Cynical Publius, a poster on X, accurately describes for me the fantastical conspiratorial posts this week about Attorney General Pam Bondi and the Jeffrey Epstein records and death as “ragebait engagement farming.” I hate mobs and mob thinking, and I think Bondi has achieved a remarkable courtroom record against a tsunami of judicial insurrection.

For example, this week the Department of Justice, which she heads, just won its 13th Supreme Court victory in six months. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt confirms that the President is proud of her and considers the “continued fixation or sowing discord on [his] cabinet is baseless and unfounded in reality. On Saturday, the president reiterated his strong support for Bondi. I will endeavor to explain how absurd this furor is and why this (like the ludicrous Pizzagate-like fantasy before it) has so many dupes believing in unsubstantiated nonsense.

A very detailed portrait of Epstein’s background and operations can be found in a 2003 article in Vanity Fair, which reveals a shrewd operator who cultivated celebrities, business figures, politicians, scientists, and people of note to amass a considerable fortune. He was also a man with a perversion for sexual relations with underage young women.

There has long been a widely held belief that he maintained a list of notable people with details of their crimes. Bondi said she had the Epstein list “on her desk,” and indicated it would be released. This was a mistake, because if the belief was that there was a roster of prominent people engaged in pedophilia, there is no such list. (If there ever had been, he most likely scrubbed it long before any criminal investigation.) 

Whether she was misled into thinking this is unknown, but she was responsible for carefully checking the reliability of the information handed to her, and apparently, she didn’t. Most likely, any list she had was no more than an unvetted sweep of all his contacts. (Possibly, as we show below, some names could not be released because of pending court orders sealing this information.)

It is also a widely held belief that Epstein was murdered while incarcerated, and there are many who disbelieve the claim that he committed suicide and were outraged when she said the evidence indicated he did commit suicide. If he was murdered, there is no concrete evidence of that.

Why the Epstein File will not Implicate Anyone not Already Implicated

Ted Frank makes a compelling argument in this regard:

Anyone hoping the Epstein files will implicate people not already implicated is going to be very disappointed. Boies Schiller represented a bunch of putative victims and left no stone unturned, suing everyone remotely involved with Epstein, including JP Morgan Chase, who was guilty solely of letting Epstein park his money there, and coughed up $290 million rather than face a New York jury and the New York press; and the FBI, whose culpability isn't even tertiary. And with dozens of clients and years of work, lawyers sued all of two celebrities: Alan Dershowitz, who they had to apologize to in a $0 settlement when the only person accusing him turned out to be unreliable and someone who the government couldn't dare call to the stand in trial; and Prince Andrew, who settled with exactly one putative victim lucky enough to get a photo with him, probably finding it cheaper than the reputation hit and inconvenience of being dragged to America and being in the headlines for months in a he-said she-said case where he was utterly unsympathetic, and perhaps at the command of the queen to make the case go away. Which makes sense: why would Epstein risk his freedom and fortune to find out if any of the rich friends he was sucking up to shared his weird predilections for underage teenagers? His emails with Bill Gates, long made public, showed how Epstein operated. He liked collecting celebrity exposure by offering his plane and his island retreat and other trappings of luxury to famous politicians and celebrities; rich people like hanging out with other rich people who treat them normally and don't ask them for anything other than reciprocal philanthropic donations; and universities are happy to send celebrity academics to meet with 7-digit donors, and the celebrity academics rely on the universities to do due diligence for them. 

Why It’s Unlikely He Had Evidence of Prominent Pedophiles

According to Shipwreckedcrew:

Hundreds/thousands of pedophiles who filmed themselves and others have been prosecuted and convicted. The public does not know what videos Epstein possessed. There were certainly videos involving him -- that has been a matter of public record for a while. He is now dead. But there is no EVIDENCE that he had videos of other identified pedophiles who have not been prosecuted. Pedophiles collect child porn. Collecting child porn and creating child porn are two different things even though both result in videos. It has been reported by DOJ that Epstein had videos -- some made by him and others collected by him. But the public doesn't know what it doesn't know. You have no way of knowing how many videos there are of pedophiles who have not been prosecuted. Be careful making allegations of criminal activity in social media without proof. Your anonymity here is not assured.  

Even more foolish is the notion that the Administration that has engaged in the largest round-up of pedophiles and has rescued thousands of trafficked kids is interested in protecting pedophiles. 

It’s Unlikely That There Were Videos of Powerful People Engaged in Pedophilia

Chronicle’s Adam Mills asserts:

No one has ever seen a library of tapes or DVDs. Nor have we confirmed such videos ever existed. We’ve assumed the FBI struck gold but hid the evidence from the public.

But do we ever ask how the FBI would have acted if they found nothing with their raids? What if the reason Epstein got such a sweet deal the first time is because he meticulously scrubbed his house of all video evidence?

[snip]

To my knowledge, the government introduced no pictures of famous people having sex with children. There were no videos consistent with what we imagine Epstein kept in his blackmail archives. We all assume that somebody is hiding these videos and photos that we just know were used to blackmail famous people.

But what would it look like if there were no photos or videos in the Epstein compound when the FBI raided it? Aside from our strong suspicions that they must exist, how do we rule that out?

It is important to note that the absence of evidence is not evidence of absence. But the question must be asked: Is it possible that Epstein exploited children for profit without retaining blackmail information on his clients? We’ve heard from his victims that he used cameras to record “private moments” and that Epstein had secret cameras positioned around his New York residence. But that doesn’t mean he actually made recordings of clients. 

