← The Political Scene | The New Yorker
The Political Scene | The New Yorker
How the Epstein Files Are Forcing a Reckoning with Power
00:37:05
Loading summary
Transcript44 lines
- [00:00]
A
If your eyes are the windows to your soul and your glasses are the windows to your eyes, then it's pretty important to find your perfect frames. That's why at Warby Parker, we've made shopping for eyewear as easy and fun as can be. Peruse endless styles in our stores, or use our app to virtually try on frames and get personalized recommendations. To find your next favorite pair of glasses, sunglasses, or contact lenses, or to locate your nearest Warby Parker store, head over to warbyparker.com that's warbyparker.com. Hey, Josh.
- [00:38]
B
Hi, Tyler.
- [00:39]
A
So I want to start by asking why you sort of why you pick this subject? I mean, you write this column every week for the website called Open Questions, where true to the title, you are often posing a question like, just to take a random smattering of headlines from the time that you've done the column, are grownups just giant kids? Are you overreacting? Why can't you pack a bag? I guess I'm wondering with this most recent column, which is about the Epstein files and kind of our conspiracy obsessed paranoid nation, what question were you trying to pose with this column or answer?
- [01:13]
B
Yeah, I mean, I think it started with the realization that not only was I becoming deeply fascinated with by the Epstein story and spending a lot of time looking at the files and actually engaging with it as a primary source thing, but also just every single person I know is talking about it. Every single parent at my kids sports events, everyone is talking about it. And the wide range of things that people think is fascinating and alarming and crazy too.
- [01:43]
A
So you mentioned that, you know, parents at your kids sporting events or talking about the Epstein files. What are they saying? Like, what is like the tenor of those conversations?
- [01:52]
B
Well, it seems to me like a lot of times there's a spectrum where like no one is minimizing the scandal. No one is saying like it's a nothing burger. I think we're all well past that at this point. But what you'll find is that there's a sort of epistemically conservative perspective which is sort of like there's a lot of bad stuff that seems to have happened, but we don't know what it is. And then that goes through sort of a spectrum. And then on the far end there's, you know, extreme certainty about, you know, cannibalism happened on Epstein's island. And I've had a lot of conversations with just friends, acquaintances, people in my life where it seems like the full spectrum is represented, which I think is Extremely notable. I also can't recall a time in my life when it's been possible for ordinary people to wade through the evidence of something like this and where it almost becomes. I mean, it's overwhelming, honestly. The amount of information, the amount of news about it, the degree to which it's incredibly disturbing, the way that every thing seems to lead to another thing. The questions just seem to pile up. And I think a lot of people are caught in this, and they're not wrong to be caught in it. I think this isn't the same as thinking like, was there a second shooter in Dallas? This is something where the. The conspiracy, if you want to use that term, is just right there to be looked at by all of us. And the questions are just asking themselves. So I thought it was really the reason I wrote about it is because I've been finding myself as obsessed with this as everyone else.
- [03:27]
A
That's Joshua Rothman, a staff writer at the New Yorker, whose new piece asks, are we living in the Age of Epstein? The piece explores how the scandal is shaping and perhaps confirming public perceptions and suspicions of power and institutional trust. Ever since Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency act last November, the Department of justice has been releasing tranches of documents related to its investigation into the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein. But despite the flow of documents, plenty of questions remain about the full scope of Epstein's operation, how many people knew his crimes, and how he was able to run in circles of powerful and influential people for so long. I wanted to talk with Josh about why the Epstein scandal has taken hold in the way that it has. How the ongoing release of documents and the information inside of them is shaping the public's response, and what this moment reveals about growing widespread distrust and conspiratorial thinking. This is the political scene. I'm Tyler Foggatt and I'm a senior editor at the New Yorker. So I want to go back to something you were saying earlier about conspiracy, and I wonder if we should just start by talking about how we would define the phrase conspiracy theory. Because I feel like the term has this, like, negative tinfoil y hat connotation for most. But I wonder if, like, you distinguish between theories based on how crazy or far fetched they actually are. Like, you know, the difference between, like, the moon landing was a hoax versus the belief that there's more to JFK's assassination than we originally thought. Like, would the latter really be a conspiracy theory? Or is that just like, healthy skepticism and then just going off of that, like, what category of conspiracy theory would you place the Epstein scandal in.
