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The Jeffrey Epstein Scandal Is a Stain on Both Parties

By
Ben Burgis

Forget partisan finger-pointing. The Jeffrey Epstein scandal cuts across party lines, indicting economic and political elites alike.

Former president Bill Clinton shakes hands with Jeffrey Epstein, while Ghislaine Maxwell looks on, following an event for the White House Restoration Project, in Washington, DC, on September 29, 1993. (White House Photographer, probably Ralph Alswang / Wikimedia Commons)

At the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell in 2021, a woman identified in court records as Jane Doe #3 testified that she’d met the defendant, and Maxwell’s longtime boyfriend Jeffrey Epstein, “in between classes at Interlochen Arts Camp in the early ’90s.” Epstein and Maxwell stopped to talk to her while she was having ice cream with her friends. After she returned home from summer camp, Jane Doe #3 and her mother “visited Epstein and Maxwell, after which began a period of grooming and later sexual abuse.”

Located in a beautiful cluster of forests and lakes in northern Michigan, Interlochen is an internationally renowned art and music camp for teenagers and younger children. I worked there for several summers during my late teens and early twenties (so about a decade later), and I can attest that, in many ways, it’s a wonderful place. But Epstein was a significant donor. Interlochen even named one of its scholarship cabins after him. The information that he recruited at least one of his victims there should be grimly unsurprising, given how much time he seems to have spent on the campus.

More surprisingly, Senator Elissa Slotkin (D-MI), seems to be unaware of her state’s connection to the world’s most notorious pedophile and sex trafficker. In a recent appearance on the YouTube show Breaking Points, Slotkin explained her years of silence on the case by saying that “there weren’t, to my knowledge, Michiganders who were involved.”

She has called for the files to be released now, though — and she took the opportunity to strongly suggest that Donald Trump doesn’t want to release the files because the information in them would be damaging to him. Slotkin isn’t wrong that Trump and Epstein were closely connected for many years. But her explanation of Trump’s behavior does raise an awkward question for Democrats. Why didn’t Joe Biden ever release the files? Why did Democrats ignore this case so thoroughly for years, to the point where they don’t even know when their own states are implicated, only to come alive midway through 2025?

And, for that matter, why have Republicans who screamed their heads off about Epstein for years suddenly gone quiet, insisting there’s nothing to see here?

There’s quite a bit we don’t know about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. One thing we can be sure of, though, is that there are elite figures on both sides of the aisle who wouldn’t want the files to come to light. Likewise, both sides are weighing that knowledge against the temptation to use Epstein as a battering ram against their political opponents when conditions are right.

The whole spectacle exposes a deep rot in our society that transcends partisan politics.

A Bipartisan Wall of Silence

At least two Epstein accusers claimed to have been trafficked by Epstein and Maxwell to be abused by other prominent figures, including celebrity attorney Alan Dershowitz and Britain’s Prince Andrew. (Both men have admitted to traveling to Epstein’s private island, though they deny participating in sexual abuse there or elsewhere.) Epstein traveled around the world on a private plane nicknamed the “Lolita Express” by locals in the Virgin Islands due to the frequent presence of underage girls on board. The publicly available flight logs include a long list of prominent figures like Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Al Gore, Kevin Spacey, and Leonardo DiCaprio.

None of these people, of course, have ever been charged with (much less convicted of) any crime in connection with the Epstein scandal. At the Maxwell trial in 2021, prosecutors stuck to the narrowest charges on which they were sure they’d secure a conviction, so no accusations were made about anyone but Epstein and Maxwell themselves. As hard as it is not to speculate, there’s very little we can know for sure.

Perhaps Alan Dershowitz, for example, is telling the truth when he admits to receiving a massage at Epstein’s island while insisting that “I kept my underwear on during the massage” and “I don’t particularly like massages.” Perhaps Prince Andrew is telling the truth when he says that a photo of him with his arm around Epstein victim Virginia Giuffre as Maxwell stands in the background is a fake. (We do know that he settled Giuffre’s lawsuit against him for an undisclosed sum in 2022.)

Even on the most generous interpretation of these men’s association with Epstein, though, it seems highly likely that a bipartisan group of wealthy and influential people would, at the very least, be embarrassed by having all of the government’s files on Epstein released.

This may explain why Joe Biden — who, as far as I know, has never been accused of any personal involvement with Epstein — did not release the files. Bill Clinton is still a major enough figure in the Democratic Party that he spoke at the 2024 Democratic National Convention and campaigned for Kamala Harris in swing states, and several other known Epstein associates have been significant Democratic donors.

Let’s assume for the sake of argument that none of these people participated in Epstein’s crimes. Even so, the potential stink of the scandal threatened to hurt their reputations. Perhaps Biden didn’t see the upside.

Trump, Epstein, and the “Wonderful Secret”

Democrats are starting to see plenty of upside now, however.

Epstein is on tape saying that he was “Donald Trump’s closest friend for ten years.” An article published earlier this month in the New York Times (“Inside the Long Friendship Between Trump and Epstein”) reveals that in the early ’90s, Trump hosted a party for participants in a “calendar girl” competition, where the girls were told that they would get to mingle with VIPs, but the only other guest was . . . Jeffrey Epstein.

