The Real Story Of The Epstein Files
Why can a 79-year-old billionaire not hire anyone with a shred of competence?
Why Epstein Still Captivates
My admittedly underinformed opinion is that there isn’t a massive conspiracy surrounding Jeffrey Epstein. The more, shall we say, aggressive interpretations of his life run into the same problem as theories around the Kennedy assassination: either one (or, here, two) people were involved, or hundreds were. Given my general belief that three people can keep a secret only if two of them are dead, it’s simply difficult to imagine an operation with that kind of reach existing with zero notice for so long.
Of course, it’s easy to see why there are so many conspiracies around Epstein; unlike the Kennedy assassination, there isn’t an official story that seems to have any logic (we’ll put a further explanation on JFK in a long, somewhat self-indulgent footnote1 so readers can move on if they so desire).
Indeed, in terms of the broad Jeffrey Epstein story, there still is no logical explanation of what actually happened here — for decades. We have no idea how he made his money: Epstein supposedly ran a hedge fund, yet Doug Kass, an actually successful hedge fund manager, could not find a single person who had ever traded with him. Kass was one of many legitimate players on Wall Street who believed Epstein’s fund involved some sort of blackmail, as a New York magazine article detailed back in 2019.
There is the odd teaching assignment at a prestigious private school (with no college degree!), the stunning rise through Bear Stearns, the accusation (admittedly by a confessed and convicted felon) that Epstein was the actual mastermind of a Ponzi scheme in the 1980s, the incredible sweetheart plea deal for sex trafficking in Florida in 2008, and then Epstein’s jailhouse suicide in 2019, which even in the official telling involved incredible amounts of incompetence. No one, to my knowledge, has proffered anything close to a logical explanation for how all of these events occurred in one man’s life; at this point, it’s not clear that anyone can devise such any explanation.
And so it’s no surprise that so many theories have been floated. Many have only added credence, at least among their believers, since U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi essentially shut down any further disclosure of the “Epstein Files”, including a purported client list.
We’ll leave the accuracy of those theories to those who have done more research (no doubt there have been about a billion words on Epstein published on Substack over the last week). But it is worth exploring another angle that hasn’t received much, if any, coverage — an angle that maps onto our previous discussions of the Trump Administration.
How We Got Here
Jeffrey Epstein has been a part of Donald Trump’s political calculus from the jump. In late 2014, when Trump was considering a run for the presidency, former aide Sam Numberg raised Epstein as a potential liability. Steve Bannon, hired to lead the 2016 campaign, reportedly told Epstein himself that “you were the only person I was afraid of.”
Epstein featured as a minor player in that campaign, with accusations going in both directions (given the connection of former President Bill Clinton, husband of Democratic Party nominee Hillary Clinton, to Epstein). In 2019, Trump’s Labor Secretary, Alex Acosta, resigned after a firestorm of criticism related to Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, which Acosta had negotiated as U.S. Attorney. Epstein hanged himself (or, “hanged himself”, depending on your perspective) a month later.
During the Biden term, Epstein seemed to be mostly a focus of the committed and online right. But the committed and online right is now running American law enforcement. So, as the Washington Post helpfully pointed out last week, that meant theories around Epstein’s influence maintained currency with the likes of vice president JD Vance; Kash Patel, now FBI director; and Dan Bongino, Patel’s deputy.
Vance said on a podcast in October that “seriously, we need to release the Epstein list. That is an important thing.” Patel said at his confirmation hearing that he would work with the Senate on detailing Epstein’s associates; as late as May, he told Fox News that “we are diligently working” on the case. He had said in November that Trump would “maybe give [the public] the Epstein list”. Bongino, on his own podcast in 2023, had told listeners that “the Jeffrey Epstein is a big deal…please do not let the story go.”
And, famously, in late February Attorney General Pam Bondi released the “first phase” of the declassified Epstein files in a heavily choreographed event featuring a number of conservative influencers. It was at that February event that the Epstein issue first became a political problem; even the invited influencers complained, as one put it, that “we’re all waiting for juicy stuff”.
What Changed?
Now, that entire group is arguing, essentially, that there is nothing left to see here, and nothing left to say. And so the obvious question is: what changed?
One irony here is that, at least in this case, Trump himself is not really to blame — at least not directly. He has never been terribly aggressive in pushing conspiracy theories about Epstein (certainly in relation to other, often baseless, accusations he has kept up for years). Most of his statements about Epstein are answers to questions from others (such as in a Fox News interview last year); his few social media posts on the matter are re-posts exonerating his own behavior. Indeed, a “person close to” Trump told the New York Times yesterday that the president hadn’t fully appreciated the reach of the scandal among his base, because he is a “a 79-year-old man whose media diet consists primarily of cable news and print newspapers.”
