A whole network of representatives of the American ruling class will most likely be involved in the release of Jeffrey Epstein's documents.
A projection on a building near the White House demands that Donald Trump release the Epstein files in July 2025.
(Allison Bailey/NurPhoto via AP)
Over the weekend, the Trump administration's months of blocking the release of massive amounts of federal documents underlying the prosecution of notorious pedophile and sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein appeared to be coming to an end. Late Sunday, Trump bowed to the likely passage of the Epstein File Transparency Act sometime this week. True Social Post declaring, “House Republicans must vote to release the Epstein files because we have nothing to hide and it's time to move on from this Democratic hoax.” The public could get a crash course in the broken system of elite impunity that brought Epstein and Donald Trump to fame in the first place.
It is unclear whether the Senate will approve the measure or whether Trump will refrain from vetoing it after Congress has approved it. (He created a potential legal defense for himself by ordering a new investigation into the Epstein syndicate—focusing, of course, on the Democratic attackers—and could easily get his legal lackeys to say that they could not release files related to the ongoing investigation.)
But if they are made public, the cache of documents related to Epstein's prosecution promises to shatter the persistent, jealously guarded silence of many bad actors in Epstein's orbit, as hinted in 20,000 emails that the House Oversight Committee released last week. The documents were Epstein's property after the disgraced financier allegedly committed suicide in custody and were not included in the lawsuit against him. In contrast, the material in what is now known as the Epstein Dossier directly targeted Epstein's vast human trafficking network and the many powerful, wealthy, and powerful people involved in it; The Justice Department says it amounts to nearly 300 gigabytes of physical and digital evidence, including graphic documentation of the sexual harassment of underage girls by Epstein, his associates and cronies. According to fellow journalist Michael Wolff, Epstein had about a dozen photographs of Trump with a group of topless girls at Epstein's Palm Beach compound, including a shot of a group of them pointing at a stain on Trump's pants and laughing.
Trump's Justice Department and FBI issued predictably disingenuous statements, saying there was no material in the files to suggest Epstein had blackmailed his clients; They also did not include “evidence that could form the basis of an investigation against third parties who have not been charged.” This would have been something of a shock for the former Prince Andrei, who was stripped of his monarchical title and benefits following a series of damning revelations about his alliance with Epstein. This would also be news to former Treasury Secretary and head of the Council of Economic Advisers Larry Summers, who, according to new report from Harvard Raspberryrelied on Epstein as his “wingman” in an unsuccessful attempt to sleep with one of his graduate students, who was apparently the daughter of one of Summers' close associates at the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank. Summers announced that after these latest Epstein revelations, he is scaling back his “public engagements.”
However, Trump's federal law enforcement team has came to the conclusion that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted,” saying he stood by the court's original seal on the documents, which was placed to “protect victims.” One problem with this reasoning, of course, is that many Epstein survivors continue to hold press conferences demanding the files be released, including today, ahead of a scheduled House vote on a bill securing their release.
The problem with trying to maintain a cordon sanitaire around the Epstein files, focusing them solely on the abuses of Epstein and his convicted lover and accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, is that Epstein was the very opposite of a lone predator. His entire career has been a case study in the benefits of attracting wealthy and powerful partners, from his incredible rise from a math teacher at an exclusive Manhattan prep school to a lucrative position in the trading desk at Bear Stearns. He then became the chief asset management advisor to Les Wexner, head of the Victoria's Secret empire.
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Once he was given power of attorney over Wexner's properties, it was easy for Epstein to piece together the entire infrastructure behind his trafficking ring – his private jet dubbed the “Lolita Express”, the island on which he hosted endless trysts involving trafficked victims and young women, and the array of financial instruments to fund it all – leaving no paperwork beyond routine stock transactions. Fueling it all was a tangled web of shell companies and fictitious bank accounts, but the financing of Epstein's depraved, predatory empire appears to have been entirely legal and consistent with offshore asset management operations commonly used to create tax havens and branded companies for the 0.1 percent. How Observations by Karl Beyer“Although Epstein likely used blackmail and other illegal schemes to avoid prosecution for his crimes, his core strategy—offshore asset management—was not just legal, but a central feature of modern finance capitalism.”
That's why, in Epstein's string of emails last week, his wealthy correspondents were so candid, discussing both their desperate seduction campaigns and their financial affairs. Their possible discovery did not raise any concerns, although at the time of the exchange of messages Epstein had already been convicted of a sex crime (albeit grotesquely achieved reduction of charges). There was no Eyes wide closed passwords, no explicit link to secure servers or chat channels (though Summers and Epstein did refer to the graduate student Summers targeted as a “danger”—an obvious racist appeal to her Asian heritage). It was simply understood that people who devote themselves to careers of financial predation also practice sexual predation; It's no coincidence that the leading financiers of the 1980s boom that brought Epstein's fortune called themselves “the big jerks.”
Living by the predator code is by no means limited to America. In 2011, the head of the International Monetary Fund, French economist Dominique Strauss-Khan, was charged with rape by Nafissatou Diallo, a maid at the Sofitel Hotel in Manhattan. She alleged that while she was cleaning his room, Strauss-Khan attacked her naked from the shower, molested her and forced her to perform oral sex on him. The case was eventually settled out of court. rumored to be a $6 million payout. Strauss-Khan was also arrested in France on charges of gang rape linked to a prostitution ring that held sex parties there; French authorities later dropped the charges. Yet the world's financial system's top watchdog—and a highly touted candidate for the French presidency—has, like Epstein, been arrested multiple times on sexual assault charges; unlike Epstein, he was allowed to pay them off in full.
Be prepared to see many variations of Strauss-Khan's highly financial version of “seignor's right” if and when the full release of the Epstein files occurs. But keep in mind that, contrary to the quisling testimony of Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, the next wave of documents will not prove there is no case; rather, they are likely to remind us of the many untouchable predators who remain outside the law.
