How the Epstein Files Are Forcing a Reckoning with Power

0:06Joshua Rothman:Hey, Josh.

0:07Tyler Foggatt:Hi, Tyler.

0:08Joshua Rothman:So I want to start by asking why you sort of why you pick this subject. I mean, you write this column every week for the website called Open Questions, where true to the title, you are often posing a question, like just to take us like a random smattering of headlines from the time that you've done the column. Are grownups just giant kids? Are you overreacting? Why can't you pack a bag? I guess I'm wondering with this most recent column, which is about the Epstein files and kind of our conspiracy-obsessed, paranoid nation, what question were you trying to pose with this column or answer?

0:42Tyler Foggatt:Yeah, I mean, I think it started with the realization that not only was I becoming deeply fascinated by the Epstein story and spending a lot of time looking at the files and actually engaging with it as a primary source thing, but also just every single person I know is talking about it. Every single parent at my kids' sports events, everyone is talking about it. And the wide range of things that people think is fascinating and alarming and crazy, too.

1:12Joshua Rothman:So you mentioned that, you know, parents at your kids' sporting events are talking about the Epstein files. What are they saying? Like, what is, like, the tenor of those conversations?

1:21Tyler Foggatt:Well, it seems to me like a lot of times there's a spectrum where, like, no one is minimizing the scandal. No one is saying, like, it's a nothing burger. I think we're all well past that. this point. But what you'll find is that there's a sort of epistemically conservative perspective, which is sort of like, there's a lot of bad stuff that seems to have happened, but we don't know what it is. And then that goes through a sort of a spectrum. And then on the far end, there's extreme certainty about cannibalism happened on Epstein's Island. And I've had a lot of conversations with just friends, acquaintances, people in my life where it seems like the full spectrum is represented, which I think is extremely notable.

2:04Tyler Foggatt:I also can't recall a time in my life when it's been possible for ordinary people to wade through the evidence of something like this, and where it almost becomes, I mean, it's overwhelming, honestly, the amount of information, the amount of news about it, the degree to which it's incredibly disturbing, the way that everything seems to lead to another thing, the questions just seem to pile up. And And I think a lot of people are caught in this, and they're not wrong to be caught in it. I think this isn't the same as thinking, like, was there a second shooter in Dallas? This is something where the conspiracy, if you want to use that term, is just right there to be looked at by all of us.

2:46Tyler Foggatt:And the questions are just asking themselves. So I thought it was really the reason I wrote about it is because I've been finding myself as obsessed with this as everyone else.

2:56Joshua Rothman:That's Joshua Rothman, a staff writer at The New Yorker, whose new piece asks, are we living in the age of Epstein? The piece explores how the scandal is shaping, and perhaps confirming, public perceptions and suspicions of power and institutional trust. Ever since Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act last November, the Department of Justice has been releasing tranches of documents related to its investigation into the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein. But despite the flow of documents, plenty of questions remain about the full scope of Epstein's operation, how many people knew his crimes, and how he was able to run in circles of powerful and influential people for so long.

3:36Joshua Rothman:I wanted to talk with Josh about why the Epstein scandal has taken hold in the way that it has, how the ongoing release of documents and the information inside of them is shaping the public's response, and what this moment reveals about growing widespread distrust and conspiratorial thinking. This is The Political Scene. I'm Tyler Foggett, and I'm a senior editor at The New Yorker.

4:01Joshua Rothman:So I want to go back to something you were saying earlier about conspiracy. And I wonder if we should just start by talking about how we would define the phrase conspiracy theory. Because I feel like the term has this negative tinfoil-y hat connotation for most. But I wonder if, like, you distinguish between theories based on how crazy or far-fetched they actually are. Like, you know, the difference between, like, the moon landing was a hoax versus the belief that there's more to JFK's assassination than we originally thought. Like, would the latter really be a conspiracy theory or is that just, like, healthy skepticism?

