A (3:51)

So let's contextualize a little bit. Do you believe that all the women were for him, girls and women?

B (3:57)

That's a good question. I mean, what I believe, I don't know. That's a tough question. My hunch is that no, they were not all for him. What the facts show so far is that there were and he certainly had a voracious appetite for young women and girls over the years. And we've seen examples certainly of, and I don't know what the intent was initially, but we've certainly seen examples of him sending young women and girls to go entertain or massage or otherwise interact with some of the very powerful men who were in his life. And so, you know, that certainly was happening. Whether that was the goal of importing these women, I don't know if I have the answer to that question. But that certainly was the effect in at least some cases.

A (4:44)

What has come out in the Epstein files that is most interesting to you?

B (4:48)

God, I don't even know where to begin on that. It's so much right. And I have a feeling my colleagues and I at the Times have spent the past, what, almost two months now doing very little aside from going through these files. And we have a big team, we have good technology and I would say we're maybe 10% through, maybe 20% through. But so far, to me, look, we've been very focused at the Times, and in particular in this little group that I operate with at the Time Times, on following the money and on how Epstein made his money, who enabled him, who paid him, where the money was going, which banks and other institutions he was working with. And so that is my personal bias as to what's interesting here. So I've been really fascinated seeing kind of the inner workings of some of these big banks like Deutsche bank, like JP Morgan, like Bear Stearns, that were supporting him for year after year after year. I've been really interested also in seeing what's been going on with some of his most powerful benefactors, whether it's Les Wexner or more recently, the private equity tycoon Leon Black. And we've just gotten these just incredibly unvarnished looks inside. Not only the emails that these guys were exchanging among, amongst each other, but also their finances. And Justice Department has been a little bit lackadaisical in terms of what it has redacted and what it has not redacted. And you know, sometimes that has ended up compromising some victims privacy, which is bad. On the other hand, we've gotten just enormous amounts of transparency about the finances of a lot of people whose finances tend to be a very closely guarded secret. So as an investigative journalist, that's just been extremely interesting to me.

A (6:25)

Well, other than the snoopy, the snoop interest in other people's money, the basic question of where he got the money and why he got the money, do you have on that?

B (6:38)

Well, I think, you know, the answer varies from year to year and decade to decade. But and going back to his origins in the 1970s in New York, there is one very clear pattern that repeats itself over and over again across the decades, which is that Epstein, first and foremost was a con man. He was a liar, he was a thief, he was a fraudster. He was also a sexual predator. But the thing, even long before he became a sexual predator, he was a con man. He was stealing other people's money, people's money with schemes both small and large. And that, as far as we can tell, is how he originally started making his money. And it certainly by the time he moved on to Les Wexner, the guy behind Victoria's Secret, in the late 80s and early 90s, he was just over and over again running these kind of fraudulent schemes and sometimes just outright stealing money from people. And he know that is not entirely consistent with, I think, the, some of the mythology around Epstein, which holds that this guy is a financial genius and, or is, you know, associated with intelligence networks or things like that. He looks a lot more to us like a common criminal in that, in

A (7:45)

that context, he got caught up in the tower financial scam and he got off when a lot of other people did not. Why do you think that was? And to bait the answer, do you think it was because he became a government informant?

B (8:01)

Well, so I don't know if you want me to go into the history of that scam, but I've actually just been researching that right now for a book I'm working on on this topic and it really, it's interesting The Tower scandal happened in waves starting in the 1987, going into the early 90s. And, you know, Epstein's original involvement with that was on a kind of a micro level where he was basically looting these two Illinois insurance companies and using the money to try to fund hostile takeover bids on Wall Street. And he was definitely involved in that. By the time Stephen Hoffenberg, who was the guy who ran Towers, was perpetrated this huge $400 million Ponzi scheme, Epstein's involvement is a little bit less clear. I'm not saying he wasn't involved. He probably was. Hoffenberg has always said that he was involved, although Hoffenberg is also a liar. But look, there is clear evidence that Epstein. When the Feds were investigating Towers in the early 90s, they initially viewed Epstein as a major suspect in that there are records of a federal grand jury thinking about bringing an indictment against Epstein. And ultimately they didn't. And as far as I can tell, the reason they didn't is that Epstein did start to cooperate with the Feds in that case. Now, that does not necessarily mean he was cooperating in other cases, but, you know, this is a pattern that, again, we will see repeating as the years pass, which is that Epstein, for all his many sins, it was very adept at kind of sensing when a ship was going down and jumping off that ship and getting immunity or some sort of softness for himself by at least making a show of pretending to cooperate with the Feds. And we do not know for sure if that is, in fact, what happened in the Towers case, but it certainly appears to be the case.

A (9:49)

What is your best guess as to how he was able to collect these friends and this salon effect of influential and players and celebrities?

B (9:59)

You know, I think it's a whole cocktail of reasons, and I think money begets money, influence begets influence. When you are, you know, rolling with a private plane and a private island and a private helicopter in the largest private residence in Manhattan, you know, people want to be your friend when that. When that private residence is bedecked in photos of you with, like, world leaders and billionaires and cultural and social luminaries, it makes it more appealing to be seen with that person. And so I think this kind of builds on itself. But I also think that in some cases, with some very powerful men, Epstein was providing not just the opportunity to make money, but also the opportunity to procure young women or perhaps girls. And I think that it would be, you know, it's easy to kind of look past that and the evidence of that is limited, but, you know, because there's just not that much written documentation that ever occurred around that. But there certainly there's enough smoke there that it seems clear that at least in a handful of cases involving a handful of very wealthy, very powerful men, that was indeed happening. And it may well have been happening a lot more extensively than that. We just do not have the actual proof to make that case.

A (11:15)

How, when there's so many communications, when you have Ghislaine Maxwell, how is there no evidence other than Bill Gates cheated on his wife, you know, and a couple of these guys took pictures? How, with all these women and all the allegations they've made, or are we deceived by the volume and do we exaggerate the reach? How do you explain why there haven't been more men exposed with all these survivors involved who keep saying they've given names?

