Over the time that I have posting comments on the interwebs or writing political commentary for a local newspaper, I have had cause to return to or reiterate a given theme. Sometimes such is called for due to a new or expanded audience. Other times, it is the fact that a different but still relevant situation has occurred and the reiteration is for emphasis.
After a few times though, I start to feel as though my audience ought to see it coming. They should see it far enough away as to have time to predict what I will say and beat me to the punch. When that doesn't happen, I start to wonder if perhaps I have misjudged and actually need to spend a lot more time and effort and electrons on the subject.
Once such theme is "the letter of the law and the spirit of the law". Humans are imperfect. As such, the constructs of humans or humanity are also imperfect. Humans have had "modern" language for 100k - 150k years. Written language is much younger but is several thousand years from being new. For all that time we have had access to language, we have not perfected it. (We have been very effective at using it to complicate a variety of issues but that is a subject for a different day.) We try. We fail. In the important and in the frivolous, we fail at making language perfect.
One of the important ways this affects your day-to-day existence is through the law. Not "a law" but, THE LAW. A huge part of the legal profession is concerned with what exactly a given word in a given physical and/or literary context means. They fail too. We frequently elect them to legislative bodies wherein they fail spectacularly. To buffer the populace from the failure of legislative bodies, we have the entirety of the judiciary. The judiciary is there to acknowledge the inability of humans to communicate perfectly. Among their jobs is divining the intention of the authors of the law and the words they used. Quite frequently they accomplish this by considering the spirit of the law.
Unfortunately, sometimes politicians do things for the wrong reasons. When that situation occurs, we can see an officious and offending example of what is known on Reddit as "Malicious Compliance". They craft the verbiage to be as confusing and meaningless as possible with the intention of abusing the complexity inherent in the judicial system.
Several of Felon47's pet Congressfolk really did not want to pass the Epstein reveal law. They passively or actively tried to prevent it from coming to a vote. Once sufficient support was achieved to pass the discharge petition, those in opposition voted for it so as to not be seen as doing what they were definitely doing - protecting pedophiles and sexual abusers.
The DOJ is attempting to play a major role in the malicious compliance attempts of Felon47's defenders. They "released" some of the documents as the letter of the law required but first they went through the documents and blacked out any information that might be relevant to anything. Of course, the spirit of the law, the spirit of the demand of the populace, was to release the information - the very information the DOJ actively and intentionally blocked the citizenry and our elected representatives from accessing or viewing.
If attention were being paid before, if there were clear evidence that this thing, this internet thing, was truly on, we should have seen it coming and included a plain language statement of intent along with the legalese verbiage of the bill. In any case, the fight is not over. Until the spirit of that law is honored and the information is released, no Executive Branch member should experience a single comfortable moment. They should not be the only ones allowed to maliciously comply.
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