4:35Joshua Rothman:And then just going off of that, like, what category of conspiracy theory would you place the Epstein scandal in?

4:41Tyler Foggatt:Well, I think, to me, a helpful place to start is with the fact that the heart of the Epstein scandal is how much is unknown. I mean, the reason it's a scandal is because it's reasonable to feel that this was under-prosecuted and under-investigated. And the reason why we feel scandalized is because we have the sense that the people who were in charge of finding the truth decided not to do that. And that's really different from the scenario of like the moon landing was faked. The moon landing happened. And it's the conspiracy theorists who are trying to inject uncertainty into a situation that's actually completely clear cut.

5:21Tyler Foggatt:There's really no mystery. There's no unknowns there. Like if you take the JFK assassination, you know, there is a very persuasive, well-documented and convincing, thorough, professional account of what happened to JFK. And, you know, there are plenty of people who wish to disagree with that, but they have to go up against this very, very huge, you know, edifice of what's known. And that's the dynamic that exists there is sort of people who want to undermine or question a fundamentally, like, comprehensible and coherent point of view. But with the Epstein story, it's actually like the reverse is true.

5:58Tyler Foggatt:It's actually that the government has released millions of documents that just raise all sorts of questions. And it seems that none of the questions have been answered. I mean, that's an exaggeration. Plenty of questions have been answered. But it seems as though there are many more questions that people have than there are answers. And so I don't know that it's right to say that people who believe that there's a scandal are conspiracy theorists. I think they have questions about what's known. And then the other thing that makes the Epstein story sort of different is that Epstein himself was doing something conspiracy adjacent in the sense that he was assembling this huge network of people.

6:35Tyler Foggatt:And one of his goals was to create, I mean, he certainly was gratifying his own intellectual pretensions and stuff by creating this whole world around himself. but he was also creating a smokescreen he was involving all sorts of people he was you know one of the revelations i think of actually reading his emails like if you go to jmail um where you can read all of epstein's emails or or a tranches a tranches of them but one of the revelations of jmail is you just see how incredibly aggressive he was about connecting with everyone so if the essence of a conspiracy theory is that like a conspiracy theorist sees connections where none exists.

7:11Tyler Foggatt:In this case, the central figure in the story was like deliberately going about connecting to as many people as possible for as long as possible. So I don't think it's quite right to say that like your average person who feels that there's something like a conspiracy here, I don't think they're a conspiracy theorist, they're responding to something very visible, which is the, you know, they can watch in real time the creation of this vast network, and then they can notice that all sorts of names are redacted from the network and they can ask, who are these people? And that's a legitimate question.

7:44Tyler Foggatt:That's not a conspiracy question.

7:45Joshua Rothman:Yeah, I guess to be interested in the files and to feel like the government is hiding something that isn't necessarily like an inherently conspiratorial stance, but it does seem like the files themselves have become a real launching pad for actual conspiracy. I guess I'm wondering if you can talk a little bit about like the more outlandish conspiracy theories that have come from the files and just like how you're thinking about the ways in which these files have allowed for our minds to just go all over the place?

8:14Tyler Foggatt:Well, I mean, where I like to start, I guess where my thinking has ended up on this is I like to rewind the tape a little bit to before the present and just think about where we're coming from when we come to the Epstein story. If you're trying to be like a rational person, something you might do is when faced with a very uncertain or unknown situation. You can ask about your own prior beliefs and at least try to know what they are before you try to make sense of this big mystery. So to me, it's like, you got to rewind, you got to ask, what did we think was true before we saw all these Epstein files and encountered the scandal?

8:51Tyler Foggatt:So I think one of the things we have come to have to admit is true is that sexual abuse is way more widespread than we thought. We have to admit that powerful people who we think we know, so a person like Bill Cosby who was charged with rape, that before Epstein, we were forced to admit that those people could be different than we thought. We've already come around to the view that hyper-wealthy people live crazy lives that are very, very divorced from not just our norms, but also from the consequences of the law. That's something we've all come around to. And there's other things we could talk about that we've all come around to.

