The darkest truth about the Epstein Files is staring right at us

Whatever happened to the Epstein ‘client list’? In February, US Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed to have the list, supposedly documenting high-profile clients for whom Epstein trafficked underaged girls for blackmail purposes, ‘sitting on [her] desk right now’. Now the Justice Department says the list doesn’t exist. The MAGA crowd is incensed. Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Laura Loomer smell a rat. So, according to polls, do most Trump voters.

Trump was their man. He was supposed to blow the conspiracy, which they were certain inculpated Democrats and the ‘deep state’, wide open. Now, instead, he is venting at ‘stupid Republicans’, ‘weaklings’ and ‘PAST supporters’ for being taken in by a ‘hoax’ made up by Democrats.

The MAGA influencers have reason to be suspicious. Trump was reportedly advised by the Justice Department that his name was in the Epstein files (distinct from the alleged ‘client list’). To protect Trump from a vote to force the release of documents, Speaker Mike Johnson shut down the House of Representatives. Certainly, Trump was close friends with Epstein, and this was known to anyone who wanted to know long before recent revelations.

However, in their fixation on a client list that may or may not exist, MAGA is systematically missing the picture that sits — like Edgar Allen Poe’s famous ‘purloined letter’ — in plain sight.

They obsess over lurid details, such as Epstein’s interest in ‘transhumanism’. They allege Mossad connections, or speculate about the ‘deep state’. What almost none of them take seriously for a second is Epstein’s actual role in global capitalism. His main job was as a fixer for CEOs, corporations and investors, who could engineer tax avoidance schemes known as GRATs.

The key to his wealth was his work for financial manager for private equity investor Leon Black and Victoria’s Secret boss Les Wexner. He helped them avoid taxes, then he protected his own income by becoming a resident of the Virgin Islands in 1996. In the same year he bought Little St. James Island, later dubbed ‘paedo island’, for $8m.

With this wealth, he accumulated the ruling class connections that made him even wealthier. He acquired Johnson & Johnson heiress Elizabeth Johnson as a client, and became close friends with billionaire Glenn Dubin, whose hedge fund paid him $15m for introducing the firm to JP Morgan Chase. He became friends with former president Bill Clinton, lawyer Alan Dershowitz, former New Mexico governor Bill Richardson, Prince Andrew and, of course, Donald Trump.

This is where the sex trafficking came in. Apart from satisfying his own desires, Epstein reportedly used sexual favours to entice clients. If ‘you invested money with him,’ a witness claimed, ‘he’d get you laid. ... It was like a dating service and the girls were like the candy on a stick.’

Veronica Giuffre, who alleged that she was ordered to have sex with Dubin, Richardson and Dershowitz among others, recorded in her diary that Epstein recorded the sex, to be ‘used as blackmail material’. This is plausible. Julie K. Brown, the journalist who did the most to unearth the Epstein scandal, describes in Perversion of Justice how Epstein ‘likely conducted video surveillance in every home he owned’.

How did he keep his activities hidden? He may have used the same web of shell companies that he constructed to minimise his tax liabilities to hide the trafficking of his victims between New York and Florida. But he was also helped by his political connections.

Brown describes how, when Epstein was investigated by Florida police beginning in 2004, notables in Palm Beach pressured them to back off. Epstein seems to have been tipped off about a search warrant: when police arrived, they found hard drives hastily removed, surveillance cameras disconnected, and the video recordings gone. No effort was made to subpoena the missing computers, which didn’t even appear in the state attorney’s file.

State Attorney Barry Krischer sank his own prosecution by ensuring that the case was heard by a grand jury at which only one of thirteen underage victims testified. That victim was systematically undermined by the prosecutors. The result was that Epstein was charged only with solicitation.

Florida cops, appalled that he was not being charged with child sex crimes, approached the FBI. The case was given to US attorney Alex Acosta — who promptly, and without the involvement of the victims, struck an illegal non-prosecution agreement with Epstein which also gave immunity to alleged co-conspirators. In exchange, he pled guilty to one charge of procuring for prostitution a girl under eighteen, was sentenced to eighteen months, and spent his jail time in a private wing of the Palm Beach County Stockade, from where he was allowed to come and go on work release.

This is only to skim the surface of the incestuous network of political and economic elites enabling and protecting Epstein as one of their own. Nor did imprisonment stop him from operating. He continued to do lucrative business with major banks like JP Morgan Chase, Deutsche Bank and Barclays. He developed relationships with Bill Gates, Larry Summers, billionaire Mortimer Zuckerman, and former Obama administration lawyer Kathryn Ruemmler.

The New York State report on Deutsche Bank’s relationship with Epstein is damning. It shows that they were aware of the allegations against him but foresaw flows of money in the hundreds of millions of dollars. According to the report, Epstein used his account with Deutsche Bank to make suspicious payments to co-conspirators. Interestingly, another of Epstein’s contacts in this period was Steve Bannon who coached the disgraced financier to improve his image.

This ruling-class crimewave is obvious to anyone who looks. So why are MAGA obsessed with what is not proven, and what is not obvious? Because right-wing conspiracism is invariably both sensationalist and trivialising. It inflates detail and rumour into lurid narratives and downplays more patently obvious and systemic realities.

Take Bannon. Having worked with Epstein, he now has the chutzpah to hawk the resulting footage for a potential Netflix documentary. In an interview on the Jimmy Dore show, he stresses that Epstein was ‘one of the leading underwriters of scientific experiments in the world, a lot of that is dealing with a thing called Transhumanism’.

Frankly, Epstein’s piddling $20,000 donation to the World Transhumanist Association, and weird fantasies about breeding a ‘super-race’ by impregnating women in a ranch outside Santa Fe, are among his least interesting activities.

Or take Tucker Carlson and Marjorie Taylor Greene, who speculate that Epstein worked for Israeli intelligence to sexually compromise and blackmail Washington politicians. The scant evidence for this mostly comes from the claims of a former Israeli spy, Ari Ben-Menashe, but it hasn’t been substantiated. Even if he was shown to have such connections, it would be one more aspect of the class power wielded by Epstein.

And that is MAGA’s problem. Rather than look at what’s in front of them, they want enthralling disinfotainment and a politics of revenge. They want to exoticise systematic child abuse, to make it appear as the work of outsiders, cosmopolitan elites whom they can take down. But systematic abuse and cover-up, from the Catholic Church to Canada’s indigenous schools, is not the work of outsiders. And now they find at the heart of the Epstein scandal their own paladin, Donald Trump.

Whether or not he is personally implicated in Epstein’s child sex rings, he was close to Epstein because he was part of a system that made and protected him. And now, having profited from the right’s obsessions, he wants his base to shut up about it. If MAGA now tears itself apart over Epstein, it will be their own fault.

Richard Seymour is a London-based writer, a founding editor of Salvage, and the author of Disaster Nationalism: The Downfall of Liberal Civilization (Verso, 2024).

Follow Richard on Twitter/X: @leninology

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Opinions expressed in this article remain those of the author and do not necessarily represent those of The New Arab, its editorial board or staff.