B (11:50)

Yeah, well, I mean, one of the things that we've seen just with the release of the Epstein files in the past couple of months is that you can start attaching some names to this. And there are allegations that have been made against people like Jess Staley, who is a top executive at JP Morgan, like Leon Black, who is a top private equity executive. And both of the men deny the allegations. But these allegations have been made, and. And there is no question that some women who were young women who were connected to Epstein also ended up, in some cases, apparently having sexual relationships with these men. And you can talk about what constitutes consent, and you can talk about the judgment that that would involve getting women from someone who is a convicted sexual predator. But, look, I think the truth is that part of the reason Epstein's network was able to survive as long as it did is that the. The combination of having, for all intents and purposes, unlimited money and having a lot of friends in high places meant that even maybe that doesn't automatically get you out of jail free, but it makes it very daunting if you are a victim or someone who is thinking about coming forward to do so. And I think that was by design. And part of the reason Epstein had pictures of himself with very powerful people all over his properties. Part of it was that he wanted other powerful people to see that and say, oh, I want to be part of that club. But I think part of it was also that he wanted the young women and girls, some of whom he was trafficking, to be frightened, that if they were to ever think about going public and telling the world what they knew and what they had seen, that they would be not just facing off against Epstein, but also facing off against all of his friends and allies. And that is, a lot of these women were not, you know, these are people who came from very damaged lives. And he was. Epstein was very savvy at picking people who had already been victimized and were already had endured trauma. And so, you know, and it seems like by design, he was doing that in part because it would be harder for those women to go public, and it would be less likely that they would be believed. And, you know, it's kind of an element of, like, a sick genius part of this that I think he. He. He was. He and his associates, like Gillian Maxwell and others were very good at finding people who would be kind of the perfect victims. And so, to me, that is part of what explains why there is a slight dearth of evidence connecting a lot of people to this, because they were very, for the most part, pretty fastidious about avoiding creating paper trails wherever they could. And, you know, a lot of the evidence that we see is kind of indirect evidence that suggests something but doesn't prove it. And then it's up to reporters or investigators or others to go do the human interviews and try and persuade people to speak and to do so publicly and then try to get corroborating evidence. And that's just hard. And it takes a long time. And a lot of people. You know, Epstein's been dead for, like, almost seven years now, and a lot of people still remain really frightened of him and his network.

A (14:51)

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B (16:44)

I mean, you know, the same thing that we've seen over and over again. It's like kind of pick your poison, right? Either his Wexner's reputation for being very detail oriented and a bit of a micromanager is not true, or he's not telling the full truth. And I don't know. I can tell you listening to that deposition and then reading the transcript after I listened to the deposition and comparing it to what we can just see in the public record alone, there were a bunch of things Wexner said that just really did not add up. Like that's contradicted by the public record and. Or by things Wexner himself has previously said. And so there is. And that this pattern repeats itself, by the way. And there is. And I know I keep saying that, but it's true. And you look at what Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JP Morgan, has said on this matter, and JP Morgan was for many years the single biggest enabler of Epstein's finances. It banked him for, like, 15 years, repeatedly ignored all these red flags about what he was using his bank accounts for. And Jamie Dimon, who is even more of a notorious micromanager than Les Wexner was, insists, contrary to the written record and contrary to what. What some of his deputies have said under oath, Dimon insists that he had never even realized who Jeffrey Epstein was, basically until the time of his arrest. And again, that, you know, either that means that Jamie Dimon was unaware of not only one of the the bank's biggest clients, but also a client that was very controversial within his senior ranks. That's option A or option B is that he's not telling the truth about what he knew and I don't know what the truth is. We do not have categorical proof that Jamie Dimon has been lying about this. We do not have categorical proof that Les Wexner has been lying about this or Leon Black has been. But there's certainly, you know, in a lot of these cases there is certainly strong circumstantial evidence that suggests that a lot of these people, not all of them, but a lot of them know more than what they have said so far.

A (18:42)

At a bare minimum, Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan settled for combined hundreds of millions of dollars with the survivors fund. Why in your opinion?

B (18:55)

You know, it's interesting. I mean Deutsche bank, it's a Deutsche bank, as I'm sure you know, is like the mother of all messed up banks. And there's basically for decades now not been a major financial scandal or criminal enterprise in the world that Deutsche bank has not one way or the other had its fingers in. In this case, you know, just from a reputational management and a legal standpoint, they've handled this much more Savily than JP Morgan has. I mean they reached set Deutsche bank reached settlements very early on that avoided having any public disclosure of what their files showed. And so there has been and Deutsche bank to me very clearly reached settlements early to avoid going to into a protracted discovery process, to avoid having its executives and employees deposed and to try and sweep this stuff under the rug and move on. J.P. morgan is a slightly different case and they fought these lawsuits for a while and as a result of that there was a huge amount of discovery which made its way into the public domain and revealed a lot of ugly stuff that had been going on inside the bank. And I think ultimately they basically decided at the bank that after going through, I think about a year of this with just tens of thousands of pages entering the public domain that they were going to put a stop to this and reach a settlement. But in both of these cases it is clear like we still do not have a full picture of what was going on inside these banks. Why Epstein was remained such a favorable client to these banks despite all of the like really grave and acute concerns that a lot of employees were raising. And, and I think the most likely scenario is that for the most part Epstein was just seen as a really lucrative client and someone who, who not only was making a lot of money for the banks but had the potential to bring in a lot of his buddies as clients to the bank. But I think also there are indications at least in JP Morgan that Epstein was at least enabling one of their top executives, just Staley, to get access to young women. And that certainly seems to have colored Staley's judgment. Now, Staley, I think, would deny that. But, you know, you can see the emails between Epstein and Staley where they appear to be talking about the procurement of young women. Staley eventually has acknowledged that he had what he calls a consensual relationship with at least one woman. But other women have, who are connected to Epstein have accused him of rape or assault. And again, he's denied those allegations. But, you know, there comes a point where you have to really start wondering, to what extent was this about money, to what extent was it about sex? Or to what extent was it maybe about something else that we still haven't even figured out yet?

