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 Blanche, who before he joined the DOJ was Trump's personal lawyer, has said that the department's collection effort resulted in more than six million pages being identified as potentially responsive, 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?
Mr. Speaker, yesterday Congressman Massie 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 percent 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 this 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, 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: Hopes, 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 at
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Anand Giridharadas, welcome to the show. 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?
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 as many concentric circles of networks, connections, friends, what Congressman Ro Khanna calls an Epstein class, one could say that. Has that made that possible. That made what he did possible. And we're getting a glimpse, I would say, of how our world, how our country is run, and it isn't pretty.
The most striking thing about the files is the range of Jeffrey Epstein's elite network. I mean, you have so many here who is intimate with not just at different times Steve Bannon and Donald Trump, but Emirati businessmen, Elon Musk, Noam Chomsky and Peter Thiel. At the same time, there's no... It crosses ideologies. It crosses industries. It crosses professions. It is an extraordinary range of contacts of Republicans and Democrats, globalists and anti-globalists. How is this one guy at the center of so many other kinds of people?
This is the great mystery. And I think because we live in such a partisan and tribal age, when these things started to come out, you had a lot of us doing what we normally do in this era, which is looking for revelations that would help our team and hurt the other team. And there were a lot of people looking for the Trump connection who don't like Trump. And there was people in the Republican and MAGA side trying to find which Democrats were implicated. But that's such a facile way of looking at what we ended up getting, and what we ended up getting, which is, as you say, a coast-to-coast, industry-to-industry, right-to-left, as far left as you can go, as far right as you can go, different professions, different ways of moving through the world, some famous, some obscure.
And as I wrote in the New York Times piece that I wrote in November, this diversity masked a deeper solidarity, because even if these people were on cable, you're sitting at home, you're watching cable at the end of the day and you're seeing these two talking heads fight, but that's for you. 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 going to help. He's going to 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, I don't know if at this point the chairman of the Paul Weiss firm, but an absolute scion of the establishment. I mean, it's a question of just where power is. 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, didn't allow Black members, didn't allow Jewish members. And so when you're dealing with a club with a white nationalist history, you go to Steve Bannon for a little help to get in. 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 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 mean what they say when you hear them in public. They mean what they say when you're not looking. And these emails 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 in some ways 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. He 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, power, 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.
And it's different needs. So the money people may not need money, although they always want more of it. They often want to seem and feel smart. If you have met people in those kinds of worlds, finance people, even if you make a lot of money in it, they're often very, very, very boring people. And I don't say this as slander. They know it. I had so many conversations with people in this world where there's an insecurity about how boring they are. So they want something else.
Then there's a bunch of academics. Academics, I think, really figure in this story in a way that feels surprising.
Well, it's a tough era to be an independent thinker. And so the academics want money and access, and Larry Summers, former Treasury Secretary, talks about how's life among the lucrative and the louche. He asks Epstein, so he wanted access to a kind of a party scene that's not available to him. So everybody had something that they needed. But his gift, I think, if it can be called that, was understanding and mapping that so well.
So I want to go into some of the pieces of this, and another word for what you're talking about is he's a broker. And I think it's important to always remember Epstein, where he comes from, is finance. And what they do in finance is they make markets and they look for market irregularities or inconsistencies. They look for where one side needs to be matched up to another. And I think you have to see money fundamentally at the source of his power. It is how he pays for and pays off women and girls. It's how he impresses contacts, particularly early on. And one thing he understands really well is money as a signal. He's got the largest private house in Manhattan. He's got an island. He's got a jet. So if he's got all that, how can he not be a success? How can he not be brilliant?
My colleagues on the news side, they did this amazing piece, I'll put it in show notes, about Epstein's relationship with JPMorgan Chase, which was his bank for a long time when he was coming up. And it was Jes Staley who was very high up at the bank. Tell me a bit about the Epstein-Staley relationship.
It's an extraordinary story of all of these kinds of brokering that he was engaged in occurring in one relationship of two people. So Staley and Epstein cultivate a mutually beneficial relationship between Epstein, the individual financier, and JPMorgan. Now, in its current form, the largest financial institution in the world, if I'm not mistaken. And again, for folks listening to this at home, it may seem a little strange. Like, what does JPMorgan need with a random finance man? But it turns out these things are complicated.
