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Understanding the Real Epstein Files
One of the things that pisses me off the most about conspiracy theories is that the people who are often most invested of them have done very little actual research into the known facts. For all the JFK conspiracy theorists out there, I reckon no more than a handful have actually read the Warren Commission Report. If you're going to question the official narrative, it helps to know what the official narrative actually is, and if you're going to allege a conspiracy theory, it helps if it isn't directly contradicted somewhere in the 26 volumes of supporting documentation. Public understanding of the Kennedy assassination, though, is much better than that of the Epstein scandal, which is surprising since the Epstein scandal has much more contemporary relevance. Over the past week or so, with the discussion on here, I've seen numerous people, including those whose opinions I normally respect, make certain statements that suggest that they have no actual understanding of the events in question. I'm not going to name any names or cite any specific examples, because it's not going to do any good, and I don't necessarily disagree with the conclusions they've drawn, but it seems like various aspects of the case have become conflated, and certain interpolations have entered the public consciousness that no reasonable person would make if they were familiar with the actual facts as they are known.
This is especially relevant in light of the recent (February) tranche of documents that has been released concerning Epstein. There was widespread disappointment that the documents didn't reveal anything that wasn't already known from various court filings. The real reason they were disappointing is that they didn't directly implicate anyone who wasn't already implicated. The public has created a narrative that has little relationship with the facts, and they're completely ignorant of any information that doesn't support that narrative. I've spent the past several weeks reviewing the Real Epstein Files, i.e. what's already been publicly released, and will attempt to describe relevant facts relating to two popular Epstein-related conspiracy theories: The widely-known theory that Epstein was murdered, and the more recently popularized theory that he was a Mossad agent. With respect to the second one, I'm going to specifically focus on the idea that the Sweetheart Deal he got in 2007 was the result of his status as an intelligence agent, because recounting the story of what happened in the US Attorney's office has the added benefit of providing a detailed description of what he was actually accused of, and, more importantly, what he wasn't accused of.
A Recounting of the Events that Led to Jeffrey Epstein's Initial Prosecution
In February of 2005, two high school freshmen got into a fight in gym class. Earlier that morning, Jane Doe had confided in her best friend that a rich guy had paid her $300 to giver him a massage over the weekend. The friend spent the rest of the morning telling other people, and by gym class it seemed like the whole school knew. Jane was not happy about this, and the two girls got into an argument, which resulted in a trip to the principal's office. The principle asked to search Jane's purse, where she found the $300. She claimed it was from her job. She claimed it was from selling drugs. The principal said she already knew where it came from. The girl talked.
Once Jane's parents found out, the incident was reported to police in Palm Beach. Another girl at the school had told Jane she could make a lot of money giving a rich old guy a massage, no experience necessary. When they got to the house, Mr. Epstein had Jane strip to her underwear while she gave him a massage. He was naked. He held up a vibrator to her crotch. Jane then watched the other girl do the same thing, except this time he masturbated, and fondled the girl with the vibrator while her panties were down. Then she was paid and asked for her phone number, and told she could make money any time she wanted, and would be given $200 for each girl she recruited to work for him.
The police launched an investigation, eventually identifying 29 victims in all. The stories were more or less the same: He's recruit teenage girls to give him massages, during which he would masturbate and fondle them. Sometimes the girls were clothed, sometimes they were naked. With some girls, he'd eventually offer more money for oral or vaginal sex. Some of the girls had only been there once, others were there dozens of times, and admitted to recruiting other girls for Epstein. It's worth noting here that there was no evidence at this point that Epstein had sex with anyone under the age of 18, and there is no evidence that any of the girls were coerced or threatened. Indeed, most claimed they were told at the outset that they wouldn't be expected to do anything they weren't comfortable with. While the details varied, there was an obvious pattern of behavior.
Police in Palm Beach brought the case to the State's Attorney, and were initially given an enthusiastic reception. Then the shit hit the fan. In a bid to halt the prosecution, Epstein's attorneys hired investigators to dig up dirt on the accusers. They marched into the State's Attorney's office with reams of information they had gathered. Social media posts evidencing alcohol and drug use, social media posts evidencing promiscuity. Behavioral problems. Minor criminal convictions. The witnesses would have credibility problems. That is, the ones who would actually testify. Most didn't want to participate, and the original complainant retracted her allegations. Epstein hired an attorney who worked for the same firm as a prosecutor's spouse, causing that prosecutor to be removed from the case. Epstein had evidently been tipped off to a search warrant police executed in October, as the computers connected to the house's hidden camera system had been removed. And if all this weren't enough, the girls had been paid, at a time when Florida was still prosecuting girls as young as 14 for prostitution, making it hard to prosecute Epstein without prosecuting the witnesses.