A (21:34)

Why did Jess Staley never get indicted or arrested?

B (21:39)

That is a good question. I mean, I think there.

A (21:42)

I mean, I've seen the same emails you have. It definitely seems like Epstein was hooking him up. But, you know, you have to assume they looked at it, right? Or at least now they looked at it. And for them to not make a move on him means that they don't believe that they can prove beyond a reasonable doubt that he did something illegal, which means they don't feel they can prove that the women he was with didn't want to do what they did or weren't in a position to consent to what they did.

B (22:14)

Yeah, I mean, I think it's maybe a little more complicated even than that. And which is that, first of all, under the federal. There's not a clear federal rape law. Right? It's a federal crime to sex traffic, which constitutes certain things. But the clearest violations of the law that Staley may have committed in terms of non consensual sex would have been a state crime, not a federal crime. And you can see in the files that the federal prosecutors and the FBI passed on a bunch of evidence and information to Manhattan prosecutors, so state prosecutors. And there appears to have been some sort of investigation in the Manhattan DA's office that does not appear to have led anywhere. In fact, it clearly hasn't led anywhere since the investigation does not appear to be open and Staley was not criminally charged. There's a similar investig. Similar kind of sequence of events involving Leon Black, where the Feds collected evidence, interviewed some people, and passed it off to the Manhattan DA's office, which investigated and did not bring charges. And we don't know why they didn't bring charges. It might be that they didn't Think there was enough evidence? There might. It might be that these men are innocent. It might be that there's a statute of limitations issue. I will say without referring, I'm not saying this in specific reference to Staley or Black, but I think in general, one of the things that we have seen over and over again in many different financial crime cases over the years is that these cases are hard to bring. First of all, they're complicated. The defendants in these cases have just huge resources to finance really top notch defenses. But there's also a very pronounced trend of federal prosecutors really being not very courageous and not very creative and not all that ambitious when it comes to trying to prosecute major financial institutions or their top executives. And we've seen this over and over again and certainly dating back to the 2008 financial crisis where there are clearly crimes took place, and yet the prosecutors have ended up bringing a very small number of charges against people kind of at the bottom of the pecan order. And the executives, you know, their reputations get banged up, they lose a bit of money in terms of the value of their stock going down, but they walk off into the sunset, often with nine figure fortunes intact. And while millions of people, for example, lose their homes. And I think there's a version of that that has probably happened in the Epstein case as well, where you see big financial institutions like JP Morgan, like Deutsche bank, that clearly should have known better. In fact, some of them did know better, and you can see that in their files. And there were at least cursory criminal investigations into both of those institutions, I think. And yet you can see in the files that have now been released, that the prosecutors concluded very early on, before they'd interviewed very many employees, even at these institutions, that the institutions were cooperating with them and they stood to benefit a lot as prosecutors from that continued cooperation. And if they were to try and bring a criminal case, or even really investigate a criminal case, that cooperation might dry up. And who knows if they would be successful in bringing charges. And so I think, you know, there is a phrase for this which is called the chicken shit club, which was coined by a former colleague of mine, Jesse Eisinger. And I think it is the chicken chip club is the club that prosecutors belong to if they have never lost a case in a federal trial. And the idea is that if you're not occasionally losing cases, you are not. If you win every single one of your cases, you are not being aggressive enough, ambitious enough and creative enough in kind of the targets you're going after. And there's no doubt in my mind that that has been a very central, prominent part of many financial investigations over the past 15 years. And I wouldn't. So that wouldn't surprise me if it continues.

A (25:56)

How do you rationalize how much of the disappointment about Epstein is because it's not there, it's too hard or. This was hyped beyond any ability to deliver by maga, which absolutely made Epstein into a mythology.

B (26:20)

Yeah, you know, it's funny that you use the word disappoint and there's. I'm not on social media very much anymore, so I don't, I'm not like that tuned into the kind of, the daily mood swings on this stuff. But like I haven't felt disappointment. I mean there is, I haven't encountered it. Like I, I think that.

A (26:37)

Let me tell you, there is tons of disappointment because on the MAGA side they were promised things. They know he was murdered. He was murdered by the rich elites, the privileged who have this two tiered society. And remember a lot of this stuff has a wisp of the QAnon of the pizza gate of. These people aren't just rich, they're different. And they do really creepy stuff that you've only seen in movies, but that's where the movies get the ideas. And he was murdered by them. And they had this big kind of playground where they were abusing kids that could be your kids. And they get away with it. And there's a list, it's all there. They know who they are, they protect them. So that's what was driving this populist outrage. And they have. Obviously no one has gone down except one quick flash of people who resigned and people probably aren't even sure why, except for the one woman who was counsel under Obama and seemed to be way too passionate about giving Epstein advice to beat his past and beat his present.

B (27:52)

Yeah, I mean, look, as I said, I don't pay that much attention to these conspiracy theories on either the left or the right. So I'm not in a great position to answer this. But I'll tell you from my perspective, what I've seen is that there actually has been a fair bit of accountability. Not legal accountability necessarily, but societal, reputational, professional accountability. I mean, you do have people like Kathy Rumler who have lost their jobs. You have people like Brad Karp, the chairman of Paul Weiss, who turned out to be very close to Epstein, who has lost his job. Essentially. You've got Prince Andrew who's been arrested. Peter Mendelsohn has been arrested. There are criminal investigations in a bunch of countries that have been reopened. You're seeing some more state scrutiny of old stuff. In the United States right now, there are a ton of people in academia and science and in the arts who have, I think, been exposed for either lying or being hypocritical about what they've said about Epstein. And so look, there is. This is. What this has not done is expose some global pedophilia ring that reaches up to the top of, you know, like corporate America or like the Western government.