- [05:12]
B
Well, I think to me, a helpful place to start is with the fact that the heart of the Epstein scandal is how much is unknown. I mean, the reason it's a scandal is because it's reasonable to feel that this was under prosecuted and underinvestigated. And the reason why we feel scandalized is because we have the sense of that the people who were in charge of finding the truth decided not to do that. And that's really different from the scenario of like, the moon landing was faked, the moon landing happened. And it's the conspiracy theorists who are trying to inject uncertainty into a situation that's actually completely clear cut. There's really no mystery, there's no unknowns there. Like, if you take the JFK assassination, you know, there is a very persuasive, well documented and convincing, thorough professional account of what happened to jfk. And you know, there are plenty of people who wish to disagree with that, but they have to go up against this very, very huge, you know, edifice of what's known. And that's the dynamic that exists. There is sort of people who want to undermine or question a fundamentally, like, comprehensible and coherent point of view. But with the Epstein story, it's actually like the reverse is true. It's actually that the government has released millions of documents that just raise all sorts of questions. And it seems that none of the questions have been answered. I mean, that's an exaggeration. Plenty of questions have been answered. But it seems as though there are many more questions that people have than there are answers. And so I don't know that it's right to say that people who believe that there's a scandal are conspiracy theorists. I think they have questions about what's known. And then the other thing that makes the Epstein story sort of different is that Epstein himself was doing something conspiracy adjacent in the sense that he was assembling this huge network of people and one of his goals was to create. I mean, he certainly was gratifying his own intellectual pretensions and stuff by creating this whole world around himself. But he was also creating a smokescreen. He was involving all sorts of people. He was one of the revelations, I think, of actually reading his emails, like if you go to jmail where you can read all of Epstein's emails or tranches of them. But one of the revelations of JMAIL is you just see how incredibly aggressive he was about connecting with everyone. So if the essence of a conspiracy theory is that like a conspiracy theorist Sees connections where none exist. In this case, the central figure in the story was like, deliberately going about connecting to as many people as possible for as long as possible. So I don't think it's quite right to say that, like your, your average person who feels that there's something like a conspiracy here, I don't think they're a conspiracy theorist. They're responding to something very visible, which is the, you know, they can watch in real time the creation of this vast network, and then they can notice that all sorts of names are redacted from the network. And they can, they can ask, who are these people? And that's a legitimate question. That's not a conspiracy question.
- [08:16]
A
Yeah, I guess to be interested in the files and to feel like the government is hiding something, that isn't necessarily like an inherently conspiratorial stance. But it does seem like the files themselves have become a real launching pad for actual conspiracy. I guess I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about, like, the more outlandish conspiracy theories that have come from the files and just like, how you're thinking about the ways in which these files have allowed for our minds to just go all over the place.
- [08:44]
B
Well, I mean, where I like to start, where my thinking has, has ended up on this is I like to rewind the tape a little bit to before the present and just think about where we're coming from when we come to the Epstein story. If you're trying to be like a rational person, something you might do is when faced with a very uncertain or unknown situation, you can ask about your own prior beliefs and at least try to know what they are before you try to like, make sense of this big mystery. So to me, it's like you got to rewind, you got to ask, what did we think was true before we saw all these Epstein files and encountered the scandal? So I think one of the things we have come to have to admit is true is that sexual abuse is way more widespread than we thought. We have to admit that powerful people who are who we think we know. So you know a person like Bill Cosby, who was charged with rape, that before Epstein, before Epstein, we were forced to sort of admit that those people could be different than we thought. We've already come around to the view that hyper wealthy people live crazy lives that are very, very divorced from not just our norms, but also from like, the consequences of the law. That's something we've kind of all come around to. And there's other things we could talk about that we've all come around to those are like background assumptions that one can have when you look at what's in the files. So what that means is that what's known about the Epstein story is that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell enlisted, like, created a sort of infrastructure for recruiting and abusing girls who were as young as 14 and did this over many years and actually created like a globe spanning recruitment operation. So that's quite conspiratorial sounding, but it's true. And then what's also known is that Epstein cultivated these connections with all these people and he brought them to his island and to his private homes in different places, and that he was very famous for having a crazy lifestyle. And then that even after he was convicted of sex with an underage girl, people continued to come and hang out with him and want to be with him. And then what's also known is when you actually look in the emails, and I think it's sort of important to do that. It's important to actually look, the chummy nature of this correspondence, the jokeiness with which the sort of realities of who Epstein was, like, that's treated often as a joke. Like a kind of like, we all know it's true, but it's cool. Like we're all cool with it. That's basically the, the thing that comes through. So all these are sort of background facts. And I guess the reason I just want to say them is because it's important to sort of get that the thing that is beyond doubt is already really, really bad.
