← The Bulwark Podcast
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- [00:00]
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- [00:37]
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- [01:12]
Tim Miller
With all of this Epstein stuff that's been coming out over the holidays, it's been kind of tough to process everything and like understand what's really going on. And I assume for some of y', all, like you've been relatively new to the story and not been following it minute by minute over the past decade. And so it's a little bit head swirling. So I wanted to bring on Julie Brown who has been covering the Epstein case from the jump, having written the critical story that led to his second indictment. And so I want to grab her to talk about these recent files, but also just kind of take the lens back for everybody and you kind of rewind back to that period from 2015, 16, 17, 18 when the attention started to come back onto Epstein. He had been first, he was first in the 90s and then he first got that sweetheart deal and the aughts and then the story comes back into focus thanks to Julie Brown and the teens. So I wanted to kind of start there and give everybody a little bit of a timeline, a little bit longer lens perspective on this and then we get into the news as well. So so much has been happening for Julie. She's so busy right now. I appreciate her taking the time to talk with all of us about that. I hope you enjoy it. Up next, Julie K. Brown. Hello and welcome to the Bulwark Podcast. I'm your host Tim Miller. Could not be more delighted to welcome to the show. Somebody I've got to know a little bit over the past few Years. She is a writer for the Miami Herald. She wrote the Perversion of Justice series and a book on all the things related to Jeffrey Epstein. It's Julie K. Brown. How you doing, Julie?
- [03:07]
Julie K. Brown
Hi there. I'm doing good.
- [03:08]
Tim Miller
You know, sometimes in podcast land, you glaze the guests a little bit. You know, you want to make them feel important and seem important to the audience, so you kind of talk about their highlights. I don't know that that's necessary here for you. And your role in the Epstein files was just so significant. And as we were kind of looking through various things that came out, there's this one email that caught a couple of people's eye that I wanted to read about the significance of your work in that Perversion of Justice series at the Miami Herald. We'll get into all the redacting. They're redacting who these emails are from and too, for some reason. But it's an internal DOJ email, and one person emails to someone else. Are we open on this? Can we be like, are we open on investigating Epstein? And then it has a link to your story? And then the person replies, yes, we're open as of today. It's on the DL for now. And so, you know, this is a guy that had been investigated many years prior, got out, was dormant for a decade. And then you begin this series, and it kind of starts this cascade, including the investigation that ends up getting him arrested. I assume you knew all that at some level, but that was pretty remarkable to see. And I'm just wondering if you could kind of take our listeners back before we kind of get into the new stuff to that period and, like, what was happening at that time that got you back into the story?
- [04:27]
Julie K. Brown
Well, there were a lot of things. Donald Trump was running for president for the first time, and I saw an article that had been written about this woman who had filed a lawsuit against him and Epstein, accusing him of, you know, raping her, essentially.
- [04:42]
Tim Miller
This was Katie Johnson.
- [04:43]
Julie K. Brown
This is Katie Johnson's case. Yes. And it sort of just brought it up again in my head. It wasn't like I said, oh, I'm going to investigate the Gatie Johnson story. I sort of thought, I remember reading about this guy and that he had sexually assaulted all these underage girls in Palm Beach. And whatever happened to this guy, I mean, it seems like he's still out there. And so I just started sort of looking into, you know, what had happened. And it just seemed, you know, like, why did this guy get away with this if he raped all these Girls. And there seemed to be just tons of information in court records that showed that they had a lot of evidence to convict him. So I thought, well, the only way I'm going to really understand this as an investigative reporter, instead of reading what everybody else has written about him, I wanted to look at all the raw material that they had from the very beginning and evaluate it from that point perspective, rather than just writing what other people had written or taken everything that had been written as being com a complete record of why he got away with it or how the crimes were committed. So essentially was sort of a fact finding mission. You know, to me it seemed like a cold case. Nobody was really looking at it at this period of time. Even though there now was a woman that was accusing him and, and the soon to be president of sexual assault, it was pretty graphic lawsuit that she had filed about what had happened. So I thought, I'm just going to start at the beginning and find out who this guy is and how he got away with his crimes.
- [06:24]
Tim Miller
Yeah. And so if that's 2016, this article comes out in 2018, then there's a period of time that you. And also it's related with Alex Acosta is the person that's referenced in this initial story about who is the prosecutor Miami gets appointed to the Department of Labor. So it's Trump Anacosta.
