From xxxxxx <[email protected]>
Subject Jeffrey Epstein Is a Policy Issue
Date July 19, 2025 1:50 AM
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JEFFREY EPSTEIN IS A POLICY ISSUE  
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David Dayen
July 15, 2025
The American Prospect
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_ There’s an incorrect belief that the Epstein case is somehow
separate from the real concerns facing America, a conspiracist
concoction. But it’s actually about the two-tiered system of justice
and accountability in America. _

Feds announce charges against Epstein's alleged accomplice Ghislaine
Maxwell, screen grab

 

Donald Trump always demands public adulation, and he probably feels
that it should be peaking now. He’s realized such longtime
conservative dreams as damaging America’s social safety net and
cementing a grossly unequal tax code. He’s bombed Iran with no
immediate repercussions, even if it was more of a glancing blow to
that country’s nuclear ambitions. He’s dropped border crossings
significantly. He’s benefiting from a Supreme Court catering to his
every wish
[[link removed]].
He’s even announced an investment in, and advance market commitment
for, a rare earth minerals mining company that the Biden
administration’s industrial-policy leaders would have gladly
implemented [[link removed]].

And yet he’s losing his MAGA base over Attorney General Pam
Bondi’s abrupt closure
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the Jeffrey Epstein case. After leading his followers along that his
administration would investigate and release information about the man
who purportedly committed suicide in prison while awaiting prosecution
for sex trafficking, Trump has tried to shut it all down and yelled at
anyone focusing on what he termed old news. His base feels angry and
betrayed, condemning Trump on his own social media site
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Even inside the administration, figures from the podcast world like
Dan Bongino are furious
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_MORE FROM DAVID DAYEN_ [[link removed]]

Democrats, who have mostly ignored Epstein for the past several years,
are finally
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Epstein-Trump connections in speeches. But it feels like their
now-standard second-term tactic of using whatever’s available to get
under Trump’s skin, without really grappling with the underlying
policy issue.

Yes, I said policy issue.

There’s an incorrect belief that the Epstein case is somehow
separate from the real concerns facing America, a conspiracist
concoction untethered to reality. But it’s actually about the policy
issue I’ve probably spent more time writing on than any other in my
career in journalism: the two-tiered system of justice and
accountability in America, and the impunity we afford the nation’s
elites.

For a scandal that’s supposed to be shrouded in mystery, the details
of the Epstein case are pretty well known. With the help of associate
Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein procured young girls as high-class
prostitutes for a fairly broad cross section of U.S. and global
elites. We have Epstein’s black book
[[link removed]], which includes nearly 2,000 names of
associates and clients. We have the flight logs
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his private jet and its passengers. We have searing documentary
testimony
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the girls who were pushed into servitude at his pleasure. We know
that Bill Gates
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Clinton
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Andrew
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Summers
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Larry Page and Sergey Brin
[[link removed]], former
Disney CEO Mike Ovitz
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founder Reid Hoffman
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and many, many more had either meetings with Epstein, visits to
Epstein’s private island, or have been subpoenaed for information
about either or both.

It’s a failure of both parties to hold anyone responsible who has a
certain degree of power and authority.

And we know that among Epstein’s associates was his neighbor Donald
Trump [[link removed]]. There are
pictures and videos from parties, seven trips on Epstein’s private
jet, numerous comments by Trump on how fun it was to hang out with
Epstein and his coterie of young girls, connections between girls
allegedly put into service by Epstein and their employment at
Mar-a-Lago, and even direct testimony from Epstein himself. Audiotape
released last year reveals Epstein saying
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he was Donald’s “closest friend for 10 years.”

Even things we supposedly don’t know, like the source of Epstein’s
wealth, are _also_ pretty clear: He obtained power of attorney
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the estate of The Limited and Victoria’s Secret founder Les Wexner
in the late 1980s, from which he appropriated bunches of money for
himself. He was paid hundreds of millions more by Apollo’s Leon
Black
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In other words, a set of crimes perpetrated by a wealthy guy reached
into the heights of the political and economic stratosphere, and went
largely unpunished for decades. Yet another Trump connection, his
original labor secretary in the first term, Alex Acosta, issued a
secret non-prosecution agreement
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Epstein in 2008 when he was a U.S. attorney, which allowed Epstein to
enter guilty pleas for state charges and avoid federal charges or jail
time.