- [11:45]
A
Yeah.
- [11:45]
B
And then the question that you then have to ask is, if that is beyond doubt, what else is possible? Right? Like if, if this situation that we just described is what really happened, then what else could happen? So from there it's just a series of steps into other things. So you say, okay, Epstein had a lot of security cameras. And what happened to the tapes of all the debauched evil parties that were happening? The actual accounts that are in the documents, which range in provenance from like huge memos put together by respected law firms to transcripts from a tip line. You know, they range in their nature. They allege all sorts of things from, I mean, how to talk about this, like from, I guess, ordinary sexual abuse to the abuse of very young children. So, so like that's, that's not somebody making up that. It's in the files. That's in the files. It's described in documents that you can read. Whether it's true is a separate question entirely, but it's not like people are fabricating what they're reading. You know, they're going to a website that's like doj.gov and they're justice.gov and they're seeing this. And then a step beyond what is seeable in the files are things that are essentially imagined and imagined victims and imagined crimes, which include all sorts of murders and cannibalistic acts and other things that are not described in any way that we would feel is credible. But there are things that people could discern in like code words that they think mean things.
- [13:22]
A
I feel like one thing that's really interesting about this scandal and kind of the investigation of it is that it's only gotten worse the more information that we've received. And by worse, I mean, people are more suspicious, they have more questions. It doesn't really feel like, you know, a new tranche of files comes out and then all of a sudden, okay, well, we have answers to questions A, B and C, but now we need to figure out D, E and F. You know, it feels like it's just two steps back each time. And I guess I'm wondering if you see there being any real resolution to this.
- [13:54]
B
It's a great question. I mean, I keep thinking of the 911 Commission. There's a lot of conspiracy theories about 9 11. And there was a commission and the commission produced a report that was a best selling volume. But conspiracies about 911 persist and they haven't gone away. So a question, you know, you can have is like, could there be a 911 Commission report for the Epstein scandal? Which feels a little weird because this is a different type of thing than 9 11, obviously. But the, you know, there's a couple issues with this. So one is that if you believe that the world's most powerful men were part of this perverted, evil sex society, then you already believe in a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, which is what we're talking about. We're talking about like Trump in the Epstein files. We're seeing Clinton, we're seeing everyone. Like we're seeing Larry Summers, who was the President of Harvard and the Secretary of the Treasury. And right up until the moment that Epstein is arrested, like, basically right up until that time, Summers, who knows the whole complexity of the situation is emailing with Epstein for dating advice about someone who he says considers him a mentor. Okay, so it's super icky, but I should mention that, you know, Larry Summers, Howard Lutnick, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, all the people who are named in the files and who, you know, they just appear in the files or they had degrees of correspondence with Epstein or whatever. They've all denied any wrongdoing in connection to his crimes. And that's really important to note and also to note that Epstein sought to correspond and connect with as many powerful and influential and famous people as he possibly could. So in a way, we're in his trap. You know, I mean, this is part of his, his design.
- [15:40]
A
He wanted to create this web. Exactly.
- [15:43]
B
So then it makes you ask, okay, if the experts were to get together and produce such a report, what proportion of Americans would believe the report? If the sort of assumption already is that the most powerful people are already involved, which like to say it again, like they are involved. Like we don't know whether they're involved at the core of the crimes, but they're involved in this normative sense of looking away, tolerating it, finding this person to be sort of a plausible friend. So for that reason, I think because the nature of the conspiracy already involves so many hyper powerful people, it makes, makes me like a little pessimistic about the idea that this will go away when, when someone releases. And then like, just to, I mean, just to also note, I mean, who's the head of the FBI right now, who's the Attorney General of the United States? These aren't people that we trust implicitly. There's another thing going on in America which is besides the Epstein scandal, which is the Trump administration, and it's incredibly problematic use of power, which we already would. There's already plenty of Trump related conspiracy theories. So we're really at a very challenging place where it's really kind of hard to imagine an easy way to kind of put this to bed in a nice, nice way.
