Epstein files

In America, important men don’t seem to suffer too much over their links to the late Jeffrey Epstein.Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Donald Trump, Howard Lutnick and Paolo Zampolli, among others, might regret their past friendships with the world’s most famous sex criminal. Certainly, they resent having to face pesky questions about it.But the story just rumbles on, darkly, a source of endless intrigue and gossip and conspiracy theories – sustained as it is by the occasional publicity jolt, such as last week when First Lady Melania Trump, apparently without the knowledge of her husband, decided to give a big public statement denying that she, er, something something Jeffrey Epstein.

Melania Trump’s bombshell statement yesterday on the Jeffrey Epstein affair needed subtitles. As she spoke it was all so odd. There had to be a subtext. Her choice of words and tone was so loaded it felt like there was another shadow statement underneath, and her shock appearance was just act one of this drama, prefiguring a much bigger statement to come. It was so astonishing for her to deny allegations that most of us had never heard about. We were left wondering what she was really trying to say. Her statement raised questions that hadn’t ever been asked before, and now we’re all wondering what the answers are When she said that the rumors about her "need to stop," did she mean the rumors about Trump and Epstein, or did she mean something else?

Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick admitted that he went on vacation, with his family, to Jeffrey Epstein’s private island in 2012. How very White Lotus! Suddenly, every ear in Washington cocked Lutnick’s way, like he was starring in an old E.F. Hutton commercial.  “My wife was with me, as were my four children and nannies. I had another couple with, they were there as well, with their children, and we had lunch on the island – that is true – for an hour.” Senator Chris Van Hollen of Maryland gave America this early Valentine’s Day present during ​a Senate Appropriations Subcommittee session on broadband funding – what was supposed to be a dull parliamentary proceeding along the lines of the hundreds that occur in DC every day.

It is not just in Washington that the Epstein files continue to dominate. In Westminster, the political reverberations of the Department of Justice’s investigation are threatening to bring down the British government. At the center of the drama is Peter Mandelson: a former Tony Blair aide who served, until recently, as Our Man in DC. Keir Starmer, the Labour Prime Minister, named him British ambassador to America last year, reasoning that the oleaginous uber-networker could be the nation’s "Trump-whisperer." But the DoJ’s initial email dump in September exposed the closeness of his relationship with Epstein, with whom he shared a love of power and money.

That’s it, I’m out. I’m finished with the Epstein scandal. This morning I read about a man who is on the cusp of cancellation because he once sent a flirtatious email to Ghislaine Maxwell, years before her crimes were known about. This is getting ridiculous. It feels like MeToo on steroids. There’s a medieval vibe of finger-pointing and rumor-mongering The man is Casey Wasserman. He’s chair of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics. And there are hollers for him to stand down. All because he once got digitally horny with Ms Maxwell. "I think of you all the time," he wrote in one email. "What do I have to do to see you in a tight leather outfit?" he asked. That’s it. A little bit of lame middle-aged wooing.

Bill and Hillary Clinton had a choice: face criminal contempt charges or come clean about their friendship with Jeffrey Epstein. After months of resisting, the former president and his wife have now agreed to testify before the House. Clinton will be the first former president to appear before Congress since 1983, when Gerald Ford discussed bicentenary celebrations for the enactment of the Constitution. An appearance of this gravity, however, is unprecedented; it may well mark the start of a true Epstein reckoning in America. The Epstein scandal has become a strange monster, hell-bent on devouring the old elite In typical Clintonian style, the couple presented their initial refusal as a principled stand.

One of the many mysteries surrounding the Epstein saga is Jeffrey Epstein the man. Beyond simple hedonism, his motives seem inscrutable – and how did he make his money anyway? The latest cache of released Epstein files has shed new light on his character. Part of what emerges is Epstein the compulsive video gamer, who was banned from online play due to abusive behavior and who liked to cruise anonymous online forums for odd genres of pornography. A December 2013 automated email to Epstein from Xbox Live (the online multiplayer feature for the Xbox console) informed him that he had been banned from the service due to “harassment, threats, and/or abuse of other players.