So there's a moment where Jeffrey Epstein has a lot of money. And that money needs managing. And the managing of that money brings in millions of dollars of fees. So that's the base layer. Then at some point, JPMorgan becomes interested, Jes Staley specifically becomes interested in the idea that JPMorgan is not doing enough business with regard to hedge funds, and hedge funds were this kind of growing category. And Jeffrey Epstein seems to have proximity to this ascendant world of hedge funds where a lot more money is moving. And so Jeffrey Epstein can make introductions in that world that then become very valuable. And he does.
So Staley invests in a hedge fund that he's connected to through Epstein, not Staley personally, but through JPMorgan. And it becomes, and Staley says this later, the investment that fundamentally makes his career because it opens that world to JPMorgan. 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.
You, Ezra Klein, if I tried to reach out to you 20 years ago, I could have just emailed some Gmail address. But now you got a podcast. I gotta go through this person. I gotta go through this person. So actually, the more important these stratospherically powerful people become, they have publicists, and 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 you're overestimating TED. If you think Sergey Brin is at the bar.
I have been with Sergey Brin at the bar.
Absolutely. I mean, I was at the bar with him with my friend Esther Perel. 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 because what they really need, what they don't have, are people they can trust with personal problems. And they probably have a lot of personal problems at that level. That was actually a really revealing moment to me.
I mean, they can contact anyone they want, they have people. But actually, I think this notion that it's lonely at the top, there's truth in it. And this is really worth understanding as a cultural figure that Epstein was. He exploited certain gaps in our culture.
Now, he was not only grooming teenage girls, he was grooming all of these people. This was all grooming. And it was a continuum of grooming from light, consensual grooming of bankers all the way to the most depraved and criminal grooming of teenage girls. But the behaviors of pulling people in, understanding, even care and feeding. Virginia Giuffre writes about how he did that to her in her incredible book, "Nobody's Girl." But he does it with very powerful people who tell him when he's landing. And he, unlike many people in American culture today, will say, have you had food? I can get this made for you. Do you like that kind of food? What time will you get here? A lot of people at that level are not worried about people on that kind of individual level.
And so there's this strange thing where he's running this giant criminal ring and he's exploiting and abusing people, and he's also attending to human beings at the kind of micro level that I think a lot of those powerful people, weirdly, are not being attended to.
The connections are doing two things at once for Epstein. One is he's able to use them transactionally, they make being in relationship with him profitable for other people, but they also cross-subsidize him in credibility.
Yeah, Epstein is taking out cash at a rhythm and in amounts that should flag investigations. And so there ultimately are a series of internal fights at JPMorgan about whether or not to keep him. JPMorgan flagged over $1 billion in suspicious transactions. And then he is eventually convicted for paying for sex with a minor, and there are more fights about whether or not to keep him. And JPMorgan keeps working with him and keeps working with him.
And there's this amazing quote from Justin Nelson, Epstein's personal banker. He prepares a memo, I'm quoting here from the Times piece. He prepared a memo trumpeting Epstein's large volume of business with JPMorgan and noting that despite his status as a sex offender, he was, quote, still clearly well respected and trusted by some of the richest people in the world.
Yeah, his network is the proof that he is worth dealing with and not beyond the pale. Because if he was, well, then how would he still have this network. He is revealing how these elites make decisions about trust. And that I think are really different from the way folks at home go through the world and make decisions about this. I think you make character judgments about people. You make judgments about how honest they have been and therefore will be. These billionaires, these super elites, these super lawyers are working on a whole different kind of system. And their system has to do, as you say, with how loaded with connections you are in this network, how high your stock is on a given day in this network.
And what Epstein figured out was how to game this. He figured out the vulnerability of this entire network, which is that these people are actually not that serious about character. In fact, character might be a liability for some of them, maybe kind of an unnecessary source of friction. These people are actually not that grounded in the evidence of how someone has lived. These people are making very thin-slice judgments about how much you are in, how central you are in the same networks they are, and therefore something as simple, and this is true, something as simple as dining at Michael's restaurant here in Midtown can do extraordinary wonders for people in the super elite.
Now, most people listening to this will not have heard of the restaurant, Michael's in Midtown, but Michael's is an example of a perfectly nice restaurant, but is an example of a place where if you can arrange to have lunch there, you will create an impression among certain people in publishing in New York, among certain people who are in network television in New York, among certain people in finance in New York, that you are in a certain place and on your way in and out, someone might introduce you to this person. And I've seen this kind of organism flourish. And then these people will just assume you must be fine, right. And they'll maybe ask you to come in for a meeting to promote your children's book or whatever it is.
And he exploited the facile nature of many of these elites who have the mental skills to be serious people who evaluate character, who look up people's history, who might, for example, find a conviction for soliciting sex with a minor problematic. But who, in fact, if you dined at Michael's, were at that party, if you were at Davos, if you were at TED, must be all right.
There's this quote from Staley, who then at JPMorgan, later leads Barclays bank. Epstein relied on his network for his legitimacy. And as running the largest investment bank in the world was part of that network for him. And what is unsaid in that quote is he was part of that network for Staley, because it's not just what they're doing for him, it's what he's doing for them. And so to cut Epstein out when he has proven repeatedly so able to introduce you to people you would want to know is also to cut yourself off from what he might be able to do for you in the future. And we haven't said yet in this portion of the conversation, but Epstein was also helping to occasion sexual activity.
We're going to get to that, yeah, for Staley. So all aspects of this brokering were at work. And the kind of leverage that provides is obviously even more potent for someone with so much to lose. Deals come and go. But Epstein had the power to destroy potentially a lot of people.
And here we're talking about him and other unfathomably rich people. But also the wealth itself was very impressive to people who offered him different kinds of credibility. So Peter Attia, the podcaster and doctor and longevity specialist, he's in a bunch of these emails. And Attia, in explaining why he was in such communication with Epstein in these years, he writes, at that point in my career, I had little exposure to prominent people, and that level of access was novel to me. Everything about him seemed excessive and exclusive, including the fact that he lived in the largest home in all of Manhattan, owned a Boeing 727, and hosted parties with the most powerful and prominent leaders in business and politics.
And there's just such currency. We've been talking about the wealthy, but for the academics, for a lot of the other kinds of people that Epstein cultivated, and one thing that is distinctive about him is he cultivated very different kinds of people, the access to his wealth was very impressive. He has a very close relationship with Kathy Ruemmler, who's former White House counsel for President Barack Obama, is now at Goldman Sachs. And he's constantly buying her just fancy gifts, fancy designer bags. And she calls him Uncle Jeffrey. And she's somebody who, having done a lot of work in government at that point, is in richer circles than she is rich. And so somebody who can give you a lot of things is valuable. And so the connections are power to the wealthy, but the wealth is power to the connections.
First of all, the Peter Attia thing is so striking. I don't mean to sound old-fashioned, but there's a lot of longevity experts now. He's one of everybody's so interested in longevity. What about living well and honorably in the existing time? Whatever that is, right. It's so interesting to me that this is someone whose mind was focused on elongating the period of time you get, who clearly had no judgment for the quality of the time, for the quality of your decisions, for the quality of your relationships.
I don't think that's fair, actually. Or I'll say it in a different way, because whatever ideas work. But to Attia, it's like you only get this one life. And here you've met somebody who has these parties with the most powerful and prominent leaders in business and politics. How could you pass that up? That's his explanation for what he was doing.
A lot of people passed it up. I mean, there's this incredible meme about all the people who didn't meet Epstein, right? Yeah, there's not a lot of people of color in these revelations. Three million documents. For obvious reasons, there's not a lot of women, although there are some, Kathy Ruemmler. A lot of people went into that house or met him at a party and were like, no thanks. We forget that. We forget it because they didn't end up in the files. But that guy was out and about.
Yeah, a lot of people whose names you and I don't know had the judgment, saw photos of underage girls lining his walls as Virginia Giuffre describes it, and were like, this ain't right. Different levels of things were known to different people, but none of it was a deal breaker to many of these people we're talking about.
Let me take that as a moment to ask something cautionary, because as you're saying, look at these files and there are a lot of people named in them, the number of people actually close to him who you can get a lot about them by reading the files, we're talking in the low dozens, maybe. We're talking about the elite, the power networks. But actually, most people didn't know Jeffrey Epstein. Most elites didn't have much to do with him. Plenty of people saw him for what he was. 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. And so is Epstein a way, you see, quote-unquote, the elite, or is this a subcategory? 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, there are going to be people of better and worse judgment, higher and lower character, more and 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.