- [17:10]
A
More with Joshua Rothman after the break. This is the political scene from the New Yorker.
- [17:23]
C
Right now we are living through some of the most tumultuous political times our country has ever known. I'm David Remnick and each week on the New Yorker Radio Hour, I'll try to make sense of what's happening alongside politicians and thinkers like Cory Booker, Nancy Pelosi, Liz Cheney, Tim Waltz, Ketanji Brown, Jackson Nuke Ingrid, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. Charlamagne, the God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour. Wherever you listen to podcasts.
- [18:00]
A
I'm curious for your thoughts on. There was a guest essay that was published by the Times on Monday called the Epstein Files Should Never have been Released. And it was written by Daniel Richmond and a former federal prosecutor. And basically it makes the argument that we kind of see the release of these files as this sort of attempt by the government to add accountability. And you know, we live in this moment where that kind of accountability is in short supply. And so you might think that it's a good thing that we have this document dump. But actually this dump kind of signifies that like a huge institutional failure essentially, because if the justice system were working properly, then the public wouldn't have to access these files and people would actually trust the government to go through the files themselves and create some kind of report which is, you know, kind of similar to what we've been talking about a little bit. But it's interesting cause if you look at the comments on this article, it's just, you know, people are just so upset, you know, and kind of saying it's not that there's something wrong with this government, it's that there's always been something wrong with the government and that that's part of the story that the files is telling. And so, yeah, I'm curious for your thoughts on, on that argument that the situation isn't unique just in the sense that we have all these high profile people who are seemingly implicated in the files and those are the people themselves who would be usually responsible with kind of assuaging our concerns. But that the files speak to this larger dynamic that's been going on in the government for a really long time, which is like super powerful people who are corrupt and doing awful things. And finally we're just getting like a piece of that story through this document dump.
- [19:35]
B
So I mean, I guess one thing to say is it seems hard to argue with the fact that the way in which these documents have been released has created chaos and been uniquely uninformative. Especially there have been things that have happened as part of the release of the documents that are really crazy. Like the fact that the names of the victims are unredacted, which was not supposed to happen. So the actual release itself has been chaotic and poorly managed. That's just granted the idea that there should have been a release to begin with. I guess to me, if you rewind it a little bit, let's say we were to go back a few years from this maximalist action of releasing all the files. So for a long time people said there was a list and what they wanted was the Epstein list. And there was this idea he had a client list and it was going to be released and we were going to know.
- [20:25]
A
And it was Pam Bondi who played into that, right. When she was asked about the list on Fox News, and she said something like, oh, it's actually on my desk. And then everyone asked after that, thought that there was a list. But then the DOJ and FBI wrote a memo which stated that there wasn't a list. And it seemed like maybe Bondi was just referring to the files themselves as opposed to a client list.
- [20:47]
B
Yeah, absolutely. And I think if you ask yourself, like, where did the idea that there was a thing called a list come from? It was just supposition, is my sense that there was a thing called a list. I mean, if I were running a huge, vast criminal enterprise of this nature, perhaps I wouldn't keep a list. But we started with the idea, like, the idea of releasing the information started with the sort of dream scenario of a very tightly organized and structured piece of information that I guess would have had sort of the imprimatur of Epstein's organization on it. Like, it would have been like, this is the list that Geoffrey and Ghislaine used while committing their crimes. But nothing like that has emerged. And instead what we have is something that. That is sort of a provocation to people. Essentially, something I feel strongly is that, you know, there's a flattening effect that's happening, which is that hypothetical victims and hypothetical crimes are. If you look, if you spend a lot of time on. On Epstein forums online, it's interesting to see the degree to which these hypothetical crimes have as much, if not more sort of mind share than the crimes that we suspect really happened or we feel fairly certain could have happened to real people who we feel we might know who they are. And this dynamic where in a way, the release of so much information has like, pulled the discussion away from the sort of core of what happened, which was a fairly easy to grasp sex trafficking operation, towards more fringe and unprovable ideas is like a worrisome consequence. But I do think, I agree that it's a sign of how bungled we are that we have to release all the files in this way. And then I also think releasing the files this way is a. You know, I think it's arguably a sort of deliberate act of obfuscation.
