What Donald Trump and “Everyone” Knew About Jeffrey Epstein

0:05You're listening to The Political Scene. I'm David Remnick. Early each week, we bring you a conversation from our episode of The New Yorker Radio Hour. This is The New Yorker Radio Hour, a co-production of WNYC Studios and The New Yorker. Welcome to The New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick. Trying to read and process what we've learned about Jeffrey Epstein and the world he created is miserable business. In its more lurid details, it's frankly awful to think about what was done to people, underage or not. In the lack of accountability for the many people involved, it is absolutely enraging.

0:49And in the banality of otherwise decent people who made friends with Epstein, deciding they could tolerate evil for the sake of his money and his connections, it's just depressing, to say the least. One email stands out amid the millions of grim details, a terse note that Epstein sent one of his lawyers in February 2019. He wrote this, Should we share the Julie Brown text with Alan, meaning the lawyer, Alan Dershowitz? She's going to start trouble, asking for victims, etc. And Julie Brown did start trouble. As a reporter for the Miami Herald, her reporting on the Epstein story has been remarkable, and it's been so for years.

1:34And to those like the president who have said that Epstein is dead and it's time to move on, Brown says no. Stop. We haven't yet seen real accountability for what happened on Epstein's Island and in his New York mansion and so much else. How could this have happened? I spoke with Julie K. Brown this past week.

1:58Julie is somebody who is almost single-handedly responsible for thrusting this into the light, this terrible subject. What does it feel like to see this gigantic onslaught of files after all this time? Well, I wish I could say it was somewhat satisfying to finally see some truth in this. But the way that this is being handled right now by the administration is very chaotic. And, you know, it's very messy. And it's very hard to figure out what's what when half a document is redacted. when the recipients and the person that sent the document is redacted. So I think in some ways this raises more questions and makes the public more distrustful because they weren't supposed to do this.

2:47It was supposed to be an act of transparency, and I don't see it as that, quite frankly. Would you say that the release of these documents is purposeful or chaotic on purpose or chaotic because of a chaotic administration? I think it's both. I actually think part of it was done on purpose because, you know, it's sort of like what this administration does, you know, distract, try to take people's minds off of things, to confuse. So I think part of it is purpose. But I also think from reading what I've read so far that it also has to be a reflection on the fact that the Justice Department has never really organized themselves well enough to figure out how to go about this investigation.

3:42It is so massive. And I think that it was just something that they just never got a handle on to begin with. How many documents are there? They're saying 6 million because they released 3 million and they say that there's 2 to 3 million documents left. Now, remember, though, part of this is a lot of repetition. Some of these documents you see multiple times. But, you know, the other interesting thing is we haven't seen any of Epstein's emails from around the time that he was buddies with Trump. So we can't get a handle. Not that Trump used emails, but that was when Trump was in his orbit, so to speak.

4:23So we're not getting any view of what was going on during that time period, which would have been like the early 2000s. What specifically have you been able to look at that surprises you in all the documents that have come your way? What have you found out? That this is a lot bigger, you know, and it spans the globe more so than I ever thought before. And I say this because, you know, from my even from my early reporting, I had spoken to investigators who looked into Epstein who said that he had recruiters, for example, and scouts in other countries to get Epstein women. And we are now seeing from some of these emails that he had not just a couple scouts.

5:11I mean, he had scouts almost, it seems like, in almost every country. What does that mean? He had people looking out for teenage girls to bring to the United States? Yes. And he had lawyers, by the way. He hired lawyers that did their visas to get them over here on work permits. I mean, he used his modeling agency as a way to get them over here. But it was clear they definitely were not just here to do modeling. You know, in my original reporting, I reported that there was a bookkeeper for that modeling agency who did a deposition. And she said that that was not what this was about, that there were these so-called parties and events that were held that they would send models to.

5:59But it was essentially to have sex. It was sending them there to have sex. You're publishing a story that has implications for the president of the United States where the Epstein case is concerned. What does it say? We have found a document in these files. There is an interview that the police chief of Palm Beach gave to the FBI. And in that interview, the police chief, Michael Ryder, told the FBI that back when Epstein's case first came to the attention of the police and Epstein was first reported as a suspect in doing this. What's the year? Around 2006, around that time period. Trump called the police chief and he said to the police chief, thank God you're doing something about him.

6:53Because, and I'm just quoting off the top of my head, I don't have the document in front of me, but he said everybody knows. Everybody knew this. He also knew about Maxwell's role at calling her evil. You know, we have this FBI report of this interview that the chief gave to the FBI where he is recalling this conversation that he had with Trump many, many years ago about Epstein. So it does raise some questions about, you know, how much Trump knew, you know, whether he knew the extent of Epstein's crimes. Just hang on for a second. So in 2006. Right. Donald Trump has what kind of communication with the police chief?