A (29:05)

They thought this was like an Illuminati thing. Like, they thought that this was the. This is true. There's like this other world that the rich and powerful inhabit.

B (29:18)

It's funny, though, because I actually think that's true. I mean, again, I don't know the particulars of the conspiracy theories, but I mean, what I see, we just did a big story on Leon Black, who is a guy who's worth, I don't know, like 10 or $15 billion right now. And we have this very rare glimpse inside his finances and inside his relationship with Epstein. And what you see from that is, again, I'm not saying Black did anything criminal or as part of some pedophile room. There's no evidence he was involved with underage women or girls, as they're often called. But you see this access to extraordinary privilege, power and complexity that infinite money buys you. And it is simply the act of us publishing the story. We encounter enormous legal pushback from very high priced, prominent lawyers and other representatives. And so to me, as I look through these files and see the interactions that Epstein was having with everyone from Leon Black to Jess Staley to folks at Deutsche bank to Les Wexner to Trump to Clinton, you see so much of this stuff. And to me, it creates a very vivid picture of people at the top end of the income spectrum or the wealth spectrum in this country. They really are playing by a different set of rules and they're living a different life. And it's one where actions do not have the same consequences that they have for most of us. And so again, I recognize it fully that that is not the global pedophile ring, that is not Pizzagate, it is not QAnon. But it is, to me, it still reveals something that is, I think, really kind of unsettling, which is the degree to which wealth and power in Western societies has basically enabled some very big names to operate with a whole lot of impunity and a lack of scrutiny that the rest of us can only kind of Dream of.

A (31:11)

Well, let's look at why that is. Because it's not just the west, it's the east. And it's pretty much since the beginning of time and currency, right. There has been a division in society and there's been tension about that. But when you look at who has been held to account here, none of it is criminal. Yep, they've gotten cancel pressure to leave and they have left. But is that proof that they have different rules or were they also held to a different standard that you wouldn't be because just being friendly with a guy who I can't even prove you knew he was into this shady. But you know, you can't be at the New York Times and have been going to dinner five, six times with Epstein and you're like, but I had no idea. I was invited by this other guy and there were all these other people there. Is that enough? I mean, it's been enough in a couple of these cases.

B (32:10)

Look, we see this sometimes as scandals erupt, that there is sometimes collateral damage, I think where people get, you know, having associated with someone in a totally innocuous or professional capacity that in which you were adhering to not just the law, but your own ethics and your employer's ethics, that that ends up kind of boomeranging on you. And I don't know, that doesn't seem very fair to me. On the other hand, I don't think certainly in terms of what we are writing at the New York Times, as far as I'm aware, what we are focusing on, and I think this is true of most major news organizations as well, is what we are focusing on are people that are. Do not just have passing interactions with Epstein who are not just exchanging an email or two or bumping into him at a dinner party or things like that. These are people who for the. And again, I'm sure you or anyone else could probably find exceptions to that rule. So I'm not saying that we are always perfect in how we execute that, but I think in general, our kind of, our line of thinking on this is that we want to be focused on, you know, accountability where accountability is deserved and transparency, where transparency is deserved. And in general, I think just as journalists, and again, not even talking about the Epstein case, that means focusing on. On the people and the institutions that wield the greatest power in whatever sphere that we're talking about. So in this case, that means the people who are either receiving or given the most money to Epstein, the people who are enabling him, either directly or indirectly, intentionally or not to commit crimes or engage in malfeasance. And that should not and does not include people who, you know, sit next to him at a dinner party once or who are, you know, providing legal representation to him. Just that on its face, is not a bad thing. Right? Everyone is entitled to a good criminal defense lawyer in this country, or at least they're supposed to be. And so I don't. But look, I totally agree with what you're saying and accept what you're saying, that we as a society, sometimes, you know, we get carried away. Epstein is obviously completely radioactive. And it's tempting to be like, well, anyone who has interacted with Epstein therefore deserves some sort of punishment. And I think that that would be painting with way too broad a brush.

A (34:29)

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B (36:13)

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A (36:46)

So do I correctly characterize the New York Times suggesting that Donald Trump has been transparent and scrutiny of him over the handling of the Epstein files is unfair?

B (37:04)

Trump's a really interesting case here. And I recognize, you know, we were talking about conspiracies on the right. I think there are a fair number of conspiracies on the left which are hold that basically unless and until there is clear evidence that Trump was raping girls with Epstein, the Epstein files are a cover up. And I don't think that's fair either. Look, what we know about Trump is that he obviously had a very close relationship with Epstein in the late 80s through the 90s into the early 2000s. They both, they bonded over kind of a shared pursuit of young women. And we know that they broke up for any one of a number of reasons in the early to mid 2000s. We also know that Trump campaigned and his allies campaigned on this idea of transparency over Epstein in 2024. And we know that upon arriving into office in early 2025, he and his allies very quickly backtracked on that pledge and fought tooth and nail for the better part of a year to avoid having to release the documents that they had promised to release.

A (38:09)

And how do you explain that? Why do you think that was?