- [06:39]
Julie K. Brown
As I was working on this, coincidentally, he nominated Alex Acosta as his labor secretary. And by that time, of course, I knew that Alex Acosta was the U.S. attorney in Miami who approved of his so called sweetheart deal. And I thought at the time he was maybe not even going to get confirmed because this was a pretty serious blight on his record. And so I thought it was possible, but it just seemed like they kind of smoothed over it. He sort of used the same lines he had always used, like, you know, we didn't know there were so many victims. A lot of the victims didn't want to cooperate. I mean, there was this whole line that he had over the years about why he decided to give him this deal. And so once again I thought, well, wait a minute, I've just gotten. By that time I had gotten the police report in the state attorney files. And to me it didn't look like that at all. It looked like they had a lot of young girls that were ready to cooperate. So I still had my day job, so to speak, because, you know, we had the Parkland shooting in, in the midst of this. I remember taking a break to help with that cover. And as you know, Miami is, you know, always full of crazy news, so I'd be doing other stuff in the middle of it, but I just kept coming back to this case.
- [07:53]
Tim Miller
And so you mentioned how you knew that there had been the other young girls that accused Epstein and had been victimized by him. So then part of that, like, period is you're cultivating relationships with them. Right. Or with some of them.
- [08:07]
Julie K. Brown
Well, that took a long time. That was a really long process because all their names were redacted from all the files. So I didn't know who they were. So I sort of came at it about three different ways. One, I tried to contact the lawyers who represented some of them, who by now were filing civil lawsuits against Epstein. Number two, I, you know, just did an old fashioned spreadsheet and started finding their names just organically in the files, you know, whenever they were talking about redactions with the Epstein files. As you know, a lot of the victims names weren't redacted from this batch that we just got over the past week and a half or so. So it was the same thing back then. There were mistakes that were made with the redaction. So I did get some names from the records themselves. And then once I got maybe five, six, seven names, I was able to figure out who their friends were through social media. And Epstein had a strange sort of obsession with girls that looked very, very young. Blond haired, petite, often blue eyed. I mean, he had a type. So it wasn't hard to figure out when you look at who their friends were, who possibly else could have been a victim. So it was a big puzzle that I sort of had to put together.
- [09:24]
Tim Miller
Yeah. I remember the last time we talked about this a couple years ago, you said that like, you were. You literally wrote some of them letters to try to get them to talk. Like handwritten letters.
- [09:31]
Julie K. Brown
Yeah, I wrote snail mail letters. Yep. I got addresses and I wrote about 80 letters, and I only got like two responses.
- [09:41]
Tim Miller
Wow.
- [09:41]
Julie K. Brown
But they were key. One of the girls was in my series, and she was a wonderful young woman who. Very articulate and who was key to my series.
- [09:53]
Tim Miller
And so I'm wondering then, as you start to talk to all those, I want to get to kind of present day and what we've learned in this latest batch. But I'm just curious about their perspective in all this. I assume that many of them you still talk to and communicate with and hear from. I could imagine a bunch of different things, like being sick of it, being passionate about wanting justice, like not trusting anybody, feeling like it's all political. Like, what is your near experience with the victims? Like, what are they thinking right now? Is this all is back in there?
- [10:22]
Julie K. Brown
I think it's all that. It's a range of emotions. You know, most of the ones that are pretty in contact regularly, they want justice. That's why they contact me regularly. They point things out to me that they see in the files or, you know, they just want to vent. You know, it's almost like I have another source who was involved in this story from the very beginning of this case, a law enforcement source. And we talk all the time because it's almost like we were there from the beginning and this, remember now it's been eight years. So it's sort of like we're in a club, you know, that we never really asked to join, but we're in this Epstein club. And there's very few people really that know this story, like every single document or most of the documents like I do. So there isn't a whole lot of people that are in this group that see something and will say, oh my God, did you see this? And it will be a, you know, something new or unnerving.
- [11:22]
Tim Miller
That's interesting. So some of the victims are like going through this, like researchers like reading stuff and looking for clues or looking.
- [11:31]
Julie K. Brown
For, oh, there's a couple of them that are really good investigators who spend time on the computer and look these people up and find out who, who's this person. And oh yeah, quite, quite a number of them are like that, really invested for obvious reasons. I mean, to some of them, I'm sure it's somewhat therapeutic.
- [11:52]
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- [12:08]
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- [13:09]
Tim Miller
So I want to get through what we've learned in this latest batch. The first, you're central in part of it, though, so I guess we should just cover that ground first, because this was a weird one. One of the things in this latest batch of files was a American Airlines flight record from 2019 with your name on it. Include your maiden name. So you're sure that that's your flight, not. Not another Julie Brown?
- [13:30]
Julie K. Brown
Well, it turns out it wasn't my flight. It was a flight that I had booked.
- [13:34]
Tim Miller
Okay.
