Photo-Illustration: Intelligencer; Photos: House Oversight Committee, Getty Images

Last week, the House Oversight Committee released over 20,000 pages of documents from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein, the biggest wave of new information on the accused sex trafficker since his former friend Donald Trump was reelected as president.

The most revealing documents from the tranche involve correspondence between Epstein and his influential friends dating from his time after getting out of prison on a charge of soliciting a minor for prostitution up to the days before his July 2019 arrest and death in federal custody. In long email and text threads, he is chummy with Harvard professor Larry Summers, former Trump White House official Steve Bannon, and the writer Michael Wolff as Epstein plots a comeback and positions himself as an expert in world affairs. He also positioned himself as an expert on Trump, frequently providing commentary on the president’s inner world, including an email in which he claimed Trump “knew about the girls.” All told, Trump is mentioned in more than half the messages.

In a surprising reversal, Trump signed a bill to compel the Justice Department to release documents from its 2019 case against Epstein within the next 30 days. As we wait for the long-anticipated Epstein files, we called experts who have followed the story for years to talk about the most revealing aspects of the latest document dump, the questions it raises, and what we may learn when the public finally sees what the government has been hiding.

Panel Participants

Brace Belden: co-host of the Epstein-focused podcast TrueAnonNick Bryant: reporter who first obtained and published Epstein’s “little black book” and the founder of Epstein JusticeVanessa Grigoriadis: co-creator of the podcast Fallen Angel, about Victoria’s Secret and the chain’s founder, Les Wexner, who was Epstein’s financial patronTara Palmeri: author of The Red Letter Substack and a reporter covering Epstein survivors

How big of a revelation is this latest batch of emails?

Brace Belden: I would say this tranche is medium-revealing, in that a lot of people are expecting some kind of smoking gun that takes down some prominent person they’ve heard of.

In actuality, the messages are a really good peek into how Epstein was operating toward the end of his career. His strategy of coordinating with Steve Bannon and Michael Wolff in terms of rehabilitating himself and coordinating with Bannon on political projects is really interesting. The way he saw himself being perceived by the public is really interesting and provides some good insight onto how he viewed everything that happened.

Tara Palmeri: He very much still fashioned himself as a power broker after his time in county jail. It shows that he was still very much entrenched in the power circles he ran in before his conviction.

No one seemed to care about his time as a sex offender. They were going to him for advice. He saw himself as a power broker, and he tried to insert himself even in diplomatic affairs, offering advice to Russian foreign minister Sergey Lavrov, which he was hoping would get to Vladimir Putin, on how they could play Trump.

These elites did not have a problem with the crimes Epstein committed. Most people who commit the kinds of crimes Epstein committed are not allowed to live in residential neighborhoods.

Nick Bryant: These emails, if veritable, show that Trump and Epstein had a relationship much longer than Trump has said.

Vanessa Grigoriadis: I think the weird pubic-hair drawing and the depreciated-asset check from the birthday book this summer are way more of a smoking gun than anything I saw. Except for the one email about the dog that hasn’t barked being Trump.

So what does it mean that Trump is the “dog that hasn’t barked”?

Palmeri: I’ve never heard that phrase before. Apparently, it’s like a Britishism that harkens back to Sherlock Holmes.

Bryant: This is from an email exchange between Ghislaine Maxwell and Epstein on July 2, 2011.

I think they’re talking about whether someone is leaking information to law enforcement. Epstein writes, “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him.” Then he says he’s 75 percent sure it was Trump. My interpretation is that he has mostly concluded that Trump told law enforcement about this girl at Epstein’s house.

What’s difficult about this is we don’t know what time they’re talking about. It’s not his initial arrest: It’s very obvious that Trump did not play a role in the 14-year-old coming forward that led to Epstein’s arrest in 2007.

The White House has said the victim in question here is Virginia Giuffre, who said Trump never molested her.

What do these emails show about Trump and Epstein’s relationship that we did not know before?

Palmeri: Epstein was very much obsessed with Trump. He really seemed to be angry at Trump. There was venom.

He probably felt like he knew him better than anyone. He was probably a little flabbergasted that Trump had made it that far, frankly. And they were pals. They were trying to make their names in the same social circle. I think for Epstein, like a lot of people, he was probably thinking, I would like to get in on this. He was a connector. He was a keeper of secrets. He was always trying to get something — money, women, access to power, being at the right tables with the right people. So Trump at that point had the ultimate table of power and Epstein wasn’t there. You can see from the emails that he was scrambling trying to figure out how he could get one on Trump.

Grigoriadis: I was a little surprised to see him be so fervently anti-Trump. But also there’s only one email about the victim in which he said he spent those hours with her.

I would assume there are many more things he knew about Trump and could have said about Trump. So where are those emails? From what I’ve seen here, it’s as if Trump is almost scot-free. That’s the only email that implies that he’s not, right? So I feel like we still just have a tiny glimpse.

Belden: Trump is now acting like the guiltiest person I could even imagine, but these emails don’t show any kind of smoking gun or anything like that.

But the way Trump is acting raises so many questions about what could be in the larger files. Beyond a shadow of a doubt, Trump and Epstein were friends, and I don’t know really what Trump’s angle is in trying to pretend there was nothing going on. He does have angles to sort of wriggle out of some of the more damning associations with Epstein; he did stop being friends with him after a certain point. But his complete overreaction and his mobilizing of so many different parts of the federal government to squash this raise a ton of questions.

What about Epstein’s attempts to be an international power broker? Was he the real thing or posturing from the outside?