7:36He called the police chief on the phone. And there's paper on that. There is. There's a report. There's an FBI report. It's an interview that the police chief gave to the FBI. So what does that suggest to you about Trump, that he was doing the right thing or that he was complicit in some way? You know, I think people are going to look at it one of two ways. A, that he, you know, was somewhat of an informant for the police in that he called them after this case, you know, became active and he became aware of it. And, you know, admitted, wait a minute, you know, I know he was doing this. or you could look at it another way in that he was also one of those people that knew and really didn't go to the police before then to tell them what he was doing because the police were sort of hearing that there were things happening at Epstein's mansion well before this, but every time they went to investigate, all the women that were coming and going that they saw on the street and stopped were of age.

8:41so they couldn't find any evidence that a real crime was being committed. But if, in fact, Trump knew that there was some crimes being committed against underage girls and he knew about it and didn't tell them ahead of time, I guess people will look at that from a different vantage point in that he should have told the police sooner. So this is after he was arrested? That's right. That's right. Your sources are not just law enforcement. You've talked to a lot of survivors. How are they reacting to these documents? Well, they're disturbed and very upset because their names are still in there. I mean, the FBI only had one job here, and that was to take out the victims' names.

9:33And their names are sprinkled throughout these documents. So they're quite irate about the fact that, you know, they have so many redactions of people, other people, but yet many of the victims' names are still in these public documents. What are the stakes for Donald Trump? Trump says he wants the country to move on from this story. But as you report, Trump is on an FBI list of people suspected of possible wrongdoing in connection with Epstein. The DOJ says that there is no credible evidence to pursue. So where are we? Well, I think that they should pursue everybody. And I think the victims, that's all the victims want.

10:16They want a credible investigation. Talk about credible tips or credible allegations. They want a credible investigation. and they're not seeing it. And quite frankly, thus far, I haven't seen it because you can say that someone's not credible, but there has to be some kind of notes. There has to be a report. There has to be some evidence that they went and talked to these people, or if they couldn't talk to them, why? And we're not seeing that. And I think that's part of the problem here. The government can say all they want. There's no credible evidence, nothing to see here, nothing more to investigate.

10:52But this case from the beginning has been, you know, a thorn in the Justice Department's side because the public doesn't trust that they did what they were supposed to, that the government, that the investigators were thorough. One of the people in Donald Trump's orbit in his cabinet that comes up a lot, a lot in the in the new documents is the Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Tell me about that. He was an ex-door neighbor, as I understand it, to Epstein in New York, and it sounds like he had been invited with his wife to Epstein's mansion. He mentioned in an interview that he felt creepy when he got into the mansion.

11:38I don't know if you've seen photographs of his mansion, but there are some creepy aspects to it, photographs on the wall, paintings, eyeballs, just very weird things in his house. So he said, you know, after he had that brief tour, he felt, you know, like, this is horrible. I never want to do anything again. You know, I'm not ever going, I don't want anything to do with this man again. And he said this publicly. And then we found documents in these files that showed that not only did he continue to communicate with him after this allegedly happened. But he even, you know, got an invite to the island and took his family to Epstein's Island.

12:19So, you know, you have to wonder, you know, why he would... This is where I have to stop. You know, you have no reason of knowing the answer, but I have to bring it up. What's, why would you bring your family to Epstein's Island? There are a lot of islands in the Caribbean and elsewhere. You can take your family anywhere on vacation when you have the money that Howard Lutnick has. Yeah. Why would you bring your children there? I can't answer it. There were plenty of other people in that category, too, that brought their families there. Not exactly Disneyland. No, I can't really answer that question.

12:59Julie, I want to play you a clip of Congressman Ted Lieu, who comes from Southern California, speaking on February 3rd. Why are Republicans so interested in Bill and Hillary Clinton? It's because they're trying to distract from the fact that Donald Trump is in the Epstein files thousands and thousands of times. In those files, there's highly disturbing allegations of Donald Trump raping children, of Donald Trump threatening to kill children. So I encourage your press to go look at these allegations. Wait, now there's a lot to unpack here. Let's start with Congressman Liu mentioning allegations of Donald Trump raping and threatening to kill children.

13:47What is he talking about? Well, there's – when they arrested Epstein in 2019, they put out sort of a big call that the prosecutor did. And they wanted more victims to come forward. So they put out this like 800 number tip line that you can call from the FBI. So the FBI got, I want to say, like hundreds of tips. And there were a couple that mentioned Trump. Now, some of them were a little bizarre that you would sort of think, no way, you know, eating, I don't know, babies. Or there's some strange ones in there that you could see were just crazy. Who's saying these things? Who's making these accusations?