State's Attorney Barry Krischer wasn't sure how to proceed, as there wasn't much Epstein could be charged with, from a legal perspective. He was offered a misdemeanor plea for 5 years probation. He turned it down, insisting on a no contest plea. Typically in Florida, the State's Attorney will directly file charges by way of an information, bur Krischer decided to prepare for a grand jury, intending to charge Epstein with a single count of solicitation. Meanwhile Chief Reiter of the Palm Beach police was growing impatient. He felt that the State's Attorney wasn't taking the allegations seriously, and he waved away the credibility issues that Krischer was concerned about. He talked to a friend in the FBI, who put him in touch with Ann Marie Villafaña, an AUSA who specialized in crimes involving exploited children.
Making a Federal Case Out of It
In May, 2006, Villafaña opened up a case on Epstein. Reiter had expressed concerns that the scorched earth approach of Epstein's attorneys had caused the state prosecution to stall, as the debate at that time was between charging Epstein with a misdemeanor and not charging him at all. Villafaña then took the unusual step of involving Alex Acosta. The concern was that Epstein's attorneys were so aggressive that what happened in Palm Beach could happen federally. It was a complicated case involving numerous victims and multiple states, but she was willing to put in the time and the FBI was willing to put in the money. She didn't want the whole thing to be wasted, though, due to last-minute legal shenanigans. She wanted to make her case to Acosta to get his word that he wouldn't back down to pressure, though she really wanted to inoculate him to the reality that Epstein's lawyers would be knocking on his door. At this point, neither Acosta nor anyone else in the US Attorney's office had heard of Epstein, but Acosta gave her the green light. His office had just successfully prosecuted Jack Abramoff, and wasn't worried about Dershowitz or anyone else.
In the meantime, a grand jury in Florida indicted Epstein on a single count of felony solicitation (solicitation being a felony in Florida if done on three or more occasions). Villafaña feared that the Florida State's Attorney planned on using the indictment as leverage to get Epstein to plead to a lesser charge. Had Epstein done so prior to the USAO formally initiating an investigation, this would have created significant barriers for a Federal investigation, since departmental policy only allows for Federal prosecution of crimes that have already been handled in state court in extraordinary circumstances. Villafaña formally initiated the Federal investigation on July 26, 2006, making the notable decision not to inform the Palm Beach County State's Attorney, as she was concerned his office would leak the investigation's existence to Epstein's attorneys. The FBI soon began looking into the matter, and was beginning to identify more victims.
Villafaña's concern about a leak notwithstanding, Epstein quickly learned about the investigation, as the FBI was interviewing his employees and demanding documents. His attorneys reached out to Villafaña in October, requesting a meeting, but Villafaña declined. Epstein hired attorneys with contacts in the USAO. The case at the time was being supervised by Andrew Lourie, head of the West Palm Beach branch office; Matthew Menchel, Criminal Division Chief; and Jeffrey H. Sloman, First Assistant US Attorney, along with Acosta. Epstein's new attorneys bypassed Villafaña and requested a meeting from Lourie, which he granted.
The First Cracks Appear
I'm going to pause for a moment to explain some of the legal niceties of the case, as they will become relevant later when examining Acosta's actions. As most of you know, garden-variety crimes are generally handled by state courts, with the Federal government only getting involved with cases that either cross state lines or offend some other Federal interest. When Villafaña agreed to take the case, she did so because she believed the following Federal interests were involved:
That Epstein had victimized minors through the facilities of interstate commerce, namely airplanes and telephones
The large number of victims
The cameras in Epstein's residence suggested the possibility that he had been producing child pornography
The possibility that the state investigation had stalled due to political pressure applied by Epstein's attorneys
I would note that these weren't necessarily all things that Villafaña saw as the immediate basis of Federal charges. These were things that, based on the evidence the PBPD gave her, that she though a Federal investigation might uncover, and that, had they been uncovered, would have been the basis for Federal charges. With respect to the first item, there was no substantial evidence at this point that Epstein transported a minor on his airplane. The Federal nexus was that Epstein, not a Florida resident, used his airplane to travel to Florida for the purpose of engaging in sexual conduct with minors, in violation of various Federal statutes.