9:34Tyler Foggatt:Those are background assumptions that one can have when you look at what's in the files. So what that means is that But what's known about the Epstein story is that Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell enlisted, like created a sort of infrastructure for recruiting and abusing girls who were like as young as 14 and did this over many years and actually created like a globe-spanning recruitment operation. So that's quite conspiratorial sounding, but it's true. And then what's also known is that Epstein cultivated these connections with all these people, and he brought them to his island and to his private homes in different places, and that he was very famous for having a crazy lifestyle.

10:28Tyler Foggatt:And then that even after he was convicted of sex with an underage girl, people continued to come and hang out with him and want to be with him. And then what's also known is when you actually look in the emails, and I think it's sort of important to do that, it's important to actually look, the chummy nature of this correspondence, the jokiness with which the sort of realities of who Epstein was, like that's treated often as a joke, like a kind of like we all know it's true, but it's cool. Like, we're all cool with it. That's basically the thing that comes through. So all these are sort of background facts.

11:06Tyler Foggatt:And I guess the reason I just want to say them is because it's important to sort of get that the thing that is beyond doubt is already really, really bad. And then the question that you then have to ask is, if that is beyond doubt, what else is possible? Right? Like, if this situation that we just described is what really happened, then what else could happen? So from there, it's just a series of steps into other things. So you say, okay, Epstein had a lot of security cameras. And what happened to the tapes of all the debauched evil parties that were happening? The actual accounts that are in the documents, which range in provenance from like huge memos put together by respected law firms to transcripts from a tip line, you know, they range in their nature.

11:54Tyler Foggatt:they allege all sorts of things from i mean how to talk about this like from um i guess ordinary sexual abuse to the uh abuse of very young children so so like that's that's not um somebody making up that it's in the files that's in the files it's described in documents that you can read whether it's true is a separate question entirely but it's not like people are uh fabricating what they're reading. They're going to a website that's like doj.gov and they're justice.gov and they're seeing this. And then a step beyond what is seeable in the files are things that are essentially imagined and imagined victims and imagined crimes, which include all sorts of murders and cannibalistic acts and other things that are not described in any way that we would feel is credible.

12:45Tyler Foggatt:But there are things that people could discern in like code words that they think mean things.

12:51Joshua Rothman:I feel like one thing that's really interesting about this scandal and kind of the investigation of it is that it's only gotten worse the more information that we've received. And by worse, I mean, people are more suspicious. They have more questions. It doesn't really feel like, you know, a new tranche of files comes out and then all of a sudden, okay, well, we have answers to questions A, B, and C, but now we need to figure out D, E, and F. You know, it feels like it's just two steps back each time. And I guess I'm wondering if you see there being any real resolution to this.

13:23Tyler Foggatt:It's a great question. I mean, I keep thinking of the 9-11 commission. There's a lot of conspiracy theories about 9-11. And there was a commission, and the commission produced a report that was a best-selling volume. But conspiracies about 9-11 persists and they haven't gone away. So a question, you know, you can have is like, could there be a 9-11 commission report for the Epstein scandal? Which feels a little weird because this is a different type of thing than 9-11, obviously. But the, you know, there's a couple issues with this. So one is that if you believe that the world's most powerful men were part of this perverted evil sex society, then you already believe in a conspiracy that goes all the way to the top, which is what we're talking about.

14:07Tyler Foggatt:We're talking about like Trump in the Epstein files. We're seeing Clinton. We're seeing everyone. Like we're seeing Larry Summers, who was the president of Harvard and the secretary of the treasury. And right up until the moment that Epstein is arrested, like basically right up until that time, Summers, who knows the whole complexity of the situation, is emailing with Epstein for dating advice about someone who he says considers him a mentor okay so it's super icky but i should mention that you know larry summers howard lutnik bill clinton bill gates all the people who are named in the files and who um you know they just appear in the files where they had degrees of correspondence with epstein or whatever they've all denied any wrongdoing and connection to his crimes and that's really important to note and also to note that epstein sought to correspond and connect with as many powerful and influential and famous people as he possibly could.