- [22:44]
A
This dynamic you mentioned, of people focusing on the most fringe aspects of the files, like the stuff that's either not even in there or that's maybe hinted at in the files, but, you know, it's more of like an allegation that the FBI was looking into as opposed to something that was actually proven how much of that, do you think, is like a failure of media literacy versus just like the way that social media works, where someone will post a screenshot of something from the files and not make it clear that, oh, this was something that was actually disproven, you know, over the course of the investigation, or this is actually just a screenshot that I manufactured, but it looks pretty similar to what's actually in the files. And so that's going to go viral.
- [23:25]
B
I mean, I think in my understanding of this, there's sort of two things that are happening. So one is that we don't know at any given time what to make of just this little shard of information that's being presented to us in a subreddit. And I think you do see. At least I feel I see people who are consuming this. They don't want to be taken in. Like, people online will say, can you link to the document? And then there's a link and it's to justice.gov and you click it and it's a PDF and it has redactions and it's, you know, so, like, there's an interest in responsibly exploring these documents that people have. But there's no question that just seeing an email, seeing a little shard of an exchange or a little piece of something, puts you in the position of filling in what you don't see and most people don't see. I mean, no one really sees 3 million files. So there's this problem, which is very profound. And then there's another problem, which is that I think, as a matter of judgment, it's unclear how to think about people who are, like, appear in the files. Like, I think we can kind of all accept that if you're in the files twice, it's probably not so bad. If you're in there a hundred times or five hundred times or a thousand times, at what point, you know, if you were invited to a dinner and you didn't go, you know, good, good for you. If you did go like twice, is that bad? If you emailed a bunch, is that bad? What does that suggest, if anything, about anything else that might have happened? What the truth is, here we're in this zone where people can just attribute to a social connection all sorts of things based on their prior understandings of the people involved. That sits pretty uneasily against the knowledge that this isn't like an email with Epstein, isn't like a tweet that you regret. It's a little bit more than that. And there's a real sort of sliding scale and the fact that we have a sense that there's more to be released. And then now the official position of the government is here's millions of files. You know, take a look and see what you think. And that's a very, that's a very strange and destructive position to put, you know, your citizens into. And it doesn't lead to people then saying, oh, I guess there's nothing here. It leads to the opposite set of conclusions.
- [25:55]
A
We'll have more of the political scene from the New Yorker in just a moment.
- [26:08]
C
Hi, I'm David Remnick, editor of the New Yorker. At this year's Academy Awards, Timothee Chalamet and Teyana Taylor aren't the only major nominees. The New Yorker will be there, too, with two nominated short films, which you can watch@newyorker.com two people exchanging saliva was executive produced by Julianne Moore and Isabel Huppert, and it's set in a dystopian Paris where kissing is illegal. Our animated short film Retirement Plan follows a man as he dreams about all the things he's going to do when he's done working. You can enjoy both of those films and our full library of acclaimed short films@newyorker.com video.
- [27:03]
A
I want to talk a little bit about, like, what's been happening in the political arena with the File, since we focus mostly on the people at home who are just trying to make sense of these things. I mean, maybe we should start by talking about how the Democrats have been seizing on the Trump administration's handling of the Files. Like there's this term Epstein class, which politicians like Ro Khanna and John Ossoff have been using in their political speeches. And I guess, I wonder if you think that this is an effective political strategy.