When I was a boy, Friday nights were time for a new episode of The Rockford Files, a show about a hapless ex con PI, played by James Garner, who lived on a boat in a California marina. Fifty years later, Friday nights are for a different kind of files: the Epstein Files. Usually, government saves Friday evenings for the kinds of things it doesn’t want the news to cover, and the Friday before Christmas is generally a good place to hide. But in the age of the instantaneous news cycle in a world without a Santa Claus, they’re not going to get their holiday wish. This week’s episode of The Epstein Files involved several intersecting, ongoing plotlines with a common theme. The Democrats are constantly trying to swing and smack the Donald Trump piñata.

As an American who respects the constitutional role and historical continuity of the British crown, I view the recent congressional request to interview Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor with disgust. In early November, several of the most progressive Democratic members of the US Congress sent a letter asking him to participate in a “transcribed interview” regarding his past association with Jeffrey Epstein, with a response deadline of November 20. While Congress is free to seek information, the request carries no compulsory authority over a foreign national residing in the United Kingdom. In this context, the decision to issue such a demand – despite its unenforceability – is less an exercise of legitimate oversight than a symbolic, politically motivated gesture.

The main thing that has made the Epstein files seem politically (as opposed to morally) significant is that Donald Trump remains obsessed with preventing them from seeing the light of day. He thus devoted much of Wednesday to importuning Republicans such as Colorado Congresswoman Lauren Boebert not to back their release. “Only a very bad, or stupid, Republican,” Trump declared, “would fall into that trap.” But senior Republicans, as Politico reported, are expecting mass vote defections in the coming week as legislators prepare to vote for a disclosure bill sponsored by Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massie.

No sooner did Democrats in the Senate reach a deal to end the federal government shutdown than a frenzy of liberal pearl clutching ensued. The Democrats should have held out longer, they argued. Healthcare subsidies could have been rescued. Donald Trump’s approval ratings were plunging. Golly, maybe the Democrats could even have driven the dreaded Trump from office? Jonathan Chait’s verdict in the Atlantic was not untypical: “Senate Democrats just made a huge mistake.” Don’t believe a word of it. The surprising thing isn’t that Democrats folded. It’s that they held out as long as they did. In the end, the moderate Democratic Senators, ranging from Pennsylvania’s John Fetterman to Nevada’s Catherine Cortez Masto, made the right call.

In May, Sky News asked Lord Mandelson, Britain's Ambassador to the United States of America, if it was true that he’d stayed at Epstein’s Manhattan townhouse in June 2009, when the financier was in jail for soliciting prostitution from a minor. He replied flatly that he refused to answer any questions about Epstein. "I wish I’d never met him in the first place," was all he would say on the subject.  No doubt Mandelson would rather forget – and that we all now ignore – how he used to lavish praise on Epstein. “Wherever he is in the world, he remains my best pal!

“Who will guard the guardians?” That question, posed two millennia ago by the Roman poet, Juvenal, is just as relevant today. It recurs every time we learn of a new political scandal – or suspect one is being hidden from us.

The official rationale for closing the FBI investigation into Jeffrey Epstein stinks and President Trump must know it – even if he can manage to feign incredulity that anyone should still want to talk about the disgraced financier. "Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years," he responded testily on Tuesday to a reporter’s question at a cabinet meeting about whether Epstein had ever been an intelligence agency asset. "Are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable. Do you want to waste the time? I mean I can’t believe you’re asking a question on Epstein." Crucially, Trump didn’t deny Epstein was a spook, and neither did Attorney General Pam Bondi to whom he passed the question.

The death of the financier and pedophile Jeffrey Epstein at Manhattan’s notorious Metropolitan Correction Center has been ruled to be a suicide, and one that took place entirely by Epstein’s own hand, without any external interference. At least, that’s the story according to the Department of Justice and the FBI, who have also announced for good measure that the so-called Epstein Files, which supposedly contained the details of his high-profile clients, do not exist. After the disappointment of the decidedly low-profile release of the JFK-assassination files earlier this year, this is a second blow for conspiracy theorists who have been assured by the government that there is definitely, 100 percent nothing to see here. Will this be enough for them?