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Chapter 1: What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
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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.
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Chapter 2: What recent revelations have emerged from the Epstein files?
That's the spectacle for you at home to keep you entertained. What they're actually doing is revealed in these files, which is hanging out, breaking bread, colluding, sharing information, giving each other tips on deals, giving each other PR advice, making introductions to each other. You have these moments in the files where Jeffrey Epstein is asking Steve Bannon for help.
getting, I think it was Brad Karp, into the Augusta National Golf Club. And Steve Bannon talks about basically how hard, he's gonna help, he's gonna maybe see if he can do some looking around, but he's kind of explaining to Epstein how hard it might be. to get Brad Karp into this club.
Why would Steve Bannon have access to the Augusta National Golf Club that Brad Karp, you know, I don't know if at this point the chairman of the Paul Weiss firm, but an absolute scion of the establishment. I mean, as a question of just where power is. Right. In a lot of these emails, it doesn't lie where you'd expect.
Well, I think... The Augusta National Club is not a normal part of the establishment. It's in the Deep South, and it is famously, you know, didn't allow black members, didn't allow Jewish members. And so when you're dealing with like a club with kind of a white nationalist history, you go to Steve Bannon for a little help to get in. You got to know who to go to for what.
And this is so striking, Ezra. Steve Bannon describes the people who run the Augusta Club to Jeffrey Epstein as crackers. He uses a racist term for white people. The specific kind of demo of white people that Steve Bannon uses used to get Donald Trump elected.
And so in this moment, Steve Bannon, who deplores the quote-unquote globalists and people of high finance and this and that, is talking to financier Jeffrey Epstein, referring to white people in Georgia as crackers. None of these people in these networks are mean what they say when you hear them in public. They mean what they say when you're not looking.
And these emails in some are an extraordinary and rare chance to see what they really think about you, how they really move through the world, what their actual ends and projects are. Maya Angelou is right when people show you who they are, believe them.
You used the word solidarity a moment ago for this network. But when you look at these communications, There are moments of solidarity, and you wrote, and some of it's actually movingly, about, I mean, Epstein has a talent for friendship. He has a talent for being of use to people. He becomes an advisor to them. You can't be a great con man without understanding human beings at a very deep level.
But there's also just endless transactionalism. an endless trading of information, money, connections, favor, powers, ultimately women and girls. And that what feels oftentimes like it is attracting them to each other is not always what I would think of as solidarity, like a fellowship. But what can you do for me? And if you can be the one who finds it for them, that's real power, right?
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Chapter 3: How did Epstein establish his powerful network?
And he does. So Staley invests in a hedge fund that he's connected to through Epstein, not Staley personally, but through J.P. Morgan. And it becomes, and Staley says this later, the investment that fundamentally makes his career because it opens that world to J.P. Morgan and it's considered a brilliant move. Epstein introduces him to Sergey Brin.
the founder of Google. I think this is so interesting, but here's how I explain it. The more powerful you are and the more you rise in these hierarchies, the more of a bureaucracy around you there becomes, right? You, Ezra Klein, if I'd tried to reach out to you 20 years ago, I could have just probably emailed some Gmail address, right?
But now you got a podcast, I gotta go through this person, I gotta go through this person. So actually, the more important thing these stratospherically powerful people become. There's publicists and the publicists have publicists and there's this person, there's that person. And that's why actually a TED conference or these kinds of worlds are valuable because Sergey Brin is actually in the bar
at night, and some finance guy who wants to meet him, yeah, he's not without status. He could go through the channels, but it's work and it's cumbersome and it's like, it's old school.
I think you're overestimating Ted if you think Sergey Brin is at the bar.
I have been with Sergey Brin at the bar. Really?
Absolutely.
You know these worlds in. Absolutely. I mean, I was at the bar with him with my friend Esther Perel, who you've always talked to. I've never seen, by the way, she had just given her talk. I have never seen so many rich people flock to one person for personal consultations. We were just having a drink and a thing. Everybody was on Esther. All those guys. All these guys were on Esther.
Help me with this situation. Help me with... It was an incredible, incredible thing to watch.
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Chapter 4: What role did elite connections play in Epstein's operations?
Tina Brown has this great line. She's invited to a dinner with Epstein, Prince Andrew, and Woody Allen. And she responded, what the fuck is this, the pedo's ball? Melinda Gates sees him perfectly clearly. Sees him perfectly clearly. And so, is Epstein a way you see, quote unquote, the elite? Or is this a... like a subcategory, right? It's not telling us that much about power.
It's telling us something about some set of powerful people, which, as in any other culture or network, they're going to be people of better and worse judgment, higher and lower character, more or less transactionalism. I mean, even in this JPMorgan Chase example I've been using, there are people in the bank who are fighting hard to cut ties with him.
they lose until it becomes completely untenable for the bank to keep going. But they are there.
I think that's right, and it's an important point to dwell on for a second, right? Because I think, you know, you could take a narrow view that... Only the people who are actively involved in crimes of pedophilia here are really this group of people we should focus on, and everything else is a distraction.