Another irony is that the long history of the Epstein shadow likely confirms Trump’s story that he and Epstein broke off communication sometime in the early 2000s, perhaps owing to a bidding war over a waterfront Florida mansion in 20032. For all the complaints from Trump and his supporters about “fake news”, neither Trump nor those in his orbit can shut the fuck up when in earshot of a reporter; sometimes, those reporters even get invited to sensitive national security discussions. If Trump actually was trying to bury something, it seems incredibly unlikely that it would have stay buried for this long.
So if Trump is not actually “implicated” (however one defines that) in the Epstein case, and no broader, deeper conspiracy exists (such as one those that allegedly involve people more powerful than the president of the United States, who Trump and his associates are protected under pain of death or worse), this becomes a story about competence, or the lack thereof. And that is precisely the story we’ve told here before.
The Story Remains The Same
It’s the story of Trump Media & Technology Group, whose executives (there, too, chosen by Donald Trump) have shown no grasp of actually running a public company or taking advantage of a multi-billion dollar cash hoard and a valuable brand. (That group’s new strategy is literally to just buy a bunch of Bitcoin; in related news, the stock is down by nearly half so far this year.) It’s the story of SignalGate, in which a journalist was added to a national security discussion while the Secretary of Defense confidently wrote that they were “clean on OpSec [operational security]”.
It’s the repeated story in which Donald Trump hires people based on loyalty, or television presence, or some other not-necessarily-germane characteristic (blonde hair?) And then those people can’t build a business, and can’t manage leaks without polygraphs, and now clearly have no plan to deal with a monster they clearly understood and had helped to create. And that is in large part because, as we wrote about both TMTG and SignalGate, there are no grown-ups in the room.
Do you know who would not have allowed the Epstein to potentially fracture the MAGA base? The Attorney General in Trump’s first term, Bill Barr. Whatever one thinks about Barr, he was a grown-up. As an experienced Washington hand, Barr almost certainly would have the entire team work together to gently manage down expectations, found a few leaks to friendly outlets to throw tidbits to the hungriest part of the base, and kept control of the narrative. The clear goal would be to push the Epstein story back to where it was in the early 2020s: purely in the online zeitgeist, and away from impressionable swing voters and/or less-committed Trump supporters. (It bears repeating: Trump himself didn’t understand how big the story had become, because he wasn’t online enough. For him and millions of other Americans in their 70s, that obviously is no longer the case.)
There would not have been a publicity stunt executed at a time when in the best-case scenario, Bondi didn’t have a full grasp of the Epstein story. (The worst-case scenario, of course, is that Bondi knew by February there wasn’t a massive network of Epstein clients and blackmail victims, in which case the plan was to have an event promoting that story at the White House in late February and then…???)
There would not have been the director of the FBI promising in late May that “I’m not going to withhold information from the American public, ever” only for that same man six weeks later to have to dismiss “the conspiracy theories” to a base whose belief in conspiracy theories was fanned by the president and, previously, by Patel himself. And there would not have been a scandal that threatens to fracture the MAGA base, in a way that only the Access Hollywood tape in October 2016 and the riot of January 6, 2021 have done.
Expertise and experience do matter; they are required in some quantity. Even in an administration that prioritizes loyalty, experience and expertise matter. Donald Trump has never, and likely will never, learn that lesson. Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino may be about to.
As of this writing, Vince Martin has no positions in any companies or securities mentioned.
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In the latter event, much of the seemingly suspicious behavior of the authorities is relatively explainable. The FBI and CIA both had kept tabs on Oswald following his return from a defection to the Soviet Union, only to see him murder a sitting president under their ostensible watch. Combined with a number of operations by both agencies of dubious legality and effectiveness, each (and the CIA in particular) limited the information given to investigators and the public for fear of embarrassment.
Federal authorities on the ground in Dallas, meanwhile, wanted nothing to do with their local counterparts. Dallas at the time was regarded as a violent and deeply corrupt city (as witnessed by the steady stream of cops into and out of Jack Ruby’s establishment, and his ability to enter the police station unobstructed to see Oswald escorted out). And in D.C., higher-ranking officials were legitimately worried that public belief in a conspiracy could increase tensions with the Soviets and thus raise the risk of a nuclear conflict. (Bear in mind the Cuban Missile Crisis had occurred only the previous year; the Soviets themselves worried about conspiracy theories affecting their relations with the U.S.)
There is a lot of seemingly strange behavior by various authorities, agencies, and actors on the day of November 22, 1963 and afterward. But it’s possible to explain most of that behavior as driven not by a massive cover-up, but by legitimate (if sometimes self-interested) concern about the aftereffects of an absolutely seismic event.
For that matter, so does the fact that Trump seems genuinely caught unaware by this scandal; had he really been involved in illegal/unethical doings on Epstein’s island, his behavior this year and over the last decade almost certainly would have been much more purposeful.