B (38:11)

I can't really. I mean, other than it's very mystifying to me, to be honest with you. What I would have told you, and I've said this publicly before, is that if you had asked me, like last September, for example, why is that happening? I think my answer would have been, well, presumably he has something to hide or his administration does. And he's obviously, you know, he's got, he promised he was going to do this. If there's nothing to hide, why wouldn't he just do it? He spent the better part of the year expending political capital and having his, you know, people in his administration like Pam Bondi and Cash Patel, kind of embarrassing themselves by flip flopping and kind of deceiving people about what they were making public and what they were not. And ultimately, at the end of the year, they kind of grudgingly got on board with this when it was clear that they were going to lose a vote in Congress. And yet what we are seeing in the Epstein files, there's certainly evidence that Trump, we all knew Trump was part of this crowd. And we know that there are some salacious allegations that people have made about Trump in connection with Epstein that were in the FBI files. We really do not know if those allegations are true. And a lot of this is people who are kind of randomly calling an FBI tip line and it's not corroborated. So I don't know, I really, truly do not know the answer as to why Trump fought so hard against this for so long. I still have people, you know, I spend my, like, days like breathing and eating and sleeping Epstein right now. So I have people coming up to me saying, when are we going to get the truth about Trump? And like, when are we going to get the real revelations about Trump in these files? And I can tell you that, like the New York Times and I'm sure literally every other US Media outlet that's been focused on this, the first thing that we did when these files came out in January was we began systematically going through them, looking for any direct, indirect passing reference to Trump. And when we found those, we either published them or we spent a lot of time and energy vetting them to see if we could get to the truth. And look, as I said at the outset, I mean, we're, I don't know.

A (40:10)

Why did you target Trump because you hate him?

B (40:12)

We targeted Trump. He's the President of the United States and he is, we've also, I wouldn't use the word targeted, by the way. There is, we, you know, the President, he's the most powerful man in the world and he has a known relationship with Epstein. His story about his relationship with Epstein has changed repeatedly over the years. He was, he flip flopped very flagrantly on whether to release these files. Repeatedly flip flopped. And so, yeah, there is, was definitely, I think a lot of people thought that there would be, I think a lot of people still do think that there will be some, some smoking gun in here that shows that Trump's relationship with Epstein was fundamentally different or substantially worse than we currently know it to be.

A (40:56)

Do you Believe that.

B (40:57)

I don't actually. I mean, I'm keeping an open mind. I think we may look, as I said, these files are. We have not read all the files. I don't think anyone has. Three million pages is a lot of pages. And there's so. But I can tell you, like, we have a very sophisticated kind of technological system that I cannot possibly begin to explain at the New York Times for searching through these files. We use everything from, like, normal shit to, like, AI that I can't understand, but we have very smart people who do understand it. I assume that many of my competitors at other news outlets have similar systems in place. And so we have, like, a very sophisticated means for going through these files, whether it's searching, like, printed words or like, handwriting or audio everything. And look, I mean, again, it's showing what we kind of thought to be true, which was that they clearly had a close relationship for many years, and that that relationship seems to have ended around 2003, 2004. And the explanations for that vary. And it could have been because Epstein was recruiting young women or girls from Mar A Lago. It could have been over a disputed property transaction. But any case, there does not appear to be any solid evidence of their continued association after that. And the allegations that have involved Trump in these files, you know, again, they may be true, but they are very hard to corroborate. And what we've seen so far does not suggest that there was a whole lot more to this going on than what we already knew. And again, I'm not like we remain actively interested in that possibility, not just with Trump, but with anybody like, so. Including Bill Clinton, including in, like, Kathy Rumler, including Leon Black. Like, the list goes on and on and on.

A (42:47)

And yet you don't believe the New York Times would be comfortable publishing the headline pedophiles being protected?

B (42:54)

I haven't seen evidence of pedophiles being protected. I think that if we had evidence that pedophiles were being protected, I mean, I don't think that's like a New York Times headline, but, like, I think we would say pedophile John Smith was protected. And to be clear, just for the avoidance of any doubt, I just made up that name. If we had evidence of a powerful person being a pedophile, we would publish that. If we had evidence of a powerful pedophile being protected, we would publish that. And look, I can't tell you how many stories we've published since these files came out a couple months ago. I'm sure it's in the hundreds. We are eager. We view this as a story of immense importance and in part because it involves really rich, really powerful people and in part because it provides this very unique look inside the workings of power and wealth in this country. And so, like, we are definitely not done investigating this. We're publishing things as fast as we can. But we also are, we're really trying to avoid the trap where we're doing stories about, oh, this person once interacted with Epstein, ergo, that person is bad. We're trying to understand the truth of things. And that is complicated sometimes.

A (44:08)

Do you think that the Trump administration has been dogged in their review of the files and looking for potential cases to bring, or do you think that they've been in more CYA mode?

B (44:21)

Well, I'm not even. I'm not sure. Is that binary? And look, first of all, I think it is very important for everyone to remember that it was the first Trump administration that brought this case in the first place. So in fairness, this is not. If the theory is that Trump has been trying to cover for Epstein or he's afraid of what might come up in the Epstein investigations, that doesn't stand up to a whole lot of scrutiny, in my opinion. Just because if that were the case, why would Trump, his administration, have brought these cases against Epstein? The first Trump administration took Epstein down. Epstein is dead because of that. And Ghislaine Maxwell is imprisoned largely because of that. Although that was obviously a case that extended past the first Trump administration, I think in with this second round of it. And no, I don't think they've been particularly dogged in terms of understanding or looking for more cases to bring. And they, upon taking office in 2025, they were very quick to conclude and have Bongino and Cash Patel announce that there was nothing more to see here. And with looking at the fact, what

A (45:23)

does that make you think of those guys? Big jobs, head of the FBI, his deputy, the pod father. That they made promises that now they just try to pretend they never made. They did that big interview on Bongino's podcast, him and Cash Patel. They didn't even mention this. Do you think they were just making it up? What they said they knew when they were doing the pods and then they got into positions of accountability and had to raise their right hand and they knew they couldn't say the same thing, so they just stopped saying it. But never admitted.

B (46:00)

Yeah.

A (46:00)

The truth.