Another issue at play here is the appropriateness of a Federal prosecution. As you probably know, there can be substantial overlap between state crimes and Federal crimes. While there is no constitutional bar for multiple prosecutions for the same conduct involving different sovereigns, the Justice Department does not wish to subject defendants to repeated prosecution. Since 1960, DOJ has followed the Petite Policy, which states the following (from the US Attorney's Manual):
Villafaña was vehemently opposed to meeting with Epstein's attorneys. At this point in the investigation, Epstein hadn't been charged, and she felt that they requested the meeting as an attempt to get the prosecutors to tip their hand as to what they planned on charging him with. She felt that having a meeting that early was something you did with white collar criminals who were likely to admit to specific conduct but dispute the nature of the charges. As Epstein was being charged with sex crimes, however, he wasn't likely to admit to anything. Lourie was of a different opinion. He believed that since the defense had reached out to them, they must have something to say, and since they haven't drafted an indictment yet, they may give away their defense strategy ahead of time. Therefore, they could gain an advantage by drafting the indictment to head of defense arguments at the pass. On February 1, 2007, Villafaña and Lourie met with Epstein's attorneys, who anticipated charges being brought and put forth the following arguments against them:
Villafaña's concerns aside, the meeting achieved everything the prosecutors could have hoped for. The defense told them where they were going to challenge, and they were able to tailor their case to those arguments. Villafaña prepared a draft indictment and memorandum, with the intention of filing on May 15. Lourie took a look at it and agreed with it, but wanted to take a more conservative path. The charges, if proven, were damning, and would see Epstein facing somewhere between 15 and 20 years in prison per the sentencing guidelines, with the conduct so egregious that it would call for an upward adjustment. Once indicted, any plea deal would require judicial approval, and, after seeing the scope of Epstein's misconduct, no judge would agree to a deal that involved substantially reduced or dropped charges. They felt the case was solid, but not a slam dunk, and were worried that an indictment would force them to take the case to trial, since they would have no flexibility with respect to a plea. Lourie wanted to arrest Epstein and charge him pre-indictment. He would be detained, and the prosecutors would be in a position to negotiate on their own terms.
More importantly, Lourie felt that he should let his superiors in Miami review the indictment before going forward. He and Villafaña had gone out on a limb involving Acosta early, and he didn't want to sign off on anything without running it up the chain. Menchel and Sloman reviewed it, but they wanted Acosta to take a look at it as well, and he was on vacation and had 700 other things to do once he got back. In the meantime, Eptstein's attorneys wanted another meeting, this time with a list of contemplated charges provided in advance, and with Acosta and other senior USAO managers present. As Lourie put it "they want me to tell them the statutes we're contemplating so Dershowitz can tell us why they don't apply". Villafaña, of course, was opposed to another meeting altogether. This wasn't a white collar case where they were negotiating the details of a light sentence, but a serious crime with substantial prison time at stake. She had already heard from Epstein's attorney's, who characterized their position as 1. The Petite Policy precludes Federal prosecution, 2. This shouldn't be a Federal offense, and 3. The victims were all complicit so they shouldn't be prosecuting. Ergo, the only reason for the meeting was for Epstein's attorneys to convince them to drop the case, and unless they were willing to do that, there was no reason to meet. She felt like the same thing the PBPD warned her about was happening again.
The USAO agreed to another meeting, though Acosta was not present and they weren't given the charges in advance. Dershowitz made arguments that certain charges shouldn't apply, with the overall theme that this was a state matter that shouldn't have any federal involvement. Epstein's attorneys walked away thinking they had convinced the Feds to drop the case. This wasn't true, but prosecutors were concerned about the travel issue. Specifically, the prosecution would have to prove that Epstein traveled to Florida specifically for the purpose of engaging in sex with minors. Dershowitz argued that Epstein had other reasons to travel to Florida, though nothing particularly compelling or specific. The prosecution felt this was their biggest weakness, but they were able to buttress it with the argument that he had created a network of high school girls willing to give him massages, and that it would be very difficult to recreate such a network in another place. Things were still going fairly well for the prosecution, but Villafaña became increasingly concerned with the glacial timeline her superiors in Miami were using to make a charging decision. Villafaña's initial charging memorandum was dated May 1, and Lourie submitted it to Miami a few days later. But the initial May 15 target date had come and gone, and the meeting with Epstein's attorneys was on June 26. She had been informed that it wouldn't be approved quickly, but this was excessive, and it's still unclear whether Acosta even read it himself before making a decision.
Down the Primrose Path
In early July, Acosta made a fateful decision that would define his role in the case. But we can't understand why Epstein got off with such a light sentence without understanding the difference of philosophical opinion that existed between him and Villafaña, and between the Miami brass and the West Palm Beach branch office more broadly. To Villafaña, the issue was pretty clear: Epstein had committed Federal crimes and should be prosecuted for them, the same as any other criminal who had committed Federal crimes. That was the end of the story, and she wasn't going to treat his case any differently than any other sex offender. Acosta saw things differently. He was under the opinion, shared among many posters here, that Federal authority was too broad. He didn't like the idea of his office trying to gin up an interstate nexus just so that they could prosecute what would traditionally be a state crime. He was uncomfortable with the idea of his office getting involved in a local prosecution because they didn't like how the local authorities were handling it.