- [27:32]
B
So there's a number of, you know, every single thing in this Epstein story, like, it has twists and turns. So one of the challenges that Democrats have faced is that sex trafficking has been a conservative cause for a long time. And conservatives have long maintained that it's a much bigger problem than Democrats acknowledge. That's been an argument that conservatives have made. There have been wildly successful feature films, for example, about rescuing people who have been trafficked, that are, like, really popular if you're a conservative, but that no Democrat has heard of. So we're in this backdrop, first of all, where that's been, what's happening. And so to some degree, I think Democratic politicians are seeking to play catch up a little and, and need to kind of show that this is something they care about very deeply. And then there's this kind of completely flummoxing cognitive dissonance situation around Donald Trump where Republicans ran on releasing the files, on exposing all this. J.D. vance and you know, everyone said we're going to win and then we're going to release the files. They made it their issue as though it were going to be the case that when these files were opened Democrats would be implicated, which you know, to some extent has happened. But it's turned out to really be something that is not easily dividable into political party and like where that was a really bizarre strategy to begin with. I mean it's a, it's, it's, it comes from, I think the fact that there is a genuine grassroots roots interest in the Epstein story. I think what you see now is like from what I can discern is Democratic politicians like Roana using these terms like Epstein class, which are not, it's like I, I, I, I object a lot to those terms. And then I also see why they're powerful. You know, like the idea that there's a whole class of people who are sex traffickers or covering up for sex traffickers is far fetched to say the least. The implication that like the ruling class of, of the world is sex predators is, is like a really destructive implication. But then at the same time I think we sort of see that we, we've come from over the last 20 years many, many, many institutional scandals that have shown that for example, at the top tier of the entertainment industry, the film industry, there was a sex predator who was presumably only one of many who was covered up for we came from a scandal where we saw that at the top of the Catholic Church, all throughout the hierarchy there was a cover up of sexual abuse and so on. And so the idea that the institution of the global power elite, which is something that I think many people believe exists not in an Illuminati way, but in the sense of everyone went to the same universities, everyone worked for a consulting firm for a period of time. In other words, these are people who all have something in common. They all are in the same world. Maybe they work for different agencies or different financial firms or different governments. Maybe one person lives in Switzerland and one person lives in Palo Alto or whatever, that there's an idea like this kind of forms one universe. The idea that that sort of scandal structure could be transposed over to this world of powerful men, to many people does not feel profoundly far fetched. It's like you accepted already that this could be true about all these other groups of people. So why not this group of people? That's essentially kind of the reasoning.
- [31:11]
A
I mean, do you see it kind of as like an extension of some of the, like, populist, anti elite rhetoric that we saw from Trump when he first appeared on the political stage? Just thinking about like this idea that there's like a class of people who are corrupt and they're willing to associate with super nefarious people in order to further their interests, like that is an idea that kind of enabled the first Trump era. And it's now, I feel like now finally we kind of see Democrats using that in reverse.
- [31:39]
B
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the Trump, the Trump argument, which always was kind of incredible and it's almost sort of like semi admirable in its audacity, was there is a global cabal of depraved evil elites that, and I should know because I'm, I, I'm one of them, but I'm actually, deep down, I'm one of you. I mean, that's essentially was the argument. You know, I think it's an interesting, I think it's interesting to look at the Epstein scandal in terms of what it reveals about the beliefs that are implicit today to the extent to which ordinary people believe in more hypothetical versions of events than that has been established. You know, what does that suggest about like, what they take for granted? And you know, I think it's notable like in the, in, in Trump's case, like, you know, you open up the newspaper and you learn how, you know, Trump has been enriching himself and his family through a huge network of business connections and you say that's just true. So the Trump era reality of a globe spanning class of wealthy people who are in it for themselves. No, it, it, it slots very nicely into the Epstein story. I guess my sort of simple way of understanding the Epstein story is it's exactly the kind of thing that you would expect to be true based on about 20 years of bad news. It's like, and then the great difficulty that it puts us in is you don't want to go along with the flow of your imagination. You don't want to fill in the blanks this way. This is a real criminal thing. This is a real series of events that really happened. And what's needed, therefore, is a very trustworthy, very careful, very independent, very searching, very transparent and thorough exploration of what actually happened and what we can and cannot say. We're not going to get every question answered, but we would like to know why weren't those people pursued? Because at this point, the assumption among lots of Americans is that they weren't pursued because they were rich and powerful. If, in fact, there was insufficient evidence, we would like that statement to be made, and then we could disagree with it or whatever, but at least there'd be an authoritative statement that says we're done. That's like, the thing that I think, at least it seems like most Americans don't perceive as happened. They're basically unsatisfied with the authoritative account, and they feel it's not justifiable. Why so many people weren't pursued as investigative targets.
- [34:22]
A
Yeah, I guess that really gets to the heart of this, which is like, does it seem like there are just a few simple questions that people are looking for definitive answers on, and if those questions were answered, some of this would die down? Or has this entire thing kind of set like a new bar for transparency and how much information people expect to receive from the government?
