While much of the recent interest in Jeffrey Epstein has focused on the late sexual predator’s relationship with President Donald Trump, his emails also reveal his close relationships with other powerful figures from the worlds of politics, finance, academia and beyond. The thousands of files released by the House Oversight Committee earlier this month include his correspondence from April 2011 through January 2019, after he was already a registered sex offender for abusing underage girls in Florida. The fact that so many prominent and influential people could ignore those crimes is indicative of their membership in a “borderless network of people who are more loyal to each other” than anything else, says journalist Anand Giridharadas. “He had chosen this particular kind of social network, this American power elite, because he could be sure that it would be able to look away.”
Giridharadas is author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World and recently wrote about the Epstein emails for The New York Times opinion section.
This is a rush transcript. Copy may not be in its final form.
AMY GOODMAN: This is Democracy Now!, democracynow.org, The War and Peace Report. I’m Amy Goodman.
We begin today’s show looking at the growing scandal around the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, both his ties to President Trump and a network of prominent politicians, academics, philanthropists, diplomats and other public figures.
Last week, Congress overwhelmingly voted — almost unanimously, save one congressman, both in the Senate and the House — to compel the Justice Department to release all files related to Epstein, who died in 2019 in prison after he was arrested on federal charges for the sex trafficking of minors. President Trump signed the legislation but has repeatedly described the call to release the Epstein files to be a “hoax.”
Earlier this month, he snapped at a female reporter aboard Air Force One about the Epstein files.
CATHERINE LUCEY: If there’s nothing incriminating in the files, sir, why not act — why not —
AMY GOODMAN: Yep, you heard it right. “Quiet, piggy,” he said to the female reporter. Trump made the comment shortly after House Republicans released 20,000 files from Epstein’s estate, putting a new spotlight on the late convicted sex offender’s connections with a network of wealthy and powerful figures.