You could take the opposite view that this is an indictment of, like, every person with more than $10 million in the bank, right? I think both of those are incorrect. I believe in this notion, and I've seen it in so many forms in the course of my years of reporting, of what I think about as concentric circles of enablement. Right.
There is no doubt that there is a core group of people who were knowledgeable about, engaged in, and shared participation in crimes of pedophilia at the heart, the burning heart of this story. That is obviously its own circle of hell. We know from testimony of survivors that it was more people than just him, that he was trafficking them to other people. We have some of the names.
We don't have all the names. But that was happening, and that's the burning heart of this story. that can't be forgotten. And then there's, what made that possible?
Who were the, very practically that means, who were the other people who didn't do that, but who are aware of it, who facilitated it, for whom it was not a problem, who were not later discouraged by it when deciding whether to let him into something. Then what was the circle around that? That just, you know, universities that maybe knew a Larry Summers was a
Pally with him or we're accepting money and just didn't stop the thing. Right. And then you can keep going out from there. And here's it's sometimes helpful to shift the metaphor. Right. I think about when I was in India as a reporter for The Times and you would have, you know, a problem of so-called honor killings in rural villages in North India. Right.
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Chapter 5: How did Jeffrey Epstein manipulate perceptions of power?
There's a very kind of catch me if you can aspect to it. And I think what the Times reporting showed so masterfully is that this was not someone who made a bunch of money in business who also did some shady things. Like the scamming is how he made his money. I think it's at this point the reporting bears out the notion that the fortune was inseparable from the scamming and the stealing.
This is not someone with like brilliant businesses.
Yeah, he becomes Wexner's, I mean, this is jumping ahead in your story, but he becomes Wexner's money manager. Maybe he just moves Wexner's money into his own accounts. Yeah. It's not that complicated of a con. He has power over the money.
I never think of simple ideas like that. That's my problem.
That's my problem.
You're trying to write books, man. Do things the hard way. Do things the hard way. No, but you're right. But I think what's so interesting here, think about something now we've had more time to metabolize as a society. Think about Harvey Weinstein.
it's the same story in the end now today 2026 how many people knew maybe thousands knew enough and you think about this guy being able harvey weinstein to operate at the highest levels of the democratic party obviously hollywood finance everything Right?
But it's not the same story because Weinstein is loathsome and a criminal and a rapist. But the thing at the center of his power was real. He really did produce those movies. He really did make that studio. With Epstein, it is a con all the way through, which is amazing.
But what I'm saying is I think the human capacity to just, to not want to stake your neck out, to not be the person at the party, not be the skunk at the garden party, to wait for someone else to say something, I'm talking about just a more basic human thing, creates an immense vulnerability that people like this know.
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Chapter 6: What was the nature of Epstein's relationships with influential figures?
One is because you see this in this moment, like when he recognizes like somebody who's got a shared interest, right, begins to pull them in and begins to, you know, he's acting as a pimp here. The other is all we know right now is what was written down. There was a lot here that should have been investigated that hasn't been, right? This is like an ongoing story in that way.
There was a lot that was said in phone calls, right? Epstein clearly has some situational awareness of what shouldn't be in an email chain. So what we are seeing here, and I mean, there are emails and files and texts and so on we don't yet have that have not been released. It's very, very incomplete.
But you can see how it goes from the reputation as a guy who is always covered in women all the way down to the procure of women, right? And then those people are woven in with him. Then they share something that the rest of the world is not supposed to know about. And that creates an intimacy that's going to be very different.
I think it's a very important point because people like Steve Tisch don't actually email. like this a lot there. I mean, again, this is a obviously reckless email and the ultimate recklessness is that Ezra Klein is reading your emails about soliciting women on a podcast. So obviously it didn't work out for him. However, generally, These people are very careful.
And so it is worth remembering, as you point out, that we are seeing, whatever you're seeing, imagine 10 times more than it. Imagine 10 times more names. Imagine, you know, that is happening in phone calls. that is happening in things that we will never see and never know, right? Imagining what is happening in rooms that is not documented in a legal paper trail. That's really important.
Not to mention just documents that the Trump administration will not release. In my book, Winners Take All, which is a lot about this class of people, one of my characters is Lori Tisch, who's Steve's sister.
And, you know, when I was writing that book, it was really important to me to not simply judge this world from the outside, but to talk to people who are in this world about how they see the world. And I did that with many different types of people.
And Lori was one of the billionaires I spoke to who I was very grateful came on the record and basically talked about the world from her point of view. And she said, you know, things like, It's a very unfair world. It's a very unequal world. This kind of power is unjust.
She talked about when she thinks about how that family fortune was made, including cigarettes and other things, she feels sick to her stomach. Sometimes people thank her for philanthropic gifts. She feels bad because she thinks about in that moment where the money came from. But she also said, look, we are here now. The best I can do is give things away, try to be a good person.
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Chapter 7: How did Epstein's financial dealings impact his power?
The director of New York Times Pending Audio is Annie Rose Strasser.