Last week, the White House took a stab at transparency by distributing binders of files related to the late financier and child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to a number of prominent far-right influencers. The idea was that these people would comb through the material — what U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi had labeled “Epstein Files: Phase 1” — and share their findings with their millions of followers, demonstrating the Trump administration’s commitment to freely sharing information with the American public.
The move backfired completely. What Bondi had teased on Fox News and then released was mostly pages of Epstein’s contacts list and flight logs from private jets he used, both of which have been public for years (and in less redacted form). Conspiracy theorists eager to see the so-called “Epstein client list,” of which there has never been any evidence, called the disclosure a farce and renewed their usual claims of an ongoing coverup. Bondi alleged that FBI agents in the New York field office had withheld more documents, and demanded them in a letter to bureau director Kash Patel.
On Monday, she again appeared on Fox News to claim that the agency’s headquarters had received a “truckload of evidence” amounting to thousands of additional documents, which would eventually be published with redactions to protect the identities of victims and possibly for reasons of “national security.” Meanwhile, the White House reportedly devolved into recriminations around Bondi’s original stunt and tried to assuage the MAGA loyalists who had used their large online platforms to criticize it.
It’s anyone’s guess as to whether Bondi will ever drop a “Phase 2” binder. But if she does, it’s unlikely to satisfy the rabid Trump supporters who seem to believe there are secret papers that prove their high-profile liberal enemies abused the underage girls whom Epstein lured into his sex trafficking scheme along with his associate Ghislaine Maxwell.
“Basically, his telephone directory and flight logs somehow got molded or misconstrued into the into this idea that there’s some kind of a client list,” explains Julie K. Brown, whose investigative coverage of the Epstein case for The Miami Herald has won multiple journalism awards. “And as far as I know, there is no such thing. I’ve never heard in all the hundreds of people that I’ve spoken to, the victims, all the court testimony that I’ve read — and I’m telling you, I’ve read almost every single civil lawsuit that was filed, every single piece of discovery that was filed — I have never, ever heard or seen anything referring to a client list.”
Despite the likely nonexistence of this fabled list, there are other aspects of the Epstein story that could be clarified in the years to come, should the right materials come to light. Here are a few big lingering questions.
When Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 after his arrest on federal sex trafficking charges, his death was ruled a suicide by hanging. This set off years of conspiracy theories about how powerful individuals connected to him might have ordered him murdered to protect themselves, though none have been substantiated.
Brown says that while the Department of Justice did release their conclusions from an investigation into Epstein’s death, identifying serious failures by the staff of New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center, “they didn’t provide the underlying documents.” These would presumably include interviews with other inmates, guards, and medics, she explains. The autopsy on Epstein has also not been released. Withholding this material means we don’t have full transparency on exactly how Epstein died before facing trial.
One way to immediately shed more light on the Epstein saga, Brown says, is for the Federal Bureau of Investigation to unredact the thousands of pages of files from their probes, dating all the way back to 2007, when they took over an investigation of the financier by the Palm Beach police. The FBI has technically released a huge volume of that material on its online “vault” portal, though with much of it blacked out.
“A lot of the redactions, if you really look at those documents, they’re completely unnecessary,” she says. “They redacted Jeffrey Epstein’s own name out of some of those documents. In other words, it’ll say, ‘We went to [blank] house in Palm Beach,’ where there were reports the girls were at this person’s home’ … it’s almost a joke.”
It’s impossible to say what else in the FBI files, yet they would no doubt offer crucial insight into how law enforcement approached Epstein as a criminal target — including, perhaps, whether they looked into his financial records and how he amassed a net worth of approximately $560 million by the time of his 2019 arrest. If these papers are made public, Brown says, “We’ll get a better feel for who exactly the FBI interviewed and how much evidence they really had back then. But that’s not going to put people in jail, even if we do find out those answers.”
The vault files could also paint a picture of whether the FBI failed to do its “due diligence” when it first went after Epstein in 2006, Brown says, or, if they did, that “the Justice Department didn’t take it a step further and bring [federal] charges.” Epstein’s lawyers got him a secret non-prosecution agreement for pleading guilty in 2008 to state charges on soliciting prostitution from a minor, and he served barely any jail time.
“Part of the reason why all these conspiracies exist is because the government hid the truth all these years,” Brown adds. “They hid things that they didn’t have to hide.”
The U.S. Marshals Service, thanks to a Freedom of Information Act request from The Miami Herald, in 2019 released some of the forms from their inspections of Epstein’s plane as it traveled between New York and the U.S. Virgin Islands. Passenger names were recorded in these reports, but the documents appeared in fully redacted form, concealing details as to who flew with Epstein and when they did so.
The Federal Aviation Administration, meanwhile, has not shared its full records about the travel history of Epstein’s various planes over the years.
That Epstein was able to get away with his crimes for so long — and secured his so-called “sweetheart” plea deal on state charges in 2008 while avoiding federal prosecution — has raised speculation that he was in with some intelligence agency or another that protected him (at least for a while). He liked to tell stories that suggested he was a “fixer,” consulted world leaders, and knew his way around illegal international markets.
But while Epstein was “very well-connected,” as Brown notes, there is no conclusive proof that he acted as an asset for U.S. intelligence or foreign powers. Instead, we only have accounts from his one-time associates, like the late fraudster Steven Hoffenberg, who told journalist Vicky Ward in a 2002 prison interview that he remembers Epstein alluding to work on “national security issues” that required “blackmail, influence trading, trading information at a level that is very serious and dangerous.” Anecdotes from such sources are, of course, far from conclusive.
There were indications that computer hard drives had been removed from Epstein’s Palm Beach and Manhattan homes before law enforcement searches of the respective properties more than a decade apart. It’s unknown what might have been stored on them or whether the FBI was able to recover or examine any of these. Computers that police did seize in Florida in 2005 did not yield evidence for prosecution. It’s not clear what was on devices obtained by the feds in the 2019 New York raid.
Epstein’s properties were equipped with video cameras. Whether any recording have survived is a mystery.
We don’t know what kind of evidence or testimony was presented during two federal grand juries related to Epstein’s activities, since those proceedings are secret. We also don’t have the evidence from the 2021 trial in which Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted of child sex trafficking (The Miami Herald‘s FOIA requests for this material have been denied), or the U.S. Virgin Islands’ civil racketeering lawsuit against Epstein’s estate following his death, which was settled out of court. Neither do we have all the government information from a suit that some of Epstein’s victims filed against the FBI.
The number and scope of legal proceedings with Epstein at their center, going back almost two decades, are why Brown immediately had doubts as to Bondi’s promises to deliver maximum transparency in her document drop. “I, quite frankly, question whether she understood the case at all,” Brown says. “The way that she was saying, from the get-go, ‘I have the file on my desk,’ I’m thinking to myself, there’s no way she could have the Epstein file on her desk. That file would fill a freaking room.”
“It just seems to me that she didn’t understand from the very beginning how massive this case is, and how many years it spanned, and how many people were interviewed, and how many court cases led to discovery,” Brown says. “It’s not as simple as getting a file on your desk that you decide to just release. It’s way bigger than that.”
Which is why the people who keep hyping up an all-encompassing Epstein bombshell are bound to be disappointed again and again. Some pertinent facts may still trickle out. Others will remain buried forever. And justice is never really complete.
From Rolling Stone US