Epstein was thereby able to continue his activities for another
decade. But the year 2008 featured unpunished crimes of a different
kind. It was the year of financial crisis, after banks committed
industrial-scale fraud to collapse the world economy. Once the fallout
hit and defaults of mortgages spiked, the banks covered up their
crimes with millions of fraudulent documents to cure fatal defects in
foreclosure cases. Nobody went to jail.

That same year, 2008, Barack Obama was elected president and adopted a
policy of looking forward, not backward, at the numerous instances of
illegal torture committed by the Bush administration. Nobody went to
jail.

As Chris Hayes recounted in his first book, _Twilight of the Elites_,
this was just part of an emerging loss of faith in institutions,
whether byproducts of the failure to stop 9/11, the bogus rationales
for war with Iraq over weapons of mass destruction, or the
overwhelming evidence of pedophilia in the Catholic Church. And  this
“rot at the heart of our democracy,” as I put it in my 2016
book _Chain of Title_, was the thoroughgoing lack of accountability
for any of these failures. Powerful people simply were held to a
different standard than someone stealing ten bucks’ worth of candy
at a convenience store or selling dime bags of pot in the streets. Who
you were mattered more than what you did.

Everything about the Epstein case mirrors this. Everything about the
failure to sanction Donald Trump for violations of law and the
attempted overthrow of a free and fair election in 2020 also mirrors
this. It’s a failure of both parties to hold anyone responsible who
has a certain degree of power and authority. That goes for Epstein and
even more so for Epstein’s clients.

Trump’s true believers thought for some reason he would be
different, that he would blow up the system and leave no sacred cows.
Entire industries like QAnon were created to enable this categorical
error of faith. But it was pitifully easy to see in advance that Trump
was never going to release information about Epstein. When asked
directly before the 2024 election if he would, Trump hesitated
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and even when he said he would
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his words carefully. When Maxwell was convicted of sex trafficking,
Trump’s biographer said he considered a pardon
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of fear for what she would reveal, potentially about him.

Everything that happened next flowed from this. When the raw tape
showing Epstein’s prison cell the night before his death was finally
released, metadata of the video file showed it was not raw
but modified in some undefined way
[[link removed]].
Bondi claimed there was no client list, after earlier saying the
client list was sitting on her desk.

You don’t even have to believe that Trump is hiding some sort of
self-incrimination, though it certainly feels that way, to understand
MAGA’s disappointment. They wrongly built up Trump as someone other
than just another politician. They failed to understand that there’s
a big difference between accountability and revenge, and that Trump is
only interested in the latter. Accountability suggests a punishment
that fits the crime, and in 21st-century America we have never seen
such a thing. 

Elite impunity is actually one of the biggest problems facing society.
It turns people away from a system that fails them, sends them into
the arms of demagogues who promise to make it all right. That the
demagogue also was a charter member of the elite, who demanded
impunity for himself and his comrades, may swing the pendulum
temporarily back to the opposite party. And Democrats are right
politically and substantively to call for the release
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more information on Epstein, even to set up potential votes on it
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But only when someone is actually held accountable for their actions
will this sorry cycle be broken.

Certainly, MAGA overhype built the Epstein scandal into a key
unlocking an understanding of the entire world, which it probably
isn’t. A lot of liars and conspiracists used Epstein to channel rage
about globalists and liberals, when in reality he was a scummy guy who
didn’t serve any political party. That’s why it’s a harder fall
now; it tears apart the entire moral system these people built for
themselves. (That Trump is betraying MAGA
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other issues, like Ukraine
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becomes more noticeable and damaging amid the Epstein disappointment.)

But the larger policy issue tarnishes both parties, rooted in their
protecting the powerful from having to answer for themselves. So much
of the past 50 years, from the Nixon pardon to Chappaquiddick, from
the Lewinsky scandal to Bandar Bush, is explained by this simple
truth, that power sees itself as above the law. The public is sick and
tired of this disparity, which rings as deep and loud as economic
inequality and oligarchy. In fact, it signals the true flourishing of
inequality and oligarchy: that the wealthy and powerful are out of the
reach of the legal system.

_David Dayen is the Prospect’s executive editor. His work has
appeared in The Intercept, The New Republic, HuffPost, The Washington
Post, the Los Angeles Times, and more. His most recent book is
‘Monopolized: Life in the Age of Corporate Power.’_

Used with the permission. The American Prospect, Prospect.org, 2024.
All rights reserved. Click here
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* Jeffrey Epstein
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* elites
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* equal justice
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