B (46:01)

I think the story's a little bit weirder than that, actually. I mean, I think that when they were in before they took office, when they were just podcasters. I mean, I think there's an enormous amount of, like, disinformation, misinformation, carelessness. Maybe it's not in carelessness. Maybe it's deliberate that we're trying to rev people up and you're spreading garbage that you have no reason to think is true. I think, actually the interesting thing, though, is, I think upon getting into office, and we can kind of see this now, looking through these files, is that they both seem to have basically read the FBI kind of summaries and the SDN Southern District in New York. They're like prosecutorial memos summarizing why they charged certain people and didn't charge others, and seem to have basically taken those at face value as evidence that that is the truth. And to me and my colleagues looking through those, now, granted, we have a little bit of hindsight, but you look through those and it's like these prosecutors clearly made decisions that were expedient. They. They had limited time, they had limited resources. Covid was like, upending all of our lives, and they decided to bring the two cases that they could as quickly as possible, and then they just moved on. And they clearly did not thoroughly investigate a lot of this stuff. And what was interesting to me, seeing Patel and Bongino and Bondi and all these guys who had been, you know, banging this drum for a while now, if I were in their shoes, I think I probably would have been like, look, this was investigated back then, but not as thoroughly as it could have been. There's a whole bunch of leads to follow up on, and if they wanted to do it, I mean, again, I don't know. I'm not a lawyer, and I also do not know what the statutes of limitations are or anything like that. But in general, like, again, just as a journalist looking through these files, and I know I'm not alone, either at the New York Times or at any other kind of major news organization, you look through these files and there are a zillion things left to investigate. And so it's just. It's almost like, again, I don't know, Bungino or Patel, I don't know what makes them tick. I don't know why they make decisions. But from my standpoint, it's almost just kind of laziness. They read these files like, well, that's done. Let's move on. I don't know. And that seems to have been the kind of stance that a lot of prosecutors took at the time, too. And granted, I'm oversimplifying this, and I've never been in those shoes myself. And so I think it's probably much more complicated than that. But that's my sense, certainly, reading these files now, with the benefit of hindsight,

A (48:19)

the case that was made against him in the settlement in 2000, what is it, six or eight? First, the idea that Donald Trump took him down and alerted the authorities. I can't find anything that makes that close to true. There is one account of one local officer who says Trump called him and said, I'm glad to hear you're going after Epstein. Everybody knew what he was into. Good for you. Which would never qualify as a tip that led to an investigation. It was him calling during the investigation to applaud it. Do you understand it differently or additionally?

B (49:00)

No, I really don't. I mean, there's. I agree with. Again, my information is incomplete here. This is not the thing I've specialized in the most. But based on my understanding of the facts, that I agree with your interpretation. I mean, there is very clear investigative kind of paper trail that goes back to 25th or 2005, when the parents of a young girl who had been at Epstein's house and was getting sexually abused by her basically found out because she had. Was found with a bunch of money in her pocket, essentially. And that is what started the Palm beach police investigation. They brought it to state authorities. The state authorities, eventually, after getting frustrated by the kind of small charges that were likely to be brought against Epstein, went to the feds. And that's the genesis of this investigation, which is supported very clearly. And there's a rich written record that substantiates that version of events. Is it possible that behind the scenes, Trump or others were kind of privately coaxing either local or federal authorities to do more? Yeah, that's possible, although we've not really seen evidence to substantiate that. But again, the fact here, and you know, you can. You can read back through the memos and the emails and the transcripts of a lot of the interaction between the state and federal prosecutors in the mid-2000s in Florida. And, you know, they were really wrestling with how to deal with this, and then DC Got involved and, you know, essentially kind of ordered up this kind of sweetheart deal. And why do you think that is? Remains a complete mystery to me, to be honest with you. And I think the most benign explanation is that these are complicated cases to bring. Epstein had this all star roster of lawyers, and the amount of time it would take and effort it would take to bring a full fledged sex trafficking case against him, coupled with the possibility you might lose that case, was not a risk worth taking, especially when the deal on the table involved Epstein, you know, doing some, at least some token jail time, coupled with him having to register as a sex offender afterwards. And I think that last part is really important. I think the prosecutors at the time believed, or at least some of them believed, that forcing him to register as a sex offender going forward was a huge win for them and that that would really impede Epstein's ability to commit crimes in the future. But there's, again, this is a point where you get a lot of conspiracy theories kind of bubbling up because there is not particularly satisfying answers, especially with the benefit of hindsight. And, you know, there have obviously been rumors that Alex Acosta, who was the U.S. attorney in Miami at the time and later became Trump's labor secretary in the first term, that he supposedly said that he was told to do this because Epstein was an intelligence asset. There's not evidence to support that claim, at least that we are aware of. There is evidence that Epstein had some kind of at least limited cooperation with federal prosecutors or FBI agents in other cases related to the financial crisis, but there's no evidence at all to suggest that that had any bearing whatsoever on the disposition of his case in Florida. So I think so. I mean, I don't know. I'm very much open to the possibility that there is more stuff to be learned here and that we do not know the full story on the facts as we currently know them. There's not much more here right now. But again, I don't want to. I know I've already said this, but say it one more time. I have an open mind about this. I'm very like. I'm not under the illusion that I know the full answer here.

A (52:53)

Have you seen yourself or among your colleagues any real trail that leads to a different reckoning of Epstein's death than suicide?

B (53:08)

I don't know how to answer that. I like the short answer is no. The longer answer is that this is another area where I am not fully satisfied by the answers we currently have. I mean, there were. So the evidence so far points to him having died by suicide in a series of crazy, hard to believe coincidences that occurred on one given night in August 2019 in a terrible jail. And I don't know, I don't have any evidence to suggest he was murdered or anything like that. I would. But we don't know what happened. Like, there's. We don't know, there's just a tremendous amount of, like, smoke around this case and a whole lot of unanswered questions, like, why did the guards decide that night to not only not do the rounds, but to lie about the rounds? Why was there. Why did he not have a cellmate? Why were. He was supposed to be on suicide watch. Why wasn't he? Why were there. This is a guy who had supposedly previously tried to commit suicide using his bed sheets. You look at pictures of his cell after he successfully died, and there's, like, nothing but bedsheets in the cell. It's like orange bedsheet upon orange bedsheet. And that's weird, I guess. I don't know. I'm not an expert in jails. And that jail in particular was notorious for being poorly run and overwhelmed and chaotic, and that may be the answer.