And according to a Wall Street Journal article around the same time, Trump contributed a “bawdy letter” to an album assembled by Maxwell for Epstein’s fiftieth birthday in 2003. (Other contributors to the album include Dershowitz and Victoria’s Secret CEO Leslie Wexner.) Trump’s letter is surrounded by a crude drawing of the outline of a naked woman, “and the future president’s signature is a squiggly ‘Donald’ below her waist, mimicking pubic hair.”

Even if you believe that Trump never participated in any of Epstein’s crimes during the two men’s long friendship, the letter, which takes the form of an imaginary dialogue between Trump and Epstein, is deeply creepy.

Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything.

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.

Jeffrey: Nor will I, since I also know what it is.

Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.

Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.

Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that?

Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.

Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret.

Trump claims that this letter is a “fake thing.” That seems unlikely, given that the Wall Street Journal knew perfectly well that its article would generate a lawsuit from our extraordinarily litigation-happy president. They would have a strong incentive to carefully check its veracity.

In light of Trump’s vulnerability, Democrats, who paid zero attention to the case when they were in the Oval Office, are now clamoring to force the Justice Department and the FBI to release everything they have on Epstein and his associates.

The Strange Evolution of the Trump Administration’s Position

Let’s assume for a moment that Trump is telling the truth — that the birthday letter is fake and, in general, nothing in the Epstein files would reflect badly on him. If so, shouldn’t he put the issue to rest by letting the public see the files and form their own judgments?

Trump’s failure to do this casts him in a suspicious light, as do the flip-flops on the issue from several members of his administration. The bizarre shifts in the Trump administration’s approach to the case have been widely and brutally mocked.

After Maxwell’s trial in 2021 (when Joe Biden was president), future Vice President J.D. Vance tweeted, “What possible interest would the US government have in keeping Epstein’s clients secret? Oh…” Other figures like Trump’s FBI director Kash Patel and his deputy FBI director Dan Bongino spent years beating the same drum on right-wing podcasts.

After years of rampant speculation that Epstein was blackmailing prominent people who participated in his sexual abuse, Trump’s Attorney General Pam Bondi went so far as to claim that she had an Epstein “client list” literally sitting on her desk waiting to be reviewed. Back in February, the administration made a show of giving more than a dozen right-wing influencers binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase One,” although these apparently contained little new information. Bondi defended her actions on the grounds that, while the information in the binders had previously been “leaked,” it had never been “released in a formal capacity by the US Government.”

A “Phase Two,” in which actually new information was released, never came. The administration announced that there was no client list. This implies that Bondi was lying when she said the list was on her desk. Nevertheless, Trump has insisted that Bondi is doing a “FANTASTIC JOB!” and that everyone should stop criticizing her. He’s also taken to suggesting fairly directly that some of the information in the unreleased files is indeed about him, but is “fake” and a “hoax.”

What, specifically, is the content of this alleged hoax? Once again, we’re left to wonder.

The Deeper Rot

Over the course of the last decade, all issues in American politics have tended to be reduced to the central divide between pro-Trump and anti-Trump forces. Thus, in this case, Democratic partisans and Never-Trump conservatives who never called on Biden to release the files are loudly demanding that Trump release them, while many Trump loyalists who spent years urging that the files be released are changing their tune.

Even some right-wing influencers who spent years using conspiracy theories about Epstein to build up their personal brands, and who initially expressed disappointment about the Trump administration’s contortions on the issue, are mindlessly lining up behind Trump’s claim that the Wall Street Journal story exposing his birthday letter to Epstein is “fake news.”

The problem with this isn’t that the divide between pro-Trump and anti-Trump forces is unimportant. (It’s not. Trump is a dangerous authoritarian.) It’s that the significance of the scandal transcends partisan divides. Similarly, it would be a mistake to dismiss the whole thing as a distraction from bread-and-butter-issues. Instead, it should be seen as a symptom of a much deeper rot in our profoundly unequal society.

Was Jeffrey Epstein linked to either American or foreign intelligence, as many have speculated? Was he blackmailing powerful people? Was his alleged suicide really a murder?

I’ll admit to being pretty curious about some of these points, but let’s go ahead and stipulate that the answer to all three questions is “no.” Fine. Even when those issues are taken off the table, here’s what we’re left with:

We live in a society where a single wealthy oligarch like Epstein can buy his own island. He can buy a personal Boeing 727-100 to fly himself and his guests back and forth from that island. He can tell vulnerable young women that his wealth and his connections to powerful people can be used to make all their dreams come true, and it can sound pretty plausible. And such an individual can draw the fawning attention of businessmen, celebrities, philanthropists, and politicians like flies to honey.

When normal people are charged with major sex crimes, the consequences for them are grim. An oligarch like Epstein, when he was first arrested in 2008, got a sweetheart deal negotiated by his world-famous lawyer friend Dershowitz, whereby he served a little over a year in county jail and was able to come and go from his cell in a “work-release” arrangement (as if someone as wealthy as Epstein couldn’t simply have entrusted his money to subordinates for a year while he sat in jail). 

And if not for subsequent years of persistent work by investigative journalists, authorities might never have been shamed into reopening their legal investigations of him. If we assume that no strings were pulled through shadowy intelligence connections to get the initial deal, that actually makes it a more disturbing indictment of American inequality. Epstein just enjoyed the perks of life in one of the very top tiers of a society where laws are for little people.

Whatever else is true, these uncontested facts are enough to make the scandal a disturbing window into what’s wrong with our social order. And much worse may be waiting to be revealed. We don’t yet know. But we should damn well find out.