Now that Donald Trump, in his second term as president, has assured us that there is no “Epstein file” after all, and nothing more to the story of the late human-trafficking financial adviser, I thought I would revisit what we’ve posted and discussed here previously about Jeffrey Epstein.
I first learned about Epstein the way that most Americans did — thanks to the reporting of Julie K. Brown and her team at the Miami Herald. This was a local story there in Florida, because that’s where Epstein was initially sentenced in an extravagantly lenient plea deal that still has not yet been explained. Brown’s reporting was the basis for the first two posts here about Epstein: “Why isn’t Jeffrey Epstein in prison?” (from December of 2018) and “A story in which no one got what they deserved” (from early 2019).
Brown’s reporting was also the reason Epstein’s initial, inexplicably corrupt plea deal was questioned. The article linked to the image above describes that strange arrangement:
Palm Beach multimillionaire Jeffrey Epstein, 54, was accused of assembling a large, cult-like network of underage girls — with the help of young female recruiters — to coerce into having sex acts behind the walls of his opulent waterfront mansion as often as three times a day, the Town of Palm Beach police found.
The eccentric hedge fund manager, whose friends included former President Bill Clinton, Donald Trump and Prince Andrew, was also suspected of trafficking minor girls, often from overseas, for sex parties at his other homes in Manhattan, New Mexico and the Caribbean, FBI and court records show.
Facing a 53-page federal indictment, Epstein could have ended up in federal prison for the rest of his life.
But on the morning of the breakfast meeting, a deal was struck — an extraordinary plea agreement that would conceal the full extent of Epstein’s crimes and the number of people involved.
Not only would Epstein serve just 13 months in the county jail, but the deal — called a non-prosecution agreement — essentially shut down an ongoing FBI probe into whether there were more victims and other powerful people who took part in Epstein’s sex crimes, according to a Miami Herald examination of thousands of emails, court documents and FBI records.
The pact required Epstein to plead guilty to two prostitution charges in state court. Epstein and four of his accomplices named in the agreement received immunity from all federal criminal charges. But even more unusual, the deal included wording that granted immunity to “any potential co-conspirators’’ who were also involved in Epstein’s crimes. These accomplices or participants were not identified in the agreement, leaving it open to interpretation whether it possibly referred to other influential people who were having sex with underage girls at Epstein’s various homes or on his plane.
As part of the arrangement, Acosta agreed, despite a federal law to the contrary, that the deal would be kept from the victims. As a result, the non-prosecution agreement was sealed until after it was approved by the judge, thereby averting any chance that the girls — or anyone else — might show up in court and try to derail it.
“Acosta” there is Alexander Acosta, who was, back then in 2007, the top federal prosecutor in Miami. By the time Brown and her team at the Herald began digging into the non-prosecution deal he approved for Epstein, Acosta had been appointed Secretary of Labor in the first Trump administration.
Acosta was forced to resign from that position in July of 2019, shortly after a new investigation — prompted by the reporting from Brown & Co. — had led to Epstein’s arrest on July 6, 2019 in Manhattan, on sex-trafficking charges.
I noted that arrest here in a brief item:
Jeffrey Epstein was arrested and charged in New York state this weekend for many of the crimes overlooked or swept away years ago by now-Trump cabinet member Alex Acosta.
Vox had a good summary of the story: “Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who is friends with Donald Trump and Bill Clinton, explained.” But even a Vox explainer can’t explain the many things we still don’t know about all of this, including even some of the most basic questions — like where did Epstein’s billions even come from? And who pressured Acosta to dismiss victims’ concerns, let all of Epstein’s co-conspirators off the hook, and to coddle a sex offender with the ultimate sweetheart-deal sentence?
Given the amounts of money involved, and the way Epstein has tied his fortune to the fortunes of others, I’m not confident we’ll ever get solid answers to those questions. At least not without a long fight.
Vicky Ward is right to say “Jeffrey Epstein’s Sick Story Played Out for Years in Plain Sight.” But parts of it — the sources of his wealth, the identities of his co-conspirators and/or of his protectors — remain hidden. But perhaps not for long.