A (54:43)

And he killed himself just after a fairly optimistic conversation with his lawyer, reportedly. And that he was still planning his defense.

B (54:54)

Yeah, that's true. On the other hand, that same day, the day before he died, there had been a trove of records in the Ghislaine Maxwell case that were made public that presented him and his network. It was kind of this first batch of transparency. We got in one of these cases, and it presented this. I mean, I remember exactly where I was reading these documents and where I was the next morning when I learned he had died. And the immediate thing that a lot of us started talking about that day in August of 2019 was, wow, what? That is crazy. He must have gotten some inkling of what. What's coming in all these files and just realized that there's not a way out for him. So you can cut these things, like, in many different ways, depending on kind of which way you want to look at them.

A (55:40)

There's one I can't cut any other way. There's one thing I can't get past that I have never seen in any other case, even involving the mob, where there is absolutely a good chance you will be killed if you talk about this, okay? I have never seen anybody do what Ghislaine Maxwell's doing, let alone a woman. No disrespect, but a woman who has no criminal history, has never done time, has never dealt with the cops, you know, is not a known criminal. Like, this is the life she chose, obviously had delusions about what she was doing. But for her to be sitting in jail. I don't care how nice you want to think the federal prison is, it's not somewhere you want to be, okay? And she has offered nothing. That doesn't make sense to me when there's. She has no. What? Why wouldn't she? Why has.

B (56:42)

How do we know she's offered nothing? Now, here's how.

A (56:47)

Her past lawyer, her current lawyer, and Blanche, who went to talk to her for the doj. Yep. And, you know, showed that he was willing to honor his deal enough to move her, which is not unusual, by the way. I'm sure you know this, but the idea that she got a special deal is not true. But all of them say she doesn't have anything. She says that a lot of this stuff is bs. And why, why, why, why wouldn't she? I mean, we are, as a society, so willing, I think, to believe that it wasn't just about her, that there were all these guys who were actually pulling the strings, not her. And she was made to do it. And this guy knew, and this guy knew, and this guy. I mean, how do you explain that to yourself?

B (57:38)

I mean, look, there's the thing I explained to myself when I wake up in the morning and when I go to bed at night when it comes to this case. And unfortunately, this is like. All I think about these days is that there is so much I don't know, and there's so many questions that either I don't have the answers to or just do not. The answers do not make any sense, and I'm not an expert on the federal prison system. What little I know about Maxwell is that she has a pretty pronounced track record of being a liar. And frankly, not that this dictates one's personality or ethics. She comes from a family that has a very sordid history of dishonesty and criminality.

A (58:23)

All the more reason to offer up names and try to clear yourself.

B (58:26)

Maybe, maybe. Or maybe it's more complicated than that. And the truth isn't something that is going to be helpful for her in her effort to get leniency or to freedom or to be comfortable in that freedom were she to achieve it. And again, I'm saying this. I'm speculating. I do not know what the truth is. And I hear what you're saying, and I don't disagree that that is unusual and raises questions. But add it to the long list because there's so many unanswered questions about this, and some of them may be worse than we think. Some of them may be less bad than we think. What's clear is that Epstein, for a long time had a pretty extensive criminal operation. He was at the top of. We know That a lot of women and who, at the time, some of them were girls, were victimized as a result of this. We know that he was interacting with and often financially involved with a lot of people who are among some of the richest and most powerful people in the world to this day. And we don't fully know why in a lot of those cases. No.

A (59:31)

But we do know from the survivors that they had sex with other people.

B (59:36)

Yep.

A (59:37)

And whether it was consensual or not. And a lot of the accounts. And again, could they be false? Of course they could be false. There was money involved. There's time, there's pressure, there's shame. There's all these other dynamics that go into it, but none of those guys have come out.

B (59:54)

Yep. Well, that's not true. Some of them have right there. But as you said at the outset, it's a small number, and it's people who have kind of become household names. And whether it's a Jess Staley or a Leon Black. And, you know, in both of those cases, they. Both of the men dispute that they had extensive involvement.

A (60:10)

Right. I'm defining it differently. When I say come out, I don't mean Jess Staley. It's. If what they're saying is true, you know, he would be brought up on 1983 charges. They would refer to a state. 1983 is the federal code that goes to infringement of civil rights, which is basically a proxy charge for whatever criminality you did to somebody. You're depriving them of their rights by whatever that taking was, physical, financial, or otherwise. And it's not happening. And it doesn't make any sense. All these women, they couldn't have just been for Epstein. All these women saying they were given to other men. None of those men have been held to account. Well, Jess Staley was. No, not really. Well, Leon Black was. No, not really. Not in any real way. You know, it's just like. There's a couple of suggestions about them, but that's not what I expected.

B (61:07)

I hear you, and I think that that is part of the reason why there. And again, this is like, I started my early on in my career as a business journalist. I was covering the financial crisis. And one of the kind of enduring takeaways that I had from that is that the anger and disbelief that a lot of people in the public had at the lack of accountability that went to the top of these organizations. It really disheartened people and left people. It cost them their trust in the American system and certainly in the American government. To handle things fairly. And I think that we are seeing shades of that in these Epstein prosecutions as well. And there have been only two prosecutions, right. Like maybe three if you were to count John Luke Brunel, who's not really related to this. Like there's. How is that possible? How. And I'm not saying I know where the crimes have been committed necessarily, but just looking purely at the financial criminal investigations that took place, looking at some of the banks that were enabling him over the years, basically up until the time of his death, despite reams of evidence, despite written records from employees saying this guy is money laundering, this guy is sex trafficking, this guy is involved in possibly drugs and terrorism, they kept doing business with him. And that is, and, and there are specific things that they failed to do that they were legally obligated to do, like filing suspicious activity reports, for example, in a timely fashion. Why were cases, those cases not brought? And to me, looking through these files, you get, you begin to kind of get answers. And it. I'm not, again, I'm not certain I have the full answer, but it appears to have just been a real haste with which some of these cases were brought and these investigations conducted and an eagerness to kind of move on and, you know, pick off the low hanging fruit, but not really stretch in ways that would, I think, satisfy most people's understanding of what justice is.