- [13:34]
Julie K. Brown
But it was a flight for one of the victims that I was supposed to interview, ironically, the day after Jeffrey Epstein was arrested. This whole interview was planned well before. I mean, I actually booked the record, I think, in June. But the flight was for July, and it was for an interviewee, one of the victims. You know, I could say her name because she's been out there publicly. It was for Annie Farmer, who I planned to interview. I had never interviewed her or her sister Maria, who was the first to report Epstein way back in 1996. So, you know, it was hard to see because, you know, like, everything with this document reveal by the doj, it is like they put everything in a salad bowl and just threw it online. So it's hard. We still don't have the grand jury subpoena that pertains to this record that they obtained from American Airlines. The record is heavily redacted, except for, of course, my name. And so it is a little unnerving when you see your name, especially when they have your maiden name, which you don't even use publicly, attached to a grand jury subpoena. But it appears that they sort of just sloppily did this subpoena pertaining to some victims, I suppose. You know, the date of this grand jury is 2010. This was a record that they were signing in 2020, which was 10 years later. So you sort of look at it and say, what the heck were they doing here?
- [15:04]
Tim Miller
And do you have any sense what the heck they were doing there?
- [15:08]
Julie K. Brown
I've been talking to prosecutors today, and they said that they think that it was, you know, that they made a mistake with saying it was from a grand jury in 2010. But what they were probably trying to do, and we don't know for sure, was that they had requested all the flight records, probably for Maxwell, who we could see in there as part of these records, and some of his victims with probably one of them was Annie. So her record came up, and my name was attached to it because we. We booked the flight, we paid for the flight for her, for us to meet up with her and interview her. I mean, we really don't know for sure, but that seems to be what it is. But again, this is a product of the fact that they are throwing stuff out there. I mean, surely this was part of a file that had the grand jury subpoena next to it. Right. You know, when you do a file, when you're doing something, you put a file and you say, here are all my. Whatever it is, and then you have everything in the file there. They seem to not be doing that. They're throwing out the returns of the grand jury. Who knows? It could be weeks before we get that actual subpoena, because they have it somewhere else. They're throwing things online without. You know, there's been so many strange things. I mean, we saw that there was one pertaining to that letter that he, you know, may have written to Larry Nasser, and they just put that online. And you don't think that that was part of a file of things that they had on his death that they found in his cell, but they didn't put it online like that. So you don't know whether they even investigated who wrote that letter.
- [16:53]
Tim Miller
Yeah. And then they come out and say it's not a real letter, but it's like that's the one thing that they're denying is real. And it's not an orderly process. No, to say the least. So at the biggest picture, then, and it seems like one of your takeaways is that it's a total mess, but what other takeaways do you have for what we've seen so far in the latest batch of files?
- [17:14]
Julie K. Brown
Well, the question is, why is it such a mess? You could just say, well, you know, they had to do it fast. Or you could make all these excuses that would provide some kind of idea why they're doing it this way. Or you could say, which. A lot of the victims believe that they're doing this on purpose. One of the ways you be transparent is you actually release the files. And when you have something like a tip, an FBI tip, you have the paperwork that says right behind it. We verified that this is not Epstein's handwriting, and this is where it was mailed. And here's what we did about this tip. But they're not doing that. They're throwing stuff out there and they're doing it in such a disorganized manner that it does distract from what the real story should be. And in this case, the real story should be whether this was a corrupt deal and whether this is, is a cover up. And when you're focusing on the shiny objects, such as a Larry Nassar letter or there's like a million other examples I can give you, you're spending your time looking at that rather than what the prosecutors were doing behind the scenes to make sure that Epstein got a better deal than any other pedophile who ever committed this kind of crime has ever been given.
- [18:30]
Tim Miller
The COVID up element of it is just, well, and there's the original cover up of why you got that deal, right? And then now we've kind of this ongoing rolling cover up. It's like a reluctant one because they passed legislation now. But, you know, you look at the files and in addition to kind of what you're talking about, there's also strange redactions very favorable to Trump. Redactions like we're redacting the picture of him and Ghislaine Maxwell on Steve Bannon's phone, for example. There's another, I guess, report from some woman put forward about Trump and touching her nipples or whatever. And like, Trump's name is redacted, but it wasn't in a separate file. So you can figure out who it is. And so that is part of this. And there's a bunch of stuff that hasn't been released. Right. So how do you assess that? You know, like the ongoing cover up element of this?
- [19:18]
Julie K. Brown
That's all you can say, that it is a cover up because they're not providing the information in a, in a way that the public can really understand. Look, if I'm having trouble understanding what it is, the public sure as hell isn't going to be able to understand a lot of what it is. I see stuff all over the place with them saying, look at this. And they're explaining a document. I know the document isn't what they're saying it is, but it's not their fault. They don't really understand all the, you know, details of this case. And the government is making it almost impossible to do that.
- [19:53]
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- [20:06]
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- [21:09]
Tim Miller
So what are some things we've seen that have been noteworthy? Like one thing that jumped to my eye but again is maybe not understanding exactly what is there, was One of the DOJ docs references 10 co conspirators that they were looking into.
