For those of us with a sincere, nonpartisan interest (I swear) in the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, it was a good week: First the Democrats, with an eye to hammering President Donald Trump, released a few redacted Epstein emails in which the president’s name featured prominently; then Republicans, presumably with an eye to burying the Democratic leak, released thousands more Epstein documents. With this kind of tag-team effort, we’ll have the whole story out in the open by Christmas!
A word of caution, though, for those liberals who are relative newcomers to the Epstein saga, for so long a mostly conservative fixation. There is a dark conspiratorial thrill that comes with encountering the reality, amply displayed in the latest round of disclosures, that so many American elites were perfectly comfortable being buddy-buddy with a trafficker of teenage girls. And because both right and left have pivoted away from the Bill Clinton-era neoliberal center, the fact that Epstein had (to quote the left-wing writer Jeet Heer) “very banal centrist politics with the same gestalt as 90% of U.S. elite since 1990s” makes him an ideal symbol of elite perfidy for both progressives and populists alike.
But it’s important not to let that conspiratorial thrill outrun the actual facts. The new tranche of information confirms, yet again, the moral squalor of various powerful Americans. But it still leaves us short of definitive answers to the outstanding Epstein questions: Did other powerful men have sex with the underage girls that he trafficked? What were his connections, if any, to the world of intelligence? And what unrevealed details have made Trump so intent, until now, on preventing further disclosure? (On social media late Sunday, Trump said House Republicans should vote to release the files.)
I thought we might be closer to answers to the last question when I read the first email that the Democrats released, a 2011 note from Epstein to Ghislaine Maxwell shortly after his release from prison: “I want you to realize that the dog that hasn’t barked is Trump … (VICTIM) spent hours at my house with him, he has never once been mentioned. Police chief, etc. I’m 75 percent there.”
With the name redacted, this email suggested there might well be an as-yet-unknown victim with whom Epstein assumed that Trump had a sexual encounter. But the hidden name turned out to be the late Virginia Giuffre, the most famous of Epstein’s victims, who had worked for Trump at Mar-a-Lago and who specifically and repeatedly denied that the future president had sex with her or any other girl, even as she made allegations against many other powerful figures.
Just because she denied it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, the suspicious reader might say, which is true. There are reasons to doubt the reliability of some of Giuffre’s accusations, so it’s possible she was also unreliable in her non-accusations. But still, those non-accusations mean that this email is not the smoking gun proving Trump’s complicity in sex crimes. And you could also read it as Epstein speculating that Trump was the person who ratted him out to the Palm Beach police, which would actually dovetail with a narrative some of Trump’s defenders have tried to spin up.
Meanwhile, the document release also includes a much later email from Epstein, a stream-of-consciousness ramble sent to himself shortly before his last arrest in 2019, in which the financier seems to describe his operation (“200 dollars for a rub and tug … no sex … most in thier mid twenties …”) and then says Trump “came to my house many times in that period” but “never got a massage,” before turning to a long complaint about how Trump took advantage of him in a real estate deal.
That email suggests, first, that it was normal for Epstein’s friends to have sexual encounters if not sexual intercourse; second, that Epstein at least wanted people to think the girls involved were not minors; and third, that Epstein had a long-standing grudge against Trump but probably did not have some secret tape of Trump getting a massage or more.
In which case the ultimate truth could be squalid (powerful men getting hand jobs from masseuses whom they thought were over 18) without being a Grand Guignol conspiracy (powerful men knowingly trafficking minors to facilitate some kind of “Eyes Wide Shut” scenario). And something similar could be the case with the intelligence-world questions: There’s evidence that Epstein used his connections to assist Israel intelligence on various projects, but nothing indicating that he was running a sex-and-blackmail operation on its behalf.
But then the great question remains: Why didn’t Trump want more disclosure?
It’s possible that he just doesn’t like the embarrassment of having everyone reminded that he was one of the rich creeps in the Epstein circle. Or it’s possible that there’s something truly sensitive related to Epstein and intelligence that has yet to be revealed.
Or it’s possible that there is some thread remaining here, and not necessarily the obvious one, that the president really, really doesn’t want to see get pulled.
