The Jeffrey Epstein Story is Beginning to Smell Like Russiagate

Once again, inference zooms past fact in a mania with Trump as a target

From CNBC:

Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers said Monday that he was stepping back from all public commitments amid fallout from the release of emails between him and the notorious sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

“I am deeply ashamed of my actions and recognize the pain they have caused. I take full responsibility for my misguided decision to continue communicating with Mr. Epstein,” Summers said in a statement obtained by CNBC.

“While continuing to fulfill my teaching obligations, I will be stepping back from public commitments as one part of my broader effort,” said Summers, a former president of Harvard University…

Larry Summers is a rare perfect 10 on the celebrity-repugnance scale. He’s everything most normal people can’t stand about the current crop of “elites”: an arrogant Davos fixture whose toad face always looks pleased with his legacy of disastrous policy decisions, and who personifies his class’s habit of lavishing exalted academic titles on intellectual mediocrity.

Now he’s pioneered a new ritual, auto-cancelation. “I will be stepping back from public commitments” is cancel-culture seppuku, a way to give the mob a win before it gets going. That’s always a questionable tactic, but especially with the Jeffrey Epstein story, which is fast acquiring a familiar shape: a factually diffuse moral mania used as a disciplinary weapon by a media sector hungry for pelts.

The exchanges between Summers and Epstein are head-poundingly banal, like 99.9% of the documents in the just-released “trove” of Epstein-related documents. Summers is guilty of knowing Epstein and having pseudo-intellectual discussions with him about a mistress nicknamed “peril,” who Summers feared might stray. Epstein compared the possibility to finding life on other planets, and tried to cheer Summers up by flattering the ex-Treasury Secretary’s fascination with Bayesian statistics:

Odds are limited to binary outcomes… since you are immobile. Do some homework… I concede your point on pessimism but would under bayesian rules. Feel comfortable. As humans are biased toward bad outcome avoidance… She is never ever going to find another Larry summers. Probability ZERO

It went on. “Send peril flowers,” Epstein advised. The two men briefly discussed whether Ehud Barak would be Prime Minister (this was July, 2019). Then Summers wrote, “At cape w mother brothers kids and nephews nieces. Bit of an Ibsen play.” Then it was “better than [sic] checov.” When the two pals from there plunged into a Google-aided discussion of Lady With Lapdog, I shut the computer off.

Congress voted yesterday to compel the Department of Justice to release in “searchable and downloadable format” all files related to Epstein within thirty days. The House vote was 427-1. Though Ro Khanna, Thomas Massie, and Mike Johnson all voiced concerns, only Louisiana Republican Clay Higgins actually voted no, saying that “this type of broad reveal of criminal investigative files, released to a rabid media, will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt.”

Predictably now Higgins is being teed up as a cancellation target, as social media fills with Meet the Lone Dickhead Who Voted Against Releasing the Epstein Files-type stories, each of which lists every maybe-naughty thing Higgins has ever done. This format, seen a lot in Russiagate with dissenters like Devin Nunes and Tulsi Gabbard, usually comes as prelude to a flood of Stubborn Ownthinker Faces Calls To Step Aside pieces, another fun part of the cancelation ritual.

For the record I’m very much in favor of releasing any Epstein files. The country deserves to know whatever there is to know about this mess, and if it exposes systemic wrongdoings, those need fixing. However, it’s extremely suspicious that a story that was deader than Epstein himself for years is suddenly the Most Important Thing now that Trump is back in the White House, especially since a lot of the techniques used to drive a media panic in the first Trump term are back. The fact that some of Trump’s top officials stoked public outrage about this subject en route to higher office does change the karmic equation this time, however.

Between Epstein’s beyond-suspicious death, multiple prosecutions for sex crimes, inexplicable $600 million fortune, and breathtaking Rolodex of powerful friends, there’s a lot to be curious about. But the public’s fascination with Epstein is based on the notion that he was not only operating an organized blackmail ring, but doing so on behalf of intelligence agencies, probably Israeli. That story simply isn’t there yet, and a lot of people who should know better, myself included, have assumed it is. It could be true, which is why releasing documents is a good idea. As of now, though, it’s closer to Russiagate, in which confirmable facts are overshadowed by a mountain range of inference:

The gap between what’s known about Epstein and what the press claims is known is large. His two criminal cases are, to put it mildly, strange. The much-criticized non-prosecution agreement of 2007 is a solicitation charge. The more serious 2019 case features a count for conspiracy to commit sex trafficking, and a count of sex trafficking. This is how the Department of Justice described his crimes:

From at least 2002 through at least 2005, JEFFREY EPSTEIN enticed and recruited, and caused to be enticed and recruited, dozens of minor girls to visit his mansion in New York, New York… to engage in sex acts with him, after which he would give the victims hundreds of dollars in cash. In order to maintain and increase his supply of victims, EPSTEIN also paid certain victims to recruit additional underage girls whom he could similarly abuse. In this way, EPSTEIN created a vast network of underage victims for him to sexually exploit, often on a daily basis, in locations including New York and Palm Beach… EPSTEIN’s victims were as young as 14 at the time he abused them, and were, for various reasons, often particularly vulnerable to exploitation.

Though there are civil actions that include more serious allegations, Epstein’s last criminal case essentially accuses him of conspiracy to traffic women to himself. The lack of a formal accusation of trafficking to other men (or women, apart from Ghislaine Maxwell) might be seen as a reason to view the two cases as lacking or corrupt. Still, that absence is what it is.