- [21:23]
Julie K. Brown
Right.
- [21:23]
Tim Miller
Massey has said that the survivors of God are the names of 20 men. So I don't know, I guess men might not be necessarily co conspirators. I don't know. What did you make of that revelation?
- [21:33]
Julie K. Brown
Well, we know that one of the men in that document, because that document, by the way, elsewhere in the record is not fully redacted. And the name in the document that is exactly the virtual is the same, reveals that one of the co conspirators listed in that document is Les Wexner, who is, as we know, Jeffrey Epstein's longtime client. I mean when I say client, I mean business. He was his only client for, he claimed for a long time. So we know that one of them is Wexner. I believe a couple of them could be people who worked for Epstein in the sense that they flew as planes. So they were, you know, furrying these girls. And they could have also been a couple of the assistants who were scheduling and recruiting girls. Those assistants names are now redacted because in, you know, in recent years after they've been interviewed, I believe by authorities by the sdny, they come to conclude that those assistants were in essence victims. You know, this was his M.O. he would recruit these girls and then use them as Sex objects. And when they got to be too old, as in 24, you know, a lot of these girls came from nothing, and so they had nowhere to go. So he hired them as assistants. So that's who I think some of the people are that are listed as co conspirators. You know, there were other names, a lot of names in here where they were redacted. So it's hard to know whether any of them were men who were involved with Epstein in any nefarious way.
- [23:13]
Tim Miller
The one thing that really strikes me from all this is that, okay, so especially if it's true, the 10 co conspirators aren't necessarily men. We have had accusations and allegations and reports that Epstein trafficked these girls to other men or shared them with other men at various parties or other things of that nature. And, you know, as I mentioned, Massie said he has the survivors have given him the names of 20 men at this point. What is the holdup in that? You know, like, is DOJ protecting people or do survivors not want to name folks because they're worried about legal ramifications? Are there not as many men as people think? Like, what do you think is happening with. Why there have been. So besides, like, formerly Prince Andrew and Les Wexner, like, there really aren't a lot of men's names being named at this point?
- [24:02]
Julie K. Brown
Well, they've named them me, so I know who. Who a lot of them are, but they won't tell me it on the record, only off the record, because they are afraid. I mean, think about it. Epstein got away with this almost cleanly the first time. Okay. In subsequent years after the sweetheart deal, there were more victims coming forward. He still was out there continuing to abuse women for, you know, a decade later. And in their minds, the fact that then he got arrested and he ended up dead, to be honest with you, a lot of them don't don't believe that he committed suicide. And they think that this is all one big government cover up. And so why would you put your neck on the line then and name all these men when you feel like there is a government cover up protecting the men? So I think that there is a understandable reluctance for them to trust the government in revealing these names because they feel like Epstein has been getting away with this and all these men now have been getting away with this for quite a long time.
- [25:07]
Tim Miller
So I understand their reluctance. But at this point, I guess you've got, I don't know, the oversight. They have some of these names right? Members of Congress, some of them could go to journalists. I certainly don't think anyone's going to feel satisfied. Certainly, I would assume not the victims, but I think the public, you know, if this release ends without other perpetrators being named, and I guess you're. Unless there aren't any other perpetrators, which you're saying is not the case, obviously.
- [25:35]
Julie K. Brown
No, it's not the case. There are. I don't know what the answer is. I don't think that they're going to reveal a whole lot because I think that the way that they are handling this so far shows that they've been, you know, reluctant, if not refusing to provide even basic information. I mean, they're redacting photographs of men in. In some of these files.
- [25:59]
Tim Miller
What do you mean?
- [26:00]
Julie K. Brown
We could tell that some of these pictures that they've redacted include pictures of men. I mean, you could just tell they are, you know, whether you'd see a suit jacket, you know, below and the face has big block black over it. I mean, there are people that have been redacted from these files. So. And we know that they removed one of Trump's photos, and then when they were called on it, they had to put it back in. So, you know, we can't trust these files are going to really reveal the story here, or the truth, I guess, is what we really want. And the way that they're doing it almost hides the truth.
- [26:40]
Tim Miller
Yeah. One of the interesting things that came out, there's a really long Marjorie Taylor Greene profile by Robert Draper that came out in the New York Times on Monday. And there's an interesting passage. Greene says that Trump was calling her. This was before that they'd passed the bill trying to berate her to not be on board with the Epstein File Release Act. She said that Trump said to her, my friends will get hurt if abusers were named. And then Greene said she told him to bring the victims to the Oval Office then and let them have a chance to say their piece. And Trump said to her that they had done nothing to merit the honor of coming there. And then she said she has never talked to Trump since. I thought that's pretty noteworthy. Again, who the hell knows? Trump's a liar, but for him to say my friends will get hurt if abusers are named felt pretty telling. Whether that's a cover or of himself being one of the friends or not, it definitely indicates that he is conscious of. And they are conscious of protecting people who are perpetrators in this release, those.