- [34:46]
B
Yeah, I mean, it's like people have such a range of beliefs about the Epstein story, so. And a range of questions to which we could expect, you know, either answers or no answers ever. So, like, a good example to my mind would be there's a. A big swath of Epstein obsessives who believe that he was connected to the intelligence community.
- [35:07]
A
Yeah.
- [35:07]
B
That the reason why he was. And this is all based on this one quote, that. This idea that at some point in the past, Alex Acosta was told, you know, leave Epstein alone. He. He belongs to. To. To the intelligence community.
- [35:20]
A
There's also an email, right. Where he's. I forget exactly who Epstein is emailing with, but he's like, can you tell them I'm not Mossad? And then it's like smiley face or something like that. And people were like, sounds like what you would say if you're Mossad.
- [35:32]
B
Yeah. I mean, so you know Julie K. Brown, who's the reporter for the Miami Herald who kind of re. Reopened the story with her reporting. When David Remnick interviewed her for. For us for the New Yorker, she said I. That I think she occupied a completely appropriate position in saying there's not really any evidence that he was part of the intelligence community. There's no nothing beyond people saying stuff like that and then Austin reading it a certain way. Now, if you're determined to believe that he was somehow part of a scheme to get Kompromat on the world's richest people and exert control through these hidden channels, really, I feel there's almost nothing that Anyone can say to dissuade you of that view, that's like a, that's a view that just is going to exist forever. But then alternatively, if you take the example of Epstein's death in jail, I think lots of Americans feel, I think I saw a report that said it's like 50% of Americans feel that he didn't commit suicide. And Julie K. Brown, in your interview with David Remnick says, I don't believe that he did. Now a question that I think is valid is will we ever know? Could we know? Should there be a new fact finding attempt to get to the bottom of that?
- [36:50]
A
The third one, right?
- [36:51]
B
The third one, yeah.
- [36:52]
A
Because there was a second one. And during the files, it seems during the second attempt they're kind of making comments about how the first investigation wasn't that great. And so it's like, it's interesting to see like the skepticism of like the officials who are tasked with looking into this stuff like come up in the files.
- [37:10]
B
I mean, so my point is just that like there's actually many Epstein scandals, if you see what I'm saying. There's many subscandals and some of them we could expect some more clarity on or at least if there's no. We could expect a authoritative statement saying there's not going to be any more clarity. Like that would be a possible outcome would be to say we've invested, investigated it again, look at all our information. We just don't, we can't say anything that's a possible outcome. There's some areas where like you could have that and you might think it could move the needle on how people relate to this. And then there's some areas where we will say, you know, forevermore. There will be this idea that Epstein was X and that he did Y in collusion with Z and A and B and C and D and E. And because there are millions of documents to be poured over and millions more to be like fabricated by AI based Epstein email generators or whatever into the future, it doesn't seem likely that those very open ended questions will be resolved anytime soon.
- [38:15]
A
Thanks so much for being here, Josh.
- [38:17]
B
Thanks for having me, Tyler.
- [38:21]
A
Joshua Rothman is a staff writer at the New Yorker. You can find his latest piece, Are We Living in the Age of epstein? @newyorker.com this has been the political scene from the New Yorker. I'm Tyler Foggit. This episode is produced by John Lamay with mixing by Mike Kutchman and engineering by Pran Bandy. Our executive producer is Steven Valentino. Our theme music is by Alison Layton Brown. Thanks so much for listening. We'll be back next Wednesday. Wired has always put a microscope on the people, power and forces shaping our world. Uncanny Valley brings that same fearless reporting straight to your feed. Is DOGE finally over? Will AI actually democratize American healthcare? Each week, Wired journalists from across the newsroom are going to unpack where politics are Technology in Silicon Valley collide. From conversations with tech leaders across Silicon Valley, Internet fandom investigations, and government crackdowns on rigged gambling. We're taking you all over the news cycle, going straight inside the priorities, pressures and power plays driving today's biggest decisions. Uncanny Valley tackles the questions keeping you up at night and helps make sense of the future taking shape right now. Listen to new episodes every Thursday. Wherever you get your podcasts.
- [39:48]
B
From prx.