Epstein Did Not Do This All by Himself

From your perspective then, it is likely that there is some set of men in the world, in the world of men, who move through Epstein's mansion, Epstein's island, and so on, who are guilty, who are guilty of essentially having girls trafficked to them and, you know, having sex with minors and so on, whose names, whose names have not been successfully accused in a court of law.

That's correct.

Okay. So the next question, what do you think about the evidence and speculation that Epstein intended to blackmail people? Because that again is sort of the next, the next phase of the theorizing is that Epstein wasn't just trying to sort of woo and, you know, befriend these men, but he also liked the idea of having dirt on the people who had done bad things around him.

I think he did, but I don't think he blackmailed people directly like that. I mean, if you just really think about it, if you send a girl over to have sex with one of these men, it's not like you write it down or that you, you know, I don't believe he had a list. I just think that he, he used these women, girls and women as pawns in order to ingratiate himself with people that he wanted to do business with. It was a business transaction to him. That's what this was. I don't think that he had this operation where he was, you know, essentially saying, "If you don't do this for me, I'm going to reveal that you had sex with so-and-so." I don't think it was like that in that traditional sense.

But if you're a man and you know that you've been doing this, you know, and he knows that you know, right?

Exactly. And I think it was more like that. But I don't think it was an official or an outright blackmail scheme like that. I think it was more like, he knows this about me, maybe I better, you know, do this.

So then that leads into the next sort of open question, right? Which is Epstein's alleged ties to intelligence agencies, meaning, I think in practice, either American intelligence agencies or the Mossad in Israel. And here we were talking earlier about Epstein's lenient plea deal and why Alex Acosta ended up giving him the plea deal. There is a now famous secondhand quote from Acosta where he is reported by someone else in the first Trump administration to have said, "Oh, he was told to back off Epstein because Epstein belonged to intelligence." Acosta has never publicly corroborated that quote, and there have been other instances where he said he didn't know anything about Epstein's intelligence connections. But first, do you think that some form of the intelligence world and Epstein's connections to it entered in at all to why he got off light the first time or anything like that?

I don't know. And I don't think anybody really knows except the people in the government that have these files. And I think that's in part one of the unanswered questions about Epstein because I just don't know. I know there's a lot of supposition about that, but as you said, you know, I try to stick to the facts, and so it's just something we don't know for sure.

Yeah. I mean, but I think I'm drawing on your view, your skepticism about the blackmail narrative, right? There are sort of two intelligence stories you could tell. In one, Epstein is literally an agent of an intelligence agency trying to gather dirt on famous people to get them to do what the US government wants or what the Israeli government wants. That's sort of the most extreme. In the second one, which I find somewhat more plausible, Epstein is operating in a world where, you know, Les Wexner, his patron, is a Zionist and a supporter of Israel. Robert Maxwell had connections to Israeli intelligence. So that, you know, this is a world of people who overlap with Israeli intelligence, and maybe Epstein is useful as sort of a conduit of information, these kinds of things, right? But it's not that he's being run as a kind of entrapment ring. That's sort of where I am. If we don't think that Epstein was running actual blackmail operations, then the idea that he is sort of doing some kind of full-scale intelligence operation seems much less likely.

Well, let me put it to you this way. You're talking about what's plausible and what's not plausible. It's the job of our government to find out what's plausible or what's real and what's not real. And the question here, if we're talking about things that we don't know and things that maybe we should look into, the question is here. There certainly was enough there that the federal government, the DOJ, at some point should have launched a counterintelligence investigation into what was true and on that end or not. We've known long enough of this Acosta statement that he made. We know they've heard everything that we've heard that we've just talked about. So, we don't know the answer to those questions, but it's the job of our federal government to look into those kinds of things. And at some point, one would hope that they did look into some of that. We just don't know whether they did or not.

Good. So that brings me to either my last or next-to-last unanswered question, right? Which is what do you think, if anything, the government has in its possession, the Department of Justice or anyone else, that could shed further light on this case?

Well, they absolutely have files that they can release. They could release his autopsy report, for example. They could release his plane records, for example, the FAA records of where he flew. They could redact the names of victims, but they could release information gathered by the US Marshals Service, which was supposed to monitor him. He was a convicted sex offender, but yet he was allowed to fly his plane all over the world, come back into the United States with girls or young women aboard his plane on a regular basis. So, this is to me more of a story not necessarily about Epstein, but about our government and what our government did or didn't do. This was a man that was allowed to abuse girls and women for two decades. How did that happen and why did it happen? To me, that is the question. Epstein is sort of the character in this. But really, these questions, I think the public, and especially the victims, did deserve to know whether our government did the job that they were supposed to do.

When people talk about the Epstein files, right, this kind of term of art that gets thrown around. Some of what you're suggesting sounds more like you think the government needs to, you know, look at material that it already has, but effectively create a new set of Epstein files. Say, we're going to go digging and find new information.

But do we know maybe they did do that? We don't know what they did and didn't do. It's possible they did do a counterintelligence operation. It's possible they did look into some of these leads that they received about what he was doing. These are just some of the questions. It's not when they say release the Epstein files, you are correct. They might not be able to release all these files, and it might not be appropriate for them to do so. But to completely shut down the case the way that they are saying that's it, nothing to see here, I think it does the public a disservice because people want answers about how this man was able to operate like this for so long.