- [27:39]
Julie K. Brown
Men who know who they are. So it wouldn't surprise me if they were reaching out to Trump and saying, you know, you got to stop this, you know, and who knows what else they know besides their own activity. They might know of other men's activity. So this is one big possible snowball here. And, you know, it could be, you know, that they reached out to him and asked him to just not do this because it's going to lead not only to, you know, embarrassment but possible criminal allegations against people that he knows or gets money from. Donors. I was told that possible are in here. Some of his MAGA or Republican donors might be named in these files. Which is kind of ironic because he at one point he said, we're going to investigate all the Democrats that are in these files. Well, there aren't all Democrats in these files. This is not a, you know, right versus Left or Republican versus Democrat issue. This is sexual assault and it doesn't discriminate based on your political party. There are bad people on both sides of the aisle involved in this.
- [28:48]
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- [29:04]
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- [30:05]
Tim Miller
Just a couple more things on the trump of this I'm curious your take on there's just some of his obvious lies. In 2024, he posted the never been on Epstein's plane. This release is showing that he's been on the plane maybe eight times on the manifest for One of the planes, the document says it was Epstein, Trump and then 20 year old redaction. So we assume it's a 20 year old girl, young woman that was on the plane. It was just the three of them at one point. And then there's Trump and Maxwell stuff as well, their picture being together in Bannon's phone. You wrote a substack on your substack recently about Trump and Maxwell's relationship. So is there anything in what we've seen that at all informs your view on the extent of Trump's relationship, the extent of his exposure with Epstein and Maxwell?
- [30:54]
Julie K. Brown
Well, I think the biggest reveal, so to speak, is where Maxwell is sitting right now, and that is in a much cozier prison than she was in before. And she was moved there without really any explanation for the longest time. Todd Blanche just recently in a couple of days ago, said it was for her safety. If it really was for her safety, why didn't they announce that when they moved her? I mean, it seems odd to me that it took them, you know, how many months before they came up with that. So, you know, I just think that Maxwell is the key to this whole thing and the fact that she's now aiming for a pardon and that Trump hasn't. You know, I would think almost any other president or lawmaker who was asked that question would say, no way is she getting a pardon. She was convicted as abusing girls. I mean, she wasn't just his recruiter. She participated, according to her conviction and the testimony in court, she participated in the abuse.
- [31:56]
Tim Miller
Yeah.
- [31:56]
Julie K. Brown
So I do think that that is the key. And it's sort of, you know, these files being released like this, hundreds and thousands of them. You know, in the back of my mind, I'm thinking, what does Maxwell know? How did she get to where she is? Is she lining something up here? Her habeas corpus petition was interesting, by the way, that she filed because she alleged, you know, that she had an unfair trial on. The new evidence is being released now with these files that show even more that her trial was unfair and that there were constitutional violations. And one of the things she says is that there were settlements with, I think, don't quote me on the number, but it was around 25 men made out of court settlements, secret settlements in connection with Epstein, which I always thought that was what was happening. A lot of the men who, whose names I've been told were involved, who haven't been made public, I were likely making out of court settlements with their victims.
- [33:00]
Tim Miller
Well, that's maybe why Some of the victims can't talk too maybe. I would assume maybe the Maxwell being in that prison also has got to be the thing that makes the victims the most pissed at this point. I would assume far be it for me to get inside their head.
- [33:12]
Julie K. Brown
But yeah. Let me add another thing. As I understand it, I'm not a lawyer, but as I understand it, even if you make a out of court settlement, you know, with a NDA, if it involves criminal activity, you're still allowed to talk about it. So I just wanted to add that. So if they have criminal information, they shouldn't be bound by the NDA.
- [33:31]
Tim Miller
But they're also like the non prosecution agreements. Right too.
- [33:34]
Julie K. Brown
I don't think that any of them signed non prosecution agreements. The victims. I don't think so.
- [33:41]
Tim Miller
Right. So that was just a deal between, you know, the government and Epstein.
- [33:45]
Julie K. Brown
Yeah, Epstein. No, they didn't. I mean they subsequently talked to me even for my series. So even after receiving the settlement.
- [33:54]
Tim Miller
Speaking of some of those victims, you did post an enticing social media post, I must ask you, about which you said that you've received a lot of new information about girls and young women who were sexually trafficked in the wake of these files. Obviously, since you're in the middle of reporting, I'm not asking you to break any news, I'm just curious, what were you referencing this case in particular or just the broader question of powerful men going after young girls?