We know Epstein cultivated long relationships with powerful people. Wouldn’t Epstein need to soothe his clients’ fears of secret cameras and tabloid cover photos? If patrons of a fitness club discovered cameras in the locker rooms, many would stop going. Some of his clients probably had private security teams that would investigate the possibility that their protectee might be walking into a honeypot. If word got out that even one of his clients was exposed, his entire clientele list and all his schemes would collapse immediately.

We know Epstein sexually exploited children. But do we actually know he recorded famous people doing likewise?

One can imagine Epstein might have had reason to make people think he retained blackmail evidence, just as Saddam Hussein pretended to have chemical weapons -- to protect his position and to bluff his enemies. Epstein probably hinted at a secret cache that could only be reached with his cooperation.

During his press conference, Trump was asked about the Epstein files. He responded by mocking people for talking about the case instead of focusing on his accomplishments. But how else would one expect him to react upon discovering that his attorney general and FBI chief made horse’s asses of themselves by promising something they couldn’t deliver?

It’s the explanation that matches observation: The videos never existed in the first place. This explanation also tracks with the level of the caution one might expect of a criminal with a long career like Jeffrey Epstein. 

As for records listing who flew on his plane or visited his compounds, there’s every reason to believe they were not engaged in pedophilia there. Releasing such lists without verification would tar perfectly innocent people, and the president has acknowledged that: 

Bill O’Reilly said, “I talked to President Trump, man to man, eye to eye, on St. Patrick’s Day about this."

“He said, and I agree: There are a lot of names associated with Epstein that had nothing to do with Epstein’s conduct. They maybe had lunch with him or maybe had some correspondence for one thing or another.

“If that name gets out, those people are destroyed because there’s not going to be any context. The media doesn't care about context -- so you can’t do that.”

The president makes sense. However, people are out to get Bondi. 

If Evidence is Being Suppressed, it’s not by the Attorney General

In fact, we have the word of one such innocent victim of an unvetted Epstein contact dragnet, Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz, whose experience indicates that if anyone is protecting prominent Epstein wrongdoers, it’s the judiciary, not the Department of Justice.

Harvard Law Professor Emeritus Alan Dershowitz just now: " I know for a fact [Epstein] documents are being suppressed and they're being suppressed to protect individuals. I know the names of the individuals, I know why they're being suppressed. I know who's suppressing them, but I'm bound by confidentiality from a judge and cases, and I can't disclose what I know. But, hand to God, I know the names of people whose files are being suppressed in order to protect them, and that's wrong." 

“Just out of curiosity, without names, are these politicians, business leaders…”

Dershowitz: “Both. Everything.”

In the same video from which this quote is taken, Dershowitz praises Bondi’s honesty and ability. If there is any evidence that people hoped Bondi had and would release, it’s most likely that the Department of Justice is bound by court orders from releasing it. 

The bigger question, it seems to me, is why so many people are captured by unlikely hearsay and anonymously sourced tales of high-level criminal conspiracies rather than meaningful political issues. I think Peter Savodnik at the Free Press nails the answer.

Today’s conspiracy theorists... are not simply reacting to the appearance of official dishonesty but the reality of it: It’s not that hard to understand why so many Americans, following the innumerable lies they’ve been told about Russiagate and police brutality and the Covid lab leak and on and on (Andrew Sullivan compiled a list in 2021), might conclude that Jeffrey Epstein was the linchpin at the center of a sprawling blackmail scheme, that he didn’t just kill himself (even though he had good reason to do so), that he was actually being silenced by the powers that be to ensure that the powers that be would be never be unearthed.

And yet.

Two things can be true at once: We can be lied to about some things, but not all of them.

It is the case that countless Democrats and reporters told us the Kremlin secretly owned the president of the United States. But it’s not the case that everyone inside the party or the government (or even the legacy media) is untrustworthy.

Nor is it the case that Jeffrey Epstein was murdered.

Or, at least, there is no evidence that he was, and if you don’t believe me, then you should believe the OG conspiracy theorist -- the sitting president.

[snip]

Alas, it is very difficult to make people believe the Epstein plot is not a plot, because the whole sorry saga does reveal that some of the most powerful people on Earth are depraved and spineless, and they do sick things like sleep with 14-year-old girls. What’s more, it appears to confirm the original pedophile faux scandale, Pizzagate -- or, at least, it appears to confirm that the nutbags who insisted Democrats were trafficking in young women were not all wrong.

And yet: We should avoid conflating one immorality with others -- a lack of character with a much more ambitious plot to control the money supply or wage war or whatever else it is that some of the more outlandish Epstein conspiracy theories allege.

And: We should steer clear of the fallacy of composition -- the mistaken belief that, because one part is corrupt, the whole is corrupt.

The whole -- meaning the whole of our institutions, government, universities, major corporations -- is not owned by some invisible, demonic “Zionist entity,” as the pro-Hamas people like to say, or by a satanic pedophile ring, as the outermost fringes of MAGA prefer. It is not kneading, molding us into submission. (And no, I am not a cog in this multitentacled beast, denying a crime that I am actually a part of, although I recognize that my denial of my noncrime will only exacerbate the incredulity.)

But yes, there are terrible people across the globe who have ascended to the highest echelons of institutional power, and they are a disgrace, and they should be rooted out, and until they are, the distrust in those institutions will not abate.

One more thing. The claim that Patel and Bongino are warring with Bondi because she hasn’t released the list seems absurd on its face if we credit the word of her deputy , Todd Blanch, who said all the contents of the memo on the Epstein files and the conclusions were signed on to by Patel and Bongino. So, if you choose to adopt a rational analysis of the claimed dispute, you know which yapping “influencers” who base their claims on hearsay and anonymous sources to ignore.