14:31Well, these are people that call the tip line. Like I have a tip on Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump. It could be any malicious lunatic out there. Let's be very clear. It could be. But, you know, my point in this is, you know, there was one I know that involved a 13-year-old girl where they said that she was giving Trump oral sex and she bit him and he slapped her. This is one of the tips that came in. and what the FBI and the Justice Department is saying. This tip list, by the way, we think that it was – they didn't mean for it to be put out there in this tranche of documents. My point isn't whether it should have been made public or not.

15:16My point is that we can't see whether they followed up on all these tips. And certainly they should have followed up on the ones that had names attached to them. So one of the most shocking revelations in this document dump was how many prominent people continue to engage with Epstein after, after he was registered as a sex offender. I'm not asking you as a psychologist or a sociologist. How do you explain that? And what was known to the general public about his crimes at the time? Well, that's really a good question because you have to sort of break it down. You have to remember that when he was in Florida and he served that year, 13 months in jail, he had pled guilty to essentially what was a prostitution with a minor charge.

16:12Okay. When he came out of jail, he really mounted a PR campaign, hired, you know, a lot of people that can help him with his image to point out. Like Peggy Siegel, the PR person. Yeah, to point out – and he did press release. We could see it in the history that he was doing all these – donating tons of money to all these causes and trying to just improve his image. And when you think about it, if all you knew at the time, oh, well, he – this is the charge on paper was that he solicited a minor for prostitution. That's what the charge was. But as the years wore on by like 2010, 2011, there were underage girls who filed civil lawsuits against him.

17:04And there was a huge lawsuit that was filed against the United States government for giving him this plea deal, which, by the way, they kept secret for a whole year until he got out of jail. And that was by design because they did not want the victims to know that they did this deal because they knew the victims would protest. And then the judge would say, well, wait a minute. I've got 25 victims in court here that are protesting this. I'm not going to approve this plea deal. So it was done the way it was. His lawyers were pretty brilliant and figured out a way to make it look like he hadn't really committed a series of crime.

17:44They limited the scope of his crimes.

17:51I'm speaking with Julie Kay Brown of the Miami Herald. Her latest reporting on what Donald Trump knew about Epstein's crimes was published this past week. This is the New Yorker Radio Hour, and we'll continue in just a moment.

18:34God, and so many more. That's all in the New Yorker Radio Hour, wherever you listen to podcasts.

18:46This is the New Yorker Radio Hour. I'm David Remnick, and I'm speaking today with the reporter Julie K. Brown. Brown began her investigation of Jeffrey Epstein as a story for the Miami Herald. In doing so, she spoke to more than 60 women who said they were victims of Epstein's abuse. She revealed the plea deal that U.S. attorney Alexander Acosta made with Epstein in 2008. And the term sweetheart deal does not even begin to describe it. Her investigation was published in the Herald in 2018 under the headline Perversion of Justice. And Brown later published a book by the same name. Since that time, the scandal has only ballooned.

19:28Donald Trump and his team, most notably Attorney General Pam Bondi, are still trying to bully his supporters, as well as his opponents, into just dropping the whole thing. And that has not worked. I'll continue my conversation with Julie K. Brown. Julie, when you inevitably punched your own name into the search engine of these files, what did you discover? Well, just like everything Epstein in his mind, he wants to control the narrative. And he wanted to meet with me after my series ran. Did he reach out to you personally? No. So he never did try to meet with you? He was advised that it probably wasn't a good idea.

20:17His idea of doing that was— For once he got good advice. Yeah, and followed it. Yeah. I guess. You know, I have to confess, of course, I punched my name in there and thinking it would come up zero. And there it was multiple times. It was just articles that people had sent him writing about Russia, whatever it was. And then there was at one point my name appears on a long list assembled by a PR person of people you might invite to some sort of social event with, you know, 200 other people. I never got such an invitation. I'm not worried about it. But it was a bit startling. Yeah. To see that. Yeah.

20:53And I wonder if you think that there are people who are more implicated, might have, you know, stupidly gone to a dinner and then never seen him again, who are somehow implicated, injured by this process. What do you think about that? Yes, I definitely think that there are probably some people in that category that made a bad decision to go to an event where he was, you know, a prominent guest or one of his dinners, you know, at his own mansion. And they went because somebody invited them and told them, for example, the prince was going to be there. And so I do think, but I also think that those people that are in that category aren't mentioned repeatedly in these files.

21:44Yeah, hundreds of times, yeah. Yeah, hundreds of times. It's different if you just see one person you knew had dinner with them one time and you don't see anything else in there. Well, let me ask you this. What did the Biden administration do about all this? Why did the Biden administration sit on these documents? They had access to these files too, didn't they? They definitely and one would hope that they would have, you know, really pressed and continued this investigation. We don't know that they didn't. We don't know that they weren't still investigating some of this. It's just not clear from the files whether they did or they didn't.

