The Infrastructure of Jeffrey Epstein’s Power
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Hi, my name is Dana. I am a subscriber to the New York Times, but my husband isn't. And it would be really nice to be able to share a recipe or an article or compete with him in Wordle or Connections. Thank you.
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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, FBI 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 Blanch, who before he joined the DOJ was Trump's personal lawyer... has said that investigators identified 6 million potentially responsive pages, but they released only about 3.5 million pages to the public. So what's in the 2.5 million pages we haven't seen? Representatives Ro Khanna and Thomas Massey, who co-sponsored the House legislation that mandated the files release, have argued that the DOJ is engaged in a cover-up and is using redactions to protect powerful men who may have committed crimes.
Mr. Speaker, yesterday, Congressman Massey 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% of the files are still redacted. In fact, there were six wealthy, powerful men that the DOJ hid for no apparent reason.
So we are still far from the end of the 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 and
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. Anand Giridharadas is a journalist who has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker, and many other outlets. He publishes the great newsletter, The Ink, and is the author of, among other books, Winners Take All, the elite charade of changing the world, which he published in 2018, and the forthcoming Man in the Mirror, Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City. I often think of Anand's work as a kind of sociology of American elites and power. And that's been the perspective he's brought to his coverage of these files.
And I think it is revelatory and worth hearing. As always, my email, ezraklineshow at nytimes.com.
Anand Giridharadas, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. So there have now been literally millions of pages of Epstein files released. There are possibly millions more that we have not seen, so we don't know everything. There are redactions that we don't yet understand. But when you try to step back from what we have seen, what is the picture that emerges?
You know, there's that proverb, it takes a village to raise a child. I think we've learned that it takes a very powerful network to abuse so many children. And so we're getting a glimpse of an absolutely barbaric pedophilia scandal at the heart of Jeffrey Epstein's life and intimate circles. But also around that, what I would think about is many concentric circles of networks, connections, friends, what Congressman Ro Khanna calls an Epstein class, one could say, that made that possible, that made what he did possible.
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Chapters
7 chapters
1
What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
0:00–7:03
2
What recent revelations have emerged from the Epstein files?
7:03–14:22
3
How did Epstein establish his powerful network?
14:22–26:51
4
What role did elite connections play in Epstein's operations?
26:51–40:38
5
How did Jeffrey Epstein manipulate perceptions of power?
40:38–1:00:56
6
What was the nature of Epstein's relationships with influential figures?
1:00:56–1:27:33
7
How did Epstein's financial dealings impact his power?
1:27:33–1:27:36