One of the most aggressively publicized accusations of trafficking, made by the late Virginia Giuffre against lawyer Alan Dershowitz, was retracted. “I may have made a mistake in identifying Mr. Dershowitz,” she said, eight years after claiming in a lawsuit that Epstein “required” her to have sex with him “on numerous occasions while she was a minor, not only in Florida but also on private planes, in New York, New Mexico, and the U.S. Virgin Islands.” This episode is almost never mentioned and the few reporters who do, like Michael Tracey, are treated like lepers (Tracey was even thrown out of an event for “victims and survivors” in September).

Things like this make it hard to know how to assess other stories, like Giuffre’s claims about Prince Andrew, or Thomas Pritzker, or the academic she described as a “quirky little man with a balding pate of white hair,” or any of the other enconuters described in gory detail in the posthumously published memoir Nobody’s Girl, which her own lawyers once described as a “fictionalized” account. The situation is also compounded, as Tracey has noted, by the agreement in Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial that allowed self-identified victims to testify pseudonymously, and by the vast sums of settlement money paid to victims by banks and the Epstein estate.

Half of the Epstein fascination is tied up in what NPR and other outlets freely call this “sex trafficking ring” side of the story. The other half is the “shadowy” tale of his “ties to Israeli intelligence.” As is the case with the trafficking story, there are a lot of compelling facts here, but what they add up to isn’t clear. Some of the strongest material involves correspondence between Epstein and Barak purloined by the Handala hacker group. As Ryan Grim and Murtaza Hussein point out on Drop Site, they appear to show Epstein brokering a security deal between Israel and Mongolia, while just-released Epstein calendars show an Israeli spy named Yoni Koren stayed at his house. As Grim and Hussein put it, if one puts the pieces together, “a portrait emerges of Epstein at the nexus of high-ranking intelligence officials in both the U.S. and Israel.”

It’s all fascinating stuff. It may end up in the place lots of people seem to believe it will. I see strong evidence that Epstein mistreated a huge number of women and girls and similarly strong evidence that he had close ties to senior Israeli officials, but also with American politicians like Bill Clinton and Donald Trump. What’s missing is evidence about all those things having meaning in coordination.

During Russiagate we saw mainstream press outlets regularly run a type of story old-school journalists were once warned against: the “if true…” feature. When the Steele dossier and the pee tape material came out, we regularly saw descriptions of the allegations like “if true, the president-elect of the United States would be vulnerable to blackmail by the Russians,” or “information that, if true, could be used to blackmail him or undermine his presidency.” Nobody actually had the story, but the possibility was so tantalizing that everyone ran with it, which in turn left audiences with the impression of something proven.

The same thing is happening with this story, in media that plays to left and right audiences. Smart commentators like Branko Marcetic of Jacobin are leading off articles as follows:

We know that Donald Trump was extremely close with an incredibly prolific child sex abuser, Jeffrey Epstein. But recent revelations raise another question: Was Trump’s association with Epstein used by Israel to amass political leverage and influence US policy?

These stories use a lot of the same tropes that we saw with Russiagate, like “It fits with what we know about how Russia/Israel operates” and “Trump’s servility to Putin/Netanyahu is otherwise hard to fathom.” These “if true” stories are getting a lot of purchase on the left because of a combination of #MeToo fervor and pro-Palestinian activism, while right-leaning audiences are responding to a combo of fears about secret child trafficking and oft-validated suspicions about the deep state.

Bret Weinstein suggests we posit that the “cartoon view” of Epstein as an intelligence front is true, in order to ask if the spook services have so much leverage over us that “the democratic nature of our society is a fiction.” Tucker Carlson, whom I obviously also know well, has been outspoken in saying Epstein was part of a “blackmail operation run by the CIA and the Israeli intel services.” He asks a similar question:

It shouldn’t need pointing out that “who’s really running the White House?” was a common trope of the Russiagate period. So were stories that catalogued “links,” read into tales of “secret backchannels,” or declared people “assets” of a foreign country, all practices coming back into vogue.

The Epstein story has more force than Russiagate because it has a firmer floor of compelling facts, both in the tales of sexual abuse and procurement and in the area of Epstein’s political ties. Still, verifiable reports linking these two things are almost totally absent. With Russiagate, deep-seated fears about the communist enemy helped drive the mania. Here, it looks like newswriters are depending on darker attitudes to help audiences to make the needed connections on their own. The press watchdog FAIR made a point of reminding audiences that Tucker and Candace Owens are Israel-focused because they’re attention-seeking bigots, while their own speculations are fact-based:

It’s true that far-right antisemites like Candace Owens and Tucker Carlson have promoted a conspiratorial version of the Epstein/Israel connection as part of their bigoted, attention-seeking narratives. But recent investigations by Drop Site News—the nonprofit investigative outlet founded in July 2024—into a major hack targeting Israel revealed that Epstein did play a significant role in brokering multiple deals for Israeli intelligence.

I’m all for the release of the Epstein files, whatever that means, and I wouldn’t be shocked by anything a truly full disclosure might reveal. By any standard it’s already a crazy story, a pedophile confidante of world leaders who managed “suicide” while serving time as world’s most watched prisoner on remand. But there are a lot of unknowns. Purely as a media phenomenon, Epstein mania currently has a giant hole in it where the presumed intelligence/blackmail operation should be. It could be there. But I wouldn’t bet against more prosaic truths emerging, either.