- [34:21]
Julie K. Brown
No, I'm talking to victims who either believe it or not, there are some victims around the world, for example, who don't live in our country, who don't get Epstein news around the clock like we are. So they weren't really aware of this story as much as we are here in the US So I've heard from some victims in other countries who now are getting this information and they are coming forward and saying, yeah, I was one of those models, for example, who he brought from XYZ country and put me up in this, you know, apartment home in, in Manhattan and promised to make me the next Victoria's Secret model and instead he just abused me. So I'm hearing from new people, I would say at least once a week and you know, they don't want to go public. They're afraid. You know, they look at what, for example, what happened with Marjorie Taylor Greene and how she sort of got attacked especially, you know, by Trump people and you know, and she claims she was threatened. And these girls were already really afraid to say anything to begin with because Epstein often said, you know, I'm going to make your life hell if you tell anybody about this. I mean, one woman said that he. He really investigated them, too. I mean, he found out one woman had a mother that had cancer. And he said, I'm gonna give you all the medical. They were poor. They didn't have access to great medical care. So he promised to get her mother the care that she deserved. So she went through with the abuse and, you know, and then she felt horrible about it. And he said, well, that's fine. I don't have to continue paying for your mother's medical care. You know, that's the kind of thing he did.
- [36:06]
Tim Miller
And the scale of this stuff is so it's like hard to even wrap your head around. It's unfathomable. I guess you must have felt that way reporting this out, like, feeling like there must be some end to the amount of victims at some point, but it's like the numbers are so vast. And when I was watching the documentary on this and then the local Palm beach police trying to figure out all of the girls who are at some point were brought to his house, and then now for you to say after all these years, there to be women who are overseas who are still reporting him, I mean, it's just truly, like, hard to kind of wrap your head around just the scope.
- [36:45]
Julie K. Brown
You have no idea that the number of calls I'm getting on a daily basis now, it's incredible. I mean, tips that I would have jumped at and written, you know, before all this happened, because they are good stories that I can't. I'm, like, trying to prioritize. It's completely overwhelming. You know, I fall asleep with my laptop beside me on the bed, and I wake up and pick it up as soon as I wake up in the morning. And I'm still, you know, answering emails and trying to follow up on all these tips. Now also I get the benefit, which I'm not complaining about at all, of some people who are really good with computers, who are able to decipher some of these documents that have attachments that I haven't been able to open. And they're able to figure out a way with whatever technology that they have that they're able to figure out. So I'm also getting tech people that are sending me stuff. So it's so much material, it's mind boggling.
- [37:43]
Tim Miller
Is there anything in all of that that you've learned recently or from these files or from those tips that has surprised you or that has made you feel like there's a new perspective on this that you haven't had. You've been doing this for so long now. Is it just all just incremental, like stuff that we already kind of knew?
- [38:02]
Julie K. Brown
I would say most of it is. The stuff that I'm getting is just more like, oh my God, this is worse than I thought. That's what I think every day. That's really what I think every day. This is worse than I thought. You know, this is like, wow, there are big people involved. And you know, and then like I said, when you see your name in the files, like the way I did, you know, people can fault me for like being an alarmist, I suppose, and that there being a logical explanation for me given the fact that I bought that ticket. But look, I, I'm absorbed in this for eight years and I've seen a lot. And so when you see something like that, I think it's just human nature to think, what is this? I'm human, you know, and I just, I'm trying to cope with all of this as best I can, you know, is all I can say.
- [38:58]
Tim Miller
And I think that speaks volumes just in itself, right? Like that you, and you've talked to these victims, you've read the reports, you've heard firsthand about the just unbelievable abuse they went through as young girls and for you to now say after all of that, after years of consuming all that, that you still think the bottom might be lower than you thought, that it might be worse than you realized, it's pretty striking.
- [39:23]
Julie K. Brown
Yeah. And there's so much like I get faulted a lot because everybody's a critic, right? No matter how hard you try and you know, I get faulted for not examining his alleged intelligence ties. It's just another whole big giant pocket of stuff, you know, I've got a million different rabbit holes and that's just another whole pocket of stuff that I quite frankly just haven't been able to have the time with, working a full time journalism job to dig into. That's like, you know, this is taking me just focusing on the victims is taking all my time.
- [39:59]
Tim Miller
It requires that amount of work. Right. And so, and I think it's obviously this is just. Was unbelievably important to work on the victims. It's, that's how this process started. They got him arrested again and refocused people on this heinous decades long crime. It was legitimate for people to ask about the other stuff that's out there. Like, I mean, I mean you don't rule out the intel stuff. I don't.
- [40:21]
Julie K. Brown
I mean, no, no, no. I think it's quite possible. This is a story that's big enough for a lot of reporters, you know, and I think that there are some people doing good work on his money picture the New York Times has been doing. Matthew Goldstein has been doing some great work on his finances. And so I try to focus on things that I know I can is more in my wheelhouse because it's just too big of a story for me to do everything.