A (63:04)

Yeah. And even the fruit that you picked off you kind of threw on the ground as opposed to juicing it the way people expected. Although I will say this, I do take away from our conversation that you don't feel it's done in any way, shape or form and that. Does that mean, does that motivating you, the aspiration that there is a there, there inside of it or you don't know what there's going to be but you're going to keep looking?

B (63:32)

Yeah, I mean, the latter mostly. I mean, I am fascinated by this. My colleagues and I have invested like just a tremendous amount of time and energy in this over the years and I feel like we're closer than we ever have been to getting satisfying answers on a bunch of fronts. But we haven't yet. And the good news is that we, you know, you know, have access to this voluminous public record that is probably an incomplete, in fact, it's definitely an incomplete public record still because we know.

A (64:01)

Don't you want to spend a day with Maxwell?

B (64:04)

I would love to spend a day

A (64:05)

with Maxwell and just be like, did you ever, did you ever hear this guy before did you ever. He ever talk about this? You were his girlfriend, you were spending all this time with him. You know, I. I don't know. I. That part just boggles my mind. It just boggles my mind how she clearly doesn't want to be there. She's clearly not doing well inside. And people make shit up all the time to try to get out of those situations, let alone, you know, make the decision to eat the truth to protect people. It just doesn't make sense to me.

B (64:39)

Well, look, it may be that the truth there and again, I do not know what the answer is.

A (64:43)

Right.

B (64:43)

I definitely, you know, have a pretty high degree of skepticism that anything that comes out of Ghislaine Maxwell's mouth is the truth. But like it may also be that the truth, if she ever were to utter it would be more damaging to her than the fact are as we currently understand them. And that, you know, there's. The guy who is at the center of this ring is dead. There's not going to be justice for him. She is the next closest thing to the center of this ring. And the people in the immediate, just the very immediate orbit, there are people that we know that the government has considered as co conspirators and not done anything with. And so that's. Yeah, so but look, I mean, yeah, I would like kill to have an hour in a room with Kalima. So I'd love to be able to ask her questions. But that's a list. The list of people that I would like, love to be in that situation with is long, you know, and she maybe is at the top. I'm not even sure she's at the top. She's near the top. But there's like. I would love to have the chance to talk to Les Wexner. I would love to have the chance to talk to Leon Black. I would love to have the chance to talk to Jess Staley. And on and on the list goes.

A (65:48)

They know how to answer the questions and there is sophistication of context in their situations. Not in hers. Not in hers.

B (65:59)

Look, I don't have any confidence that I would get the truth out of these individuals but boy, it would be super interesting to be able to just have a candid conversation with anyone just

A (66:06)

to see how candid they are and.

B (66:09)

Well, and also just to hear their explanations. Because look, we. I sit here in a room and am aware that, you know, there are circumstances where things look worse on paper than they are in reality sometimes. And our like, my job as a journalist is not we're not trying to like go like hang people up and get them. We're trying to understand what the truth is.

A (66:31)

And yeah, the time's a little bit, a little bit. You got a little hangman in you. You guys at the time, you've got some hangman in you. But the question is, you haven't been able to hang anybody here.

B (66:41)

Well, honestly Chris, I can tell you the way we operate and I can't speak for everyone at the time, but I can speak very clearly for the immediate group of people that I've been working with on this for years. We're really careful and we really try to start. We know who was connected to Epstein and we want to understand what the relationships were and the roles. And I mean you can see this if you go back and look at the incremental stories we've done over the years about for example, Leon Black, where we have just followed leads and our understanding of the truth has changed dramatically over the past seven years. But like we, I don't think we still know the full truth and I have an open mind about what that truth might be. And that that goes not just for Leon Black or Jess Staley who I keep obsessing over, but for Bill Clinton, for Donald Trump, for Lane Maxwell. Look, there's, you know, I don't know, I think it's really important to just like for everyone to remain curious and be as open minded as possible and be willing to change your mind if you've got things wrong.

A (67:36)

So that would be nice. Well, I gotta tell you David, I wish you well going forward. I appreciate the discussion and kind of the journey through your reckoning of what seems still so inscrutable to so many. The mythology lives on and so will the reporting. And that's good to know on, on one level, especially as the world is trying to figure out whether or not we're at war right now to distract from that conversation. I don't believe that. But the timing certainly wasn't bad for the administration. David, thank you very much. Good luck to you going forward.

B (68:14)

Thanks for having me.

A (68:21)

For me, it's still all about Maxwell. I can't believe that there's more there, not on the money level that I believe. Deutsche Bank, JP Morgan, what they knew, what they didn't knew, why they settled, why they were allowed to settle. All of those things are interesting. But how does Ghislaine Maxwell rotting in federal prison. And let me tell you, I don't care what kind of federal prison it is. I don't want to be there. And if she had names to offer up, she knows how hungry society is for them, especially if it's a man that had something to do with it. Why has she said nothing? I just can't get past that. How about you? Thank you for subscribing and following. Appreciate you here at the Chris Cuomo Project. See you in the morning. SXM Radio 124, 7. 9 Eastern. That is a feedback mechanism for you, where you're at the center of the conversation. Then we have News nation at night, 8 and midnight, 8 p eastern. Midnight eastern, every weekday night. Appreciate you selling the merch. Don't have it on now because I decided to gussy it up a little bit, but I'm selling it because I want to push the branding of getting after it, of being independent, of being a free agent, of being a critical thinker, of being different than these pack animals that just gobble up things about Epstein or anything else and then they get upset. Why? They were never thinking about it for themselves. But you are, and I appreciate you for it. Let's get after it.