22:22And the other thing to remember is they did convict Maxwell and she did appeal that conviction. So technically the case was still an open case. So you usually don't open your files when you still are investigating or litigating a conviction. So in some sense, that's one excuse I guess they could use. But I do think that the Justice Department failed these survivors through almost every presidential administration that we've had. I mean, this should have been investigated throughout this time. And now what's really horrible about it is, as you know, when a crime is committed, especially against young people, children, you know, as they get older, their memories fade.

23:12The evidence isn't as readily available. You know, the diary that maybe these girls kept when they were 16 about this, probably they don't have anymore. So had the prosecutors done their job back in 2007, there would have not only been far less victims here, but he could have gone to prison and we wouldn't even have this happening right now. You know, we wouldn't even be talking about him. What were Epstein's politics and do they matter?

23:49Let me tell you why I don't think it matters. Sexual assault doesn't discriminate based on political party. There were bad people on all sides here. There was not one party or the other. And it kind of frustrates me sometimes when people try to make this into a Republican versus Democrat issue because it had nothing to do with that. It had to do with power and money and sex. And it really didn't matter what your political party was. there were people, you know, as I said, on both sides here who were implicated or have been implicated. Julie, when you look at the array of people who have spent time with Epstein, who among the high and the mighty do you come out shocked at how they behaved?

24:33I mean, look at Bill Gates's behavior, for example. I don't know the guy. I've interviewed him on this program. But he's been in our lives in one way or another for a very long time. And, And, you know, call me naive, but I was appalled, although I should say that Gates denies the behavior that's mentioned in the files. So who's on this list for you? I, you know, he's definitely one of the people I think everybody was a little surprised at. I wasn't a little surprised. I was a lot more than that. Well, you know what? I've been doing this for so long, and I just know from covering especially sexual assault cases, a lot of men act completely different you wouldn't even know them when they're among their you know their buddies um you know just talking about women so in some ways there really hasn't been a whole lot that has been surprising to me like i said gates is sort of this guy that seems like a you know a little bit of a geek quite frankly so you wouldn't but you know what a lot of these men were older men too.

25:36So it's almost like maybe a club of people that don't normally get the girls, so to speak. And maybe that's why. Despite all their wealth and power, they needed Epstein in some way to do what for them? To hook them up with children. Yes. Yes. Or young women. But it was done. It's important to understand this wasn't Epstein going to these women and girls and saying, I'm going to pay you$200 if you have sex with me or if you have sex with, you know, so-and-so. That's not what he did. He used fraudulent means, which is one of the elements of sex trafficking. In other words, he said, I want to hire you as my assistant.

26:22I'm going to pay you$100 ,000 a year. Or I want to send you to college. Or you're a great artist. or a ballerina, or a model. I know I can get you in the Victoria's Secret catalog. That's how he got these women trapped. And that's how he did it. He did not, and then they got kind of enamored with him because he acted sort of like this father figure, and I'm going to change your life, and you can do this, that. There's tons of emails between him and women in these tranches that show him talking to these women that he wants to sort of snare. And then there's other emails that are clearly after he already had his way with them or they got too old for him where he's saying, well, I don't know what you want me to do about it.

27:16You know, this was your choice. There are these this trajectory that you could see with some of these women that at first he kind of gets them under his wing and then makes them believe that he's going to change their lives or that, you know, some of them fell in love with him. And then you could see in later emails where he's essentially just discarding them. Let's talk about conspiracies. QAnon for a long time has been full of crazy, lurid imagery about, God knows, human sacrifice. And watching the grotesqueness of Epstein's world laid out in these documents, one after the other, How do you – again, this is not crediting QAnon with truth-telling, but I have to think that it fuels conspiracy thinking because, in fact, the Epstein world was full of it.

28:15Yeah, and I'll point out another part of this that isn't talked about much. But some of the victims here were really damaged. I mean, he didn't go after – he wouldn't have been able to go after someone who had a lot of confidence and had a real life that had a future. He purposely targeted vulnerable girls who came from nothing or they were even homeless or in foster care, for example. And the damage that he did to some of these girls affected them the rest of their lives. And there are some of it is victims, like you mentioned, those tips that we saw that come from people who have been really traumatized.

29:09And that's why I'm saying I don't think you can discount all those crazy tips because I have found that some of the women that had those crazy aspects to their stories, there was still some shred of truth to what they were saying. It's just that they were so traumatized. And this is common, by the way. I've talked to FBI specialists who interview, especially children who have been traumatized. Your brain is almost damaged when something like this happens to you as a child. One of the theories that was going around a lot, as you know, Julie, was the idea that somehow that Epstein was not only trying to enrich himself all the time.