories with images (.jpg format), which appear to be mostly scanned documents. The first directory, IMAGES/001 has James Patterson’s and John Connolly’s (2016) book with Tim Malloy, Filthy Rich (see below). This seems to give us some basic facts that we the people can use to orient ourselves.

  • I poked through directory 007: it starts with an email Epstein received on June 30, 2019, just over a month before his death: it’s a summary of news articles from “flipboard.com,” a news aggregator. The first headline is “What Does Putin Really Want?”

  • I clicked forward and there was A Resource Guide to the U.S. Foreign Corrupt Practices Act (FCPA) from 2012.

• NATIVES/001: The NATIVES directory has only one subdirectory, 001. Here there are some interesting spreadsheets about finances and gas usage at Mar-a-Lago. There’s also a video of a dog gnawing on a Donald Trump chew toy that was first uploaded to this repository in April 2020, in .mov format (see first analysis below). The video’s metadata says it was made June 29, 2017.

• TEXT: This directory has communications in .txt format in two directories…

  • 001, which contains stuff like this, some kind of legal letter sent by Kenneth W. Starr to Judge Mark Filip in defense of Epstein on May 27, 2008. Here’s an interesting excerpt: We urgently requested that your Office conduct an independent review of the proposed federal prosecution of our client, Jeffrey Epstein. The dual reasons for our request that you review this matter are (i) the bedrock need for integrity in the enforcement of federal criminal laws, and (ii) the profound questions raised by the unprecedented extension of federal law by the United States Attorney’s Office in Miami (the “USAO”) to a prominent public figure who has close ties to former President Clinton. The need for review is now all the more exigent. On Monday, May 19, 2008, First Assistant Jeffrey Sloman of the USAO responded to an email from Jay Lefkowitz informing U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta that we would be seeking your Office’s review. Mr. Sloman’s letter, which imposed a deadline of June 2, 2008 to comply with all the terms of the current Non-Prosecution Agreement (the “Agreement”)

  • 002 contains mostly the emails—though one of the documents is a reading list with table of contents and several articles, which seem to have been prepared for Epstein (see HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031913.txt). These can help us understand the social dynamics of Epstein, Trump, Maxwell, and all the other super-frenemies. Here are two examples from correspondence between Epstein and Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel—and in this relationship Barak needed Epstein: Epstein was Barak’s fixer, indicating Epstein sat atop Barak in their circle’s hierarchy. See this article by Drop News and recent Democracy Now! episode with Drop News.

    • In 2013, Epstein gives advice that Ehud Barak, former prime minister of Israel, should write an op-ed (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_031964.txt): I would use the opportunity to compare it with Iran. The solutions become more complex with time, not less. I think many people would like your views on Egypt, Syria, etc. Russia’s role? I think you might point out the gassing of “women and children” is an expression from the 20th century. Women are no longer equivalent to children; civilians vs. combatants only.

    • In 2017, Ehud Barak forwarded Epstein a Twitter post about how the Israeli government was going to make a Trump “welcome video” that would appeal to Trump by showing him “Where God had sex with Maria”

• DATA: these contain relational data and metadata about different images, etc.; they are used in Concordance software, apparently, but I know little about this and I’m not sure how useful they are anyway. I downloaded the files, uploaded them to ChatGPT, which read them. I don’t know how they’re useful yet. If you, or someone you know, knows anything about Concordance, please drop a message here or via direct message! The screenshots below show what ChatGPT read from the files—I just downloaded the two files to my computer from the cloud, then re-uploaded them into ChatGPT.

Note! It was surprisingly difficult to get ChatGPT to give me exactly what I wanted. The following prompts/interactions got me these previews: