Bill Clinton published another memoir last year, entitled Citizen, and I take it that everyone read the book the minute it came out. For those who somehow didn’t, there’s a striking passage that can be easily found by standing in a bookshop, going to the index and searching under ‘E’ for ‘Epstein’.
This leads to a single page reference in which the 42nd president gives a terse and somewhat legalistic account of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, explaining that he never went to Epstein’s island, borrowed his plane only to support the work of the Clinton Foundation and cut off contact before Epstein’s first arrest in 2005. In a brusque summary Clinton or his ghostwriters conclude: ‘I wish I had never met him.’
Quite a few eminent people seem to have come to the same conclusion. Epstein appears to have made it his life’s mission to be close to as many prominent people as he could, from politicians and journalists to scientists and lawyers. The ‘little black book’ of his contacts included people he had met, but also the phone numbers of those he hadn’t and apparently wanted to.
There are several ways to see all this. Perhaps Epstein was a high-networking pimp, introducing women to prominent men. Perhaps a number of the men knew he liked underage girls and they liked underage girls too – a fact he could hold over them. Some think that this explains Epstein’s otherwise inexplicable fortune: he was effectively running a high-end blackmail and extortion racket. Others have come to the conclusion that he must have been performing such an operation on behalf of an intelligence service.
All these questions and more have recently burst into the open again because of the Trump administration’s change of direction on the story.
When running for office, Donald Trump was happy to promise the release of all the details relating to the Epstein case in the same way that he promised the release of all the government files relating to the assassinations of John Kennedy, Robert Kennedy and Martin Luther King. It seemed part of an initiative for greater openness and transparency in government.
Some people – including Trump supporters – have concluded that the Epstein files must incriminate him
But as I described here in March, the release of the JFK files changed nothing. Despite Trump’s declaration that it was going to be huge, no especially new information was discovered.
With Epstein things are different, not least because it is all more recent. And because so many distinguished people – including Trump – knew the disgraced man.
In February there was a bizarre scene at the White House when the administration released binders marked ‘The Epstein Files: Phase 1’ to a bunch of conservative media influencers. These people left waving their binders as though they were golden tickets to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. They became less excitable when it transpired that all the contents were already in the public domain. But what of volumes two and more?
Attorney-General Pam Bondi increased speculation that there was more to come by claiming some months ago that Epstein’s ‘client list’ was literally sitting on her desk waiting to be released.
Then in a strange about-face this month, the administration has said that no such list exists. This has led to demands from even some of Trump’s most loyal supporters for the firing of Bondi, or the resignations of various Trump appointees at the FBI and CIA. Some have even turned on Trump himself and he, in turn, has turned on them. He now claims that the whole thing is a Democrat hoax and attacked ‘My PAST supporters’ who ‘have bought into this bullshit hook, line and sinker’. Anyone who thought the Epstein saga could not get more complicated now has to contend with this as well.
Some people – including Trump supporters – have concluded that the files must incriminate him. Others have suggested that the President may simply be being judicious in deciding that innocent people named in Epstein-related documents should not have their lives destroyed by mere association.
But it is too late to try to consign the saga to the past. As a story, it is almost perfect. It currently includes claims about high–profile paedophiles and the possibility that successive presidents have been involved in a child-prostitution ring. There is virtually nothing more precisely pitched to agitate the public mind.
Over a decade ago, British politics went into a meltdown after Tom Watson and others insisted a ring of murderous child-rapists had been operating at the heart of Westminster. Those claims were indeed lies, as this magazine said from the get-go. But they tapped into a deep public fear.
The unsourced claims by various MAGA influencers of Mossad involvement make the Epstein story even more enticing, as the conspiracy now involves Israeli intelligence too – although it would be a very strange Mossad operation that caught up the former Israeli prime minister Ehud Barak and simply passed it over. (For that matter, it would also be strange for the files to have included material on Trump which the Biden administration chose not to release.) But that is where the Epstein theorists have landed.
The Epstein case is obviously not all lies. Why did so many big names find him so congenial? And why did so many stick by him even after his exploitation of underage girls had become a matter of public record?
The administration now has the opportunity to double-down or to reverse course once again and release what it has. Other than ‘don’t hang out with paedophiles’, it is hard to know what lessons to draw. Except, of course, for the old one that you should be careful about feeding the fires of public outrage, lest they burn down more than you could ever imagine.
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