- [40:49]
Tim Miller
The finance story I did find interesting. That Times finance story, you said, I'll put a link in the show notes for people that want to read it, because it does paint a picture of him as just a real scam artist. I think the last time we talked or two times ago, one of the questions I asked you was, what do we know about where he got his money? And it still is uncertain. And it does feel like he was shaking a lot of rich people down. And some of it may have been related to the girls, but some of it, I think, was related to embarrassment. If you're a rich person and you get Huck, you know, and a huckster comes in and takes your money, I think both of those things could be true. Right. That like some of the he was working with also were abusers, and some of them were just embarrassed so that they were so easily scammed by him. That was kind of one of my takeaways.
- [41:33]
Julie K. Brown
Right. Well, Leon Black, you know, he. He gave Epstein an awful lot of money that authorities right now are really, quite frankly, it's public that they're investigating why he gave Epstein so much money. So there's a million different, as I said, rabbit holes you can jump down with this case. There's the modeling interest part of it. Epstein had a modeling agency that he said that he was sort of modeling after Trump's agency, trying to do the same thing.
- [42:01]
Tim Miller
Right. I was going to say that ties into Trump.
- [42:03]
Julie K. Brown
Yeah. And, you know, and then there's the intelligence part of it. There's the money laundering, slash whatever, you know, fraud he was doing. He had his hands in so many different things. I mean, he was getting ballerinas. You know, he had got a couple of girls from Interlock in the camp in Michigan for musical proteges. You know, he had a home there, I'm told, right next to the lodge where all the young girls were housed. You know, he had ties to Hollywood. You know, he. There's message pads there from. From Harvey Weinstein. There are actors. I'm hearing that you know, were associated with him. So it's big. It's big.
- [42:44]
Tim Miller
And he was such a connector in that way. Like, also, you know, like, the thing I keep going back to is that email between, I was reading the full exchanges of an email between him and Peter Thiel.
- [42:53]
Julie K. Brown
Yeah.
- [42:53]
Tim Miller
And it's like he's trying to get Peter Thiel. He's like, come to dinner with Woody Allen.
- [42:57]
Julie K. Brown
Right?
- [42:57]
Tim Miller
And Peter Thiel's like, that sounds interesting. I guess maybe I can do that sometime. I don't know. But it's like, well, what was happening there? And Peter, he was investing with Peter Thiel. Peter Thiel obviously is interested in young girls. He was really tied up.
- [43:09]
Julie K. Brown
Well, there's pictures, there's pictures of some of those dinners in the files with Woody Allen and other famous men that are in the same pictures at a table. Like, you know, that's exactly what he was doing. He was gathering all these people together.
- [43:25]
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- [44:41]
Tim Miller
So just kind of circling back on the trump part of it because I know it's what a lot of folks that are listening are interested in. And it's the big question right now is like, why the extent of the COVID up on this from him? We started. You mentioned the Katie Johnson accusations. When people talk about the Trump cover up, maybe he is just sympathetic to other rich guys and who have me too accusations. And him and Epstein were just pals running around. Maybe it is worse than that. Maybe these direct accusations about Trump have merit. Maybe there's intel elements to it. Obviously you don't know and you're not going to be the jury on this, but what do you make of the extent of the Trump potential exposure here?
- [45:24]
Julie K. Brown
Well, let me just start by saying I don't have any evidence and I haven't seen any concrete evidence, you know, as in on paper, with photographs, you know, scheduling books or whatever. I haven't seen any evidence that Trump, you know, was involved with his sex trafficking network. I haven't seen any hard evidence. But I think that the way that this has been handled by him and the Justice Department really should raise questions on the part of Congress as to why he was, you know, really browbeating, you know, members of Congress not to prove this and saying things like you mentioned that Marjorie Taylor Greene said that it's going to hurt a lot of his friends. That should be investigated. You know, all this should be investigated. And I don't think it should be a partisan thing. I think that the Republicans should want to investigate it, too. I mean, why, why did they release a couple of binders full of stuff when Pam Bondi said they were going to release, you know, everything and it was on her desk? I mean, there's some serious questions that I think need to be answered.
- [46:30]
Tim Miller
And now we have a million more files.
- [46:32]
Julie K. Brown
They said, yeah, and, and also the question should be raised about why did they say that there wasn't any anything here? You know, there definitely is stuff there. We're seeing some of the memos, we're seeing that there were 10 co conspirators, you know, and there might even be more that we don't know that because we don't have the files. But there's stuff there that shows that this was a massive crime and that there were a lot of, you know, people that were involved. And, you know, it doesn't seem like the government completely finished their investigation. It feels like they got Maxwell and then they said, you know, that's it, we're done here, we got her. I mean, the only thing, thing I could say in their defense is that it's very hard to convict people based on crimes that were convicted that long ago. If they were long ago, I think that they probably continued up until his arrest. But some of them certainly were from young girls from a very long time ago. And those cases are very hard to make, but there's other ways to make them. You know, Wyden is trying to get more of his financial information showing he was making these big payments and he's hit a brick wall with the Trump administration over that. So as they say, follow the money. So they should be looking at that and giving Wyden the room to get some of those records.
