Jeffrey Epstein is in the news again, this time after the House Oversight Committee released a whole library of his correspondence over the years. On one hand, the rare glimpse into the world of elite power brokerage this offers is fascinating. Like most rich people, Epstein and his conspirators clearly believed that they were above the law and often talked about their blackmail schemes in perfectly blunt terms. For example, in a letter to Epstein, journalist Michael Wolff says of Donald Trump, “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house . . . you could save him, generating a debt.”

Writing for the American Prospect, David Dayen has argued that Epstein is, at heart, a story of elite impunity for their crimes. He lays out the evidence about the human trafficking ring he ran and the endless number of rich people who were implicated in it; he then summarizes this as “a set of crimes perpetrated by a wealthy guy [that] reached into the heights of the political and economic stratosphere, and went largely unpunished for decades.”

The criminal dimension of the Epstein case is important, but I think Dayen’s focus on it misses something crucial: that much of what Epstein did was completely legal.