Last November, Congress overwhelmingly passed, and the President signed, the Epstein Files Transparency Act. The Act was spurred by the delay, despite the Trump administration’s campaign promise to make it all public on day one.
If you haven’t been paying attention, Epstein was a wealthy financier who had a hankering for young girls. He was also very effective at cultivating relationships with many rich and powerful people whom he invited to his pleasure islands. People generally assumed these cohorts, but maybe not all, also partook in the nubile flesh his top recruiter, Ghislaine Maxwell, convinced or coerced to visit the islands.
Attracted as we are to scandals involving the rich and powerful, Americans of all persuasions demanded an accounting of the government’s actions in Epstein’s case. They also wanted to see their evil political and cultural opponents skewered by publicly shaming their involvement, if not actually seeing criminal justice done.
On July 6, 2019, Epstein was arrested at Teterboro Airport in New Jersey and charged with sex trafficking and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking. Less than three weeks later, he was found in his cell with neck injuries. The jail placed him on suicide watch, but dropped that on July 29. On August 10, Epstein was found dead in his cell, officially by suicide, at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in Manhattan.
In July 2020, his procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, was arrested in New Hampshire. By the end of 2021, she’d been convicted on five of six counts, including sex trafficking of a minor.
Child sexual abuse almost always ranks #1 or #2 in surveys ranking the evil of crimes. Sexual abuse of people who’ve not yet reached the age of majority is rated as more “severe” than the murder of an adult because children are viewed as the most “innocent” and “vulnerable” victims.
This is why the Epstein Files are so explosive. It’s not just about “crime”; it’s about the specific category of crime that occupies the most “hated” spot in the human psyche. And if our favorite despised political leader is exposed for being close to the crime and criminals, so much the better.
Late on the 19th, the Bondi DOJ released several thousand documents, many of which were seriously redacted, along with some photographs. Roughly 4,000 files were in that first batch, followed by subsequent batches over the following days (including a larger dump of 30,000 pages on December 23).
There were many never-before-seen images from the FBI searches of Epstein’s Manhattan and Virgin Islands homes. The files contained numerous photographs and references to prominent figures, including Bill Clinton, Donald Trump, Prince Andrew, Michael Jackson, and Kevin Spacey. Each is known to have out-of-the-ordinary sexual piccadillos.
On Christmas Eve, the DOJ announced that federal prosecutors and the FBI had suddenly “uncovered” more than a million additional documents that had previously been overlooked.
Representatives Ro Khanna (D) and Thomas Massie (R), the original sponsors of the legislation, have accused the DOJ of failing to comply with the law and have threatened “inherent contempt” proceedings against Attorney General Pam Bondi.
Since Epstein’s suicide in 2019, the question of what the government knew, and when it knew it, will roil the political landscape into 2026.
By Christmas week, after the press had digested the released documents, it was apparent that something wasn’t quite right. Social media posters went berserk, condemning the AG and the White House for covering up the truth. A condemnation familiar to those of us who lived through the more than two years it took for the Watergate crimes to undo Richard Nixon.
The reason it didn’t happen overnight—and why people often compare it to modern investigations like the Epstein files—is that the “cover-up” works for a long time. Despite the break-in in June 1972, Nixon went on to win re-election in a historic landslide in November 1972 because most of the public still viewed Watergate as a “third-rate burglary,” beneath the dignity of a U.S. president. It took months of investigative reporting and a dedicated Senate Committee to slowly identify the conspiracy between the burglars and the White House. The scandal became fatal to Nixon’s presidency when one of his henchmen betrayed him and revealed the existence of the White House taping system in July 1973. It took another year of legal battles, including a Supreme Court ruling, before Nixon was forced to turn over the “Smoking Gun” tape that proved he ordered the cover-up.
History shows us that people in government offices, from the top down, often cover up the skullduggery and deception of powerful people and interests. Frankly, we shouldn’t be surprised at the Epstein delays.
And that’s why folks shouldn’t recoil from public service, but actively get in and clean things up.