Epstein’s suspiciously long-delayed day in court, it seemed, promised to provide answers and explanations. Anticipation of what that trial might reveal about Epstein’s crimes, and the potential complicity of some of his powerful friends and protectors, was the subject of the next mention of him here on this blog. That was a July 25, 2019 post that quoted this from Gabriel Sherman’s reporting for Vanity Fair:
Likely within days, the U.S. Court of Appeals for the Second Circuit will release almost 2,000 pages of documents that could reveal sexual abuse by “numerous prominent American politicians, powerful business executives, foreign presidents, a well-known prime minister, and other world leaders,” according to the three-judge panel’s ruling.
Sherman had written “likely within days” on July 17, but a week later, the document drop still hadn’t happened. That apparent delay led me to write this:
We’ve seen how successful mid-level monsignors and Southern Baptist pastors have been at stonewalling and silencing any attempt to release such information about them, so just imagine how much more capable this apparent list of even more powerful people might be at it.
So if there’s no big story coming out “within days,” that itself should be a big story.
It’s still quite possible this will all play out quietly, like the Dennis Hastert business. Hastert, the longest-serving Republican speaker of the house in history, just kind of went away, and everyone who supported him throughout his long career just discreetly disassociated themselves and moved on, unperturbed by any intrusive questions or by anything like accountability. My guess is that before any court documents reveal any of these names, we’ll see quite a few of these folks slinking away from the spotlight, pre-emptively Hasterting themselves into obscurity in the hopes that this will all somehow blow over.
I also noted this:
None of those named should be presumed to be guilty by association, but many of them seem to be associated by guilt. After all, if you’re claiming to be innocently unaware of Epstein’s crimes because you only knew him indirectly due to your close friendships with Henry Kissinger, Adnan Khashoggi, Rupert Murdoch, and Lewis Ranieri, then you’ve already got a lot of red in your ledger regardless of whether or not you’re also a sexual predator.
Another two weeks passed without those names getting named and without those 2,000 pages of documents being publicly released. And then, on August 10 of 2019, Epstein was found dead in his cell from an apparent suicide.
So the next mention of him here was this post, shortly after his death, reflecting on Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, “The duty of speaking ill of the dead.”
The next mention of Epstein’s actual criminal case here wasn’t until March of this year, when I linked to a couple of items discussing the disastrously backfiring publicity stunt of the second Trump administration’s claim to have “released the Epstein files,” sending redacted copies of already public-record material to a hand-picked group of MAGA influencers who were angered and unimpressed by the gesture. (See “The Trump Administration’s Epstein Stunt Is Turning Into a Vast Right-Wing Feud” and “Documents Proving Epstein Was Murdered By Deep State Still Missing Somehow.”
That was from shortly after Attorney General Pam Bondi had appeared on Fox News to assure the MAGA faithful that “The Epstein client list is sitting on my desk right now.” That assertion is back in the news because now Bondi is saying that there is no such thing, that an “Epstein client list” does not exist.
That’s also what Donald Trump is saying. Or, rather, it’s part of what Trump is saying. He says the Epstein list does not exist and that it was also written by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and James Comey in an attempt to frame Trump. It’s possible for both of those claims to be false, but not possible for both of them to be true.
I mostly agree with Joe Patrice here, and agree with him that the second option is probably correct. This is from his “Pam Bondi And The Case Of The Missing Epstein Client List (That She Assured Us Was ‘On My Desk’)“:
Either the Attorney General is currently engaged in covering up a damning client list that would expound upon allegations of the the pedophile sex trafficker’s ties to at least some key Trump donors (Opens in a new window). Or there never was a client list and Bondi was just bald-faced lying for attention when she explicitly said that it was on her desk.
Neither is good!
The former would be a criminal conspiracy run from the highest halls of government. The latter is that the Attorney General exhibits a level of weaponized stupidity that should disqualify her from managing a Chipotle, let alone the Justice Department. It’s probably the latter, but then what, exactly, was the endgame? Baiting their most rabid and dangerous fans that there was a big revelation coming that they never bothered to verify existed? Not exactly 3D chess over there.
It seems impossible that the same MAGA fans who have spent years denouncing the “Deep State” for covering up Epstein’s client list would now pivot to accept Trump’s claim that the list and the cover-up never existed and that they should all just forget the whole thing and drop the subject.
But that’s what they’re going to do, because he said so. And they always fall in line.
These are, after all, the same people who spend $3.50/gallon to fill their tank on a way to a Trump rally where they loudly cheer for him as he tells them that gasoline is now $1.98/gallon. They’ve got a knack for this.
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