David Enrich

As someone who has built this huge network, not only of young women and girls whom he's abusing, but also this cast of rich, powerful, famous men who have supported him and enabled him along the way.

Well, Epstein and Trump were operating in very similar social circles for a number of years, basically from the late 1980s into the early 2000s.

They were at times apparently very close friends.

And our colleague Nick Confessori has just spent months digging into this.

And one of the findings in his investigation was that not only were they close friends for years—

But they were also competing with each other for young women.

And Nick in his story described Epstein and Trump as being one another's wingmen.

That being said, there are still a lot of unanswered questions about the exact nature of that relationship.

If there were business dealings between the two of them, for example.

And it is not clear to me whether there are answers that are lurking in these as yet undisclosed Epstein files that the Trump administration is sitting on.

And one way to think about this is that at the outset, what the Justice Department has been told and is required under law to release are files related to the federal investigations of Epstein over the years.

And it is not clear to me that federal investigators were doing a whole lot of investigating into the men with whom Epstein was associated, whether that's Trump or men like Leon Black or Les Wexner or people like that.

And so to the extent that those were not subjects of investigation—

we're not likely to see a tremendous amount about them in these files but at the same time there's also a question of why exactly trump and his administration have been so reluctant to come clean about what is in these files to begin with and if they had just released this stuff when they said they would back early in this year we might not be talking about this anymore and the fact that they have been fighting so hard against full transparency here it does suggest that there is something in there that they want to hide

It's not self-evident that this would have already come out for at least two reasons.

One reason is that, you know, it's become, I think, accepted conventional wisdom that if an administration has damaging information about its political enemies, that that will immediately be released.

That is not the way justice departments have historically operated.

And so it's entirely possible that a previous administration's justice department might have had damaging information about its opponents that it kept under wraps because it was supposed to do so.

That's thing one.

Thing two is that it is also entirely possible that there could have been reports or suspicions or investigative trails that were followed that did lead to powerful men and powerful institutions.