At the end of January, Trump’s Department of Justice released what it said was the last tranche of Epstein files: millions of emails and texts, F.B.I. documents and court records. It’s just a huge dump of information. Journalists, investigators and the public are sifting through them as we speak. What’s amazing, though, is how much we just still don’t know, or at least don’t know yet. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who, before he joined the D.O.J., was Trump’s personal lawyer, has said that “the department’s collection effort resulted in more than six million pages being identified as potentially responsive ——” But they released only about three and a half million pages to the public. So what’s in the two and a half million pages we haven’t seen? “Mr. Speaker, yesterday, Congressman Massie and I went to the Department of Justice to read the unredacted Epstein files. We spent about two hours there, and we learned that 70 to 80 percent of the files are still redacted. In fact, there were six wealthy, powerful men that the D.O.J. hid for no apparent reason. So we are still far from the end of this story. We’re still far from knowing much of what we want to know inside the story. But what has come into clear view is the incredible breadth of Epstein’s network. The huge range of people who relied on him, communicated with him, traded with him, and the role he played in this network, the role he played among the American elite, as a broker of information, connections, wealth and ultimately human beings. This is what I think the files, along with a lot of amazing reporting and courageous testimony, have at least begun to answer: where Epstein’s mysterious power came from. Why so many famous and powerful people from so many walks of life orbited around him, even after he was convicted in 2008 of soliciting a minor for prostitution. What has come into clear view is the infrastructure of Epstein’s power, and maybe through that, the infrastructure of modern power and elite networks more generally.