And when you say things could be things could be released that wouldn't be appropriate, that means that there's a set of information and material that involves both victims and maybe alleged perpetrators, also just people who are connected to Epstein, right? And there's some of that that presumably can't be released without betraying the victims themselves, right?

Right.

And some of that you wouldn't want to release because you'd be effectively releasing hearsay and rumor about public figures who haven't actually been charged with a crime, right? Those seem like both impediments to some kinds of release that people want.

That's correct. But there's still a whole set of information that they could release. For example, the FBI has a lot of files that are there online in their vault, what they call the vault. And for the most part, when you click on those files, they're either filled with wall-to-wall gobblygook codes or they are reports from the FBI from their investigation way back in 2005 where they're kind of giving status reports on the investigation. Those reports are heavily redacted. Even Epstein's own name is redacted in some of these reports. That investigation from back then, what they did and what they knew and when they knew it. Certainly, some of those files could be looked at again and unredacted so that people can see exactly what happened. But I think that it's just a place where nobody wants to go. These are very powerful men, important men, and possibly even quite frankly GOP or Democratic donors.

Okay. And now Trump himself. Um, what do you think? Now we're going to enter the realm of speculation, but Trump, it's not just that the Trump administration has sort of shut down the investigation or said, "Well, we've disclosed everything we can disclose." It's that Trump has come out swinging, right? Saying, you know, "This is a hoax. This is," you know, he's essentially treating a story that had been taken up by a big part of his own base as a story that he wants to not just sort of ignore, but like publicly discredit. First, what is your understanding of Trump's connections to Epstein?

Yeah, and I'd like to stick with what I know because...

Well, we know. Yeah, stick with what you know there. He was friends with Epstein in the 1990s and they were in the same social circles together. And, you know, we see the video of him at a party at Mar-a-Lago. My understanding is the falling out was two things that led to the falling out. One, that he, Epstein hit on a member's daughter at Mar-a-Lago, and he was banned from Epstein was banned from Mar-a-Lago. And the other...

Once again, Donald Trump is standing up for sexual ethics in America. Yes, that's good.

And the other involved a real estate transaction, of course, money, where they were bidding on the same property, a very big property, and Epstein lost, and Trump won the deal. And so they had a falling out over that property. So those were the two things. But up until then, Trump had been flying on Epstein's plane. He entertained some of Epstein's family at one of his casinos. So they were somewhat friendly.

So now, so then, and again, I don't want to make you speculate too much, but then to you, watching Trump essentially say, "It's time to bury this story. It's time to get my own supporters to move on from it," and so on, that looks like to you just a desire similar to the desire of prosecutors not to have to deal with potential fallout from other names coming out? What is that your reading?

I don't know. It doesn't make any sense to me, to be honest with you. I really honestly don't know. It doesn't make any sense that you would promote doing this and saying you're going to do it over and over again and have the people that you appoint go forward with going public on TV in a very public way, promising to do something, and then to switch gears like that. I really honestly don't know why he would do something like that. I just don't.

He gave an interview during the campaign, I think during the campaign, right, where he said something like he was asked about the files and in part of the answer he said, "Well, we're going to release, you know, we should release something." But then he said, "But you don't want to release things that aren't true."

Right. Right. And my perception was always that other people in his coalition were much more enthusiastic about this story. It was never, this was never one of Trump's obsessions. This was something his supporters were obsessed with. So it didn't surprise me that, you know, in the end, they didn't want to do some version of even what you're describing and say, "Ah, you know, we're going to go back and find a bunch of other records to release." That doesn't surprise me. I am surprised, though, by the vehemence of Trump's reaction to the negative reaction. That is something of a mystery.

Okay. I've been trying to cover the unanswered questions. Do you have any other specific questions that you would like answered?

I wish I understood why our government isn't treating this like the crime that it is. It's a serious crime that happened here. I don't think there's any dispute. I mean, let's, you know, this is something that actually happened. This isn't a hoax. This happened to these women when they were very young. And I just, it is surprising to some degree that they're treating this as such a political issue and not treating it like it should be treated, which is as a crime. And if the files are unsatisfactory, don't contain credible evidence, then maybe they need to look a little deeper. Maybe the answer is, we still have questions and we're going to look into this more. But that's not the answer they gave. The answer they gave was, there's nothing here. There's nothing more to investigate. We're done with this story. And I think the answer should be, obviously the public has a lot of questions and the victims still want justice. So we're going to look at this a little further.

But in the end, for that to be worth doing, right? Epstein himself is dead. So the assumption, your assumption in making this argument, and I think it's a very compelling argument, but the core of the argument is there are other people out there who are guilty.

That's correct.

Of Epstein's crimes who should face justice and haven't.

Yes. Yeah. Let me be clear. Epstein did not do this all by himself. He barely tied his shoes by himself. He had butlers and assistants doing everything for him, including compiling of his contact list, his musical playlists. He had people doing that for him, his computers. He had lots of people helping him. And so he did not do this alone. There were other people helping him. And there were other men who he sent some of these women to.

Julie K. Brown, thank you so much. It's been a pleasure. Thank you.