- [47:57]
Tim Miller
And again, this stuff's a long time ago. And so there is legal ramifications, but then there's also political and other reputational ramifications. It's like Trump says he wasn't on the plane with Epstein, he was on the plane with Epstein and a 20 year old girl. Like, why? What were they doing? Who is. You know what I mean? Like, to me it's like, right, and obviously, you know, if there was specific allegations or instances or accusations of rape or sexual assault or abuse, like that's important in its own right. But also it's like you knew what was happening. What did you think was happening when you were on a plane with a 20 year old girl? What do you think she was there for? You know what I mean? Like you knew at some level it was happening.
- [48:36]
Julie K. Brown
Right?
- [48:36]
Tim Miller
All right, the last thing I'll jump just really quick because I've seen you pop off a little bit on this is like the other thing was that Epstein's death happened during the first Trump administration. I know that on the right they tried to make this into a Hillary conspiracy theory, but Trump and Bill Barr were in charge when he died. His brother, Epstein's brother, now in this latest batch of files, claimed that he doesn't think it was a suicide and that Epstein was about to name names. Epstein, another thing from the files is, I guess said that his cellmate or whatever was trying to kill him 18 days before he died. Which is kind of a weird thing to say if you're planning to kill yourself. What do you make of all that? At the least, it feels like it hasn't been fully investigated.
- [49:18]
Julie K. Brown
No, it not only wasn't fully investigated, but the way that it was investigated was so incredibly slipshod that you have to wonder if they really were already convinced it was a suicide in their mind. So there was no need to investigate the possibility of anything else. And we know that I've interviewed the forensic pathologist that was at the autopsy, the one that his brother hired, who I've done a lot of work with in my previous reporting about. You know, I covered Florida prisons for many, many years, so I know the way that deaths happen in prison, deaths as in murders happen in prison. And he has quite a lot of experience in those kinds of cases, too. And he doesn't believe, for a lot of reasons that. That it was a suicide. And I actually don't believe it was a suicide because it was too soon for, I think, Epstein to give up. He had been only in jail for a month, you know, and he had a good chance of. I think he had a shot anyway at getting out, because the information that the SDNY had at that time were from victims in Florida, and his lawyers were going to argue that they would have been covered by that immunity deal that he made in Florida. So they had a good, you know, platform there to start with to get him off. You know, he was also, you know, right before his arrest, talking to Bannon and to other people about how to kind of smooth this story over that I had written to sort of make it, you know, at one point, I think they were trying to figure out a way to discredit me. So he had been through this ammo, you know, stuff before hiring private investigators and really digging into people. So I just think that it was too soon for him to just throw in the towel unless he was sick or something else was going on. His brother doesn't believe it. Neither does Maxwell, by the way. Maxwell doesn't think he committed suicide either. So those are the two people that presumably would know more about this, whether he was capable of it, than anybody else. But I just think it's. The whole thing was done really messy, and it just raises questions. The two guards that they charged, and they gave them sort of a deal, you know, so the whole thing just doesn't sit well. And the American public is pretty smart. They've probably read some of this stuff, too. And I think most people don't believe the suicide angle.
- [51:53]
Tim Miller
Oh, man. Julie Brown. Well, thank you for working through Christmas on all this, reading these files, taking these new tips. We appreciate you. I look forward to continue reading your work on your substack, which people should sign up for, and at the Miami Herald. You've been on this for, like, almost a decade now, but I think you might have another decade ahead of you. I don't think that this is going anywhere.
- [52:12]
Julie K. Brown
Oh, please. I know I want to retire at some point, but I think you're right, actually, this story is going to outlive me. You know, it's going to be like the JFK assassination, and it's definitely going to outlive me.
- [52:25]
Tim Miller
Wow. Well, happy New Year. Send me an evening of champagne and enjoyment and then get back to work. All right.
- [52:32]
Julie K. Brown
Okay. Thank you.
- [52:34]
Tim Miller
Thanks so much to Julia K. Brown for her time today. Tomorrow we will have a year end pod with one of my faves. Hasn't been on in way too long so I'm excited to get them back and we will take you into the New Year tomorrow and then give you a couple days off and we'll be back to the grind next week. So appreciate you all very much. See you tomorrow. Peace. I'm burying my brother today.
- [53:00]
Julie K. Brown
Today.
- [53:02]
Tim Miller
Today. Today. Forever Today. The Bulwark Podcast is produced by Katie Cooper with audio engineering and editing by Jason Brown.
- [53:15]
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