15:04Tyler Foggatt:So in a way, we're in his trap. You know, I mean, this is part of his design.

15:10Joshua Rothman:He wanted to create this web. Exactly.

15:12Tyler Foggatt:So then it makes you ask, okay, if the experts were to get together and produce such a report, what proportion of Americans would believe the report? If the sort of assumption already is that the most powerful people are already involved, which like, to say it again, like they are involved. Like, we don't know whether they're involved at the core of the crimes, but they're involved in this normative sense of looking away, tolerating it, finding this person to be sort of a plausible friend. So for that reason, I think because the nature of the conspiracy already involves so many hyper-powerful people, it makes me like a little pessimistic about the idea that this will go away when someone releases.

16:02Tyler Foggatt:And then just to also note, who's the head of the FBI right now? Who's the Attorney General of the United States? These aren't people that we trust implicitly. There's another thing going on in America, which is besides the Epstein scandal, which is the Trump administration and its incredibly problematic use of power, which we already would, there's already plenty of Trump-related conspiracy theories. So we're really at a very challenging place where it's really kind of hard to imagine an easy way to kind of put this to bed in a nice way.

16:39Joshua Rothman:More with Joshua Rothman after the break. This is the political scene from The New Yorker.

16:51Joshua Rothman:Remember when tech was supposed to save us? When politicians promised progress, instead, the rent and everything else is still too damn high. The news is chaotic and people are having to confide in robots. I'm Akilah Hughes, and on How Is This Better, we're asking the question out loud. Because if this is the future they promised us, it kind of sucks. Follow How Is This Better on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

17:30Joshua Rothman:I'm curious for your thoughts on, there was a guest essay that was published by The Times on Monday called The Epstein Files Should Never Have Been Released. And it was written by Daniel Richman, a former federal prosecutor. And basically, it makes the argument that we kind of see the release of these files as this sort of attempt by the government at accountability. and, you know, we live in this moment where that kind of accountability is in short supply. And so you might think that it's a good thing that we have this document dump, but actually this dump kind of signifies that, like a huge institutional failure, essentially, because if the justice system were working properly, then the public wouldn't have to access these files and people would actually trust the government to go through the files themselves and create some kind of report, which is, you know, kind of similar to what we've been talking about a little bit, But it's interesting because if you look at the comments on this article, it's just, you know, people are just so upset, you know, and kind of saying it's not that there's something wrong with this government.

18:28Joshua Rothman:It's that there's always been something wrong with the government and that that's part of the story that the files is telling. And so, yeah, I'm curious for your thoughts on on that argument, that the situation isn't unique just in the sense that we have all these high profile people who are seemingly implicated in the files. And those are the people themselves who would be usually responsible with kind of assuaging our concerns, but that the files speak to this larger dynamic that's been going on in the government for a really long time, which is like super powerful people who are corrupt and doing awful things.

19:00Joshua Rothman:And finally, we're just getting like a piece of that story through this document dump.

19:04Tyler Foggatt:So, I mean, I guess one thing to say is it seems hard to argue with the fact that the way in which these documents have been released has created chaos and been uniquely uninformative. Especially there have been things that have happened as part of the release of the documents that are really crazy, like the fact that the names of the victims are unredacted, which was not supposed to happen. So there's the actual release itself has been chaotic and poorly managed. That's just granted the idea that there should have been a release to begin with. I guess to me, if you rewind it a little bit, let's say we were to go back a few years from this maximalist action of releasing all the files.

19:45Tyler Foggatt:So for a long time, people said there was a list. And what they wanted was the Epstein list. And there was this idea he had a client list and it was going to be released and we were going to know.