Belden: Epstein has been portrayed by various people at various times as either a complete bloviator and charlatan or as a really masterful operator. You see him here kind of split the difference.

It’s very clear that he has pretty high-level contacts all over the Persian Gulf and Europe. But at the same time, he’s trying to use some of his Norwegian diplomat friends to try to put in a good word with Lavrov to get him to mediate with Putin. So it’s clear he doesn’t have just total access to everybody, but he does have a pretty diverse international array of high-ranking contacts who relied on him and worked with him up until his death.

Palmeri: He very much still fashioned himself to be a power broker, but I think he’s more on the outside looking in. It’s still amazing how remarkably close he was able to get to Trump through Bannon, who holds on to a number of tapes we still haven’t heard from. Even through Wolff, who was chronicling Trump at the time and had access to him, he wasn’t that far away. He was one layer removed from President Trump, essentially, during that period — when he was scrambling to try to break through and either take him down or communicate to him or be on his good side. I feel like probably there’s nothing worse for someone like Epstein to feel like they’re on the outside.

Grigoriadis: It feels like he’s very adjacent and his point of view matters very little — and really only matters to the people he’s paying to take his views seriously. I don’t think you see a power broker in there. It feels like it’s just this group of these old dudes who are clinging to the last bits of power they have. I didn’t think about the Me Too implications quite as much until reading the emails. I was like, Oh, that’s of course why they also were drawn to him.

Bryant: The emails that really disclosed that Epstein was sculpting geopolitical events came from information from a hack by a pro-Palestinian group that was published on Drop Site News in September and this week.

The report says Ehud Barak — within a month of taking his post as Israeli defense minister in 2013 — goes to Mongolia and talks to the president. He reaches out to Epstein to put together this “Mongolia Presidential Advisory Agreement” to give the country a security state. The emails show that Barak reaches out to Epstein to help put this deal to sell cybersecurity surveillance to Mongolia. Then Epstein conscripts Larry Summers to be part of this advisory board to ensure that Israel sells these arms or whatever they’re trying to sell to Mongolia. So this really shows his power.

How about his long and chummy correspondence with Wolff? Did the journalist get too close to his source?

Belden: I think you could argue that Wolff’s brand of journalism necessitates him becoming sort of a co-conspirator. I think everyone knew Wolff was hanging out with Epstein. This just further proves it.

Grigoriadis: I do think what Tina Brown has said is right — which is that Wolff was playing him.

What have we learned about Epstein’s relationship with Bannon, with whom he was working to rehab his image?

Belden: It’s really interesting because you can kind of see Epstein get a little red-pilled. He starts out sending Bannon various articles about how Trump maybe has dementia and stuff like that. Toward the end, he’s congratulating Bannon and the Sweden Democrats for doing well in the elections there. He’s talking about meeting up with Sebastian Kurz, the right-wing former chancellor of Austria. He’s arranging deals for the Saudis to meet up with Bannon when Bannon is visiting with Alternative für Deutschland in Germany. You see their relationship grow through this as Epstein starts to feel himself as an international operator again.

Grigoriadis: I was struck by an exchange with Bannon in which Epstein is trying to set him up with a woman and Bannon very clearly does not want to be set up with this woman. You wonder, is it because he doesn’t want to go on a date, or is it because he’s like, Ha, no, Jeffrey, you’re not getting me. I’m not getting entangled in this web of yours. Which seems like the likelier scenario.

A massive release of Epstein materials may be coming our way in the next month. What should we expect?

Bryant: I am skeptical of this sea change from Trump and other Republicans after the November email release, when all of a sudden Republicans were willing to make a deal and start releasing documents. We’re not going to have justice in the Epstein case until there are indictments. I’m skeptical until there are indictments. Until then, it’s going to be the same old same old.

Palmeri: I still expect a lot of stonewalling. Pam Bondi is essentially Trump’s avenger, and she’ll do whatever he wants.

We probably won’t see the full story until after Trump’s administration because I think right now the risk of a DOJ whistleblower coming forward would be too great. They’d probably have to leave the country. They’re all taking polygraph tests, as we know.

Grigoriadis: It could come out completely redacted. It could just drip, drip, drip for the next 16 years. We could only get a tiny bit of it. I mean, I’m no expert on that process, but it does seem to me like the person in charge of the people who are releasing it only wants select things to come out.

I was surprised there wasn’t more about Bill Clinton and what was already released. So I mean, there’s going to be a lot about Clinton. I personally don’t believe it’s going to be about Clinton and underage girls, but I think it is likely there will be some embarrassing incidents and messages.

And then there’s the obvious question: Who was in this underage sex-trafficking ring? And what evidence do we have, and what punishments should be meted out? This is never going to happen, but my hope for this next phase is that we just focus on that and leave all the random salacious details of who knew who and how much money they had out of the picture.

Belden: There are serious questions that need to be asked about how involved Epstein was with various Gulf governments, how involved he was with connecting U.S. political actors to European politicians, and what his business dealings were. There’s a lot more to learn from that. We still don’t know how Epstein earned his money. It seems he only employed a handful of people but was running this multibillion-dollar business that we still don’t know what it did.

It’s tough to tell the full story with all of these because Epstein is smart enough to know that when things get a little complicated over email or text, he says, “Call me.” Jeffrey Epstein does not seem to be the smartest guy from the way some of these emails are written. But I think he’s smart enough not to write out a crime.

Interviews have been edited for clarity.

From Intelligencer - Daily News, Politics, Business, and Tech via this RSS feed