To Acosta, the role of his office in the Epstein case was to act as a backstop to an injustice that a local prosecutor was allowing to happen. He appears to have strongly felt that yes, the State's Attorney was allowing Epstein to get away with reprehensible conduct, and his office had a responsibility to prevent that from happening. But he didn't feel that the risk of a full-blown federal prosecution was worth it if an alternative could be arranged. The way he saw it, it wasn't fundamentally a sex trafficking case, but a prostitution case, and solicitation of prostitution is traditionally a state concern. Furthermore, he wasn't sure a jury would view it as a sex trafficking case, either, and they might acquit on that basis, regardless of the technical wording of the statute. There was also the witness credibility problem, which hadn't gone away.
Thus, Acosta made the decision that the best way to get out of this was to use the threat of a Federal indictment to induce Epstein to plead to state charges. He wanted a deal that involved three things: Jail time, sex offender registration, and victim compensation. In his view, if local prosecutors had credibly threatened Epstein with charges that would result in those three things, the PBPD would never have reached out to Villafaña. With these goals in mind, the USAO began negotiations with Epstein's attorneys.
The attorneys did not act like they were being offered a gift. They took Acosta's minimum demands as a starting point for negotiations, which they continually frustrated. Their initial counteroffer was that Epstein wouldn't register as a sex offender and accept home confinement in lieu of jail time. And also that certain state procedures would be used to ensure "maximum flexibility" in sentencing. The defense team engaged in the time-honored tactic of agreeing to a term in principle and moving on to the next one, and then, when it appeared they were getting close to a deal, backtracking on the proposed terms or proposing alterations. They would agree orally to certain provisions, and when it looked like an agreement was about to be finalized, they'd send out a draft with wildly different terms. At one point they proposed a "hybrid" plea that would encompass state and Federal charges, only to reject it after the USAO drafted a proposed agreement. They tried to do various end arounds involving the State Attorney's office. The history of this period is frustrating to even read, and must have been a nightmare to be involved in. As various internal deadlines approached, Villafaña was ready to throw up her hands and file charges, but was overruled by her superiors, who were convinced the finish line was in sight. Finally, on September 26, after Acosta had made it abundantly clear that this was the final deadline and charges would be filed if a deal wasn't reached by 5 pm, Epstein agreed to the NPA. He would serve 18 months in a county detention facility, with no possibility for early release, followed by one year of home confinement, would register as a sex offender, and would provide restitution for victims under provisions of Federal law.
The End of the Beginning
Popular reporting would have you believe that, having gotten off with a slap on the wrist, Epstein quietly served his sentence and then disappeared into private life until the story was blown open at the end of 2018. This is not the case. While prosecutors were initially relieved to have completed the deal, their problems with Epstein's defense team were only beginning. In fact, the NPA had actually improved Epstein's position, at least temporarily, because it eliminated the threat of Federal prosecution. Almost immediately, Epstein's attorneys began collateral attacks against the terms of the agreement, insisting that they be interpreted in ways favorable to them. The major sticking point was that the victim compensation provision, which allowed victims to file claims under Federal law, was inappropriately being applied to state charges. They attacked this provision repeatedly from various angles, in an apparent (and successful) attempt to delay sentencing. They made repeated requests to eliminate or renegotiate terms that weren't even at issue. It got so bad that Acosta threw up his hands at one point and offered to mutually rescind the deal. If you don't like it, we don't either, and you can take your chances with an indictment. No, Acosta was assured, Epstein wanted to keep the deal in place, they were just working out some small details.
These collateral attacks delayed Epstein's sentencing for months, and resulted in an addendum to the original NPA being executed resolving the issues. Some people in the USAO wanted to take the position that, in light of the stalling and attacks on the agreement, they should just find that he was in breach and indict him on the Federal charges. Others realized that this would only be playing into his hands, as such a breach would be challenged, and the ensuing litigation would only drag things out longer. Complicating the situation was that the NPA did not include a firm date by which Epstein was to be sentenced.
Even after the addendum was executed and the collateral attacks stopped, it didn't end Epstein's quest to avoid prosecution. Running out of options, his attorney decided to attack the Federal prosecutors themselves. They commissioned opinions that assessed various improprieties in the investigation, and sent letters to Acosta accusing Villafaña and the office as a whole of misconduct. Villafaña wasn't worried about the ethics accuasations, but she had another concern—the case was growing stale. The NPA had been executed at the end of September. As the year was coming to a close, and it still wasn't clear when, if ever, Epstein would plead. If he were to draw this out much longer and reneg, there might not be a case left for them to indict on. So now she had to take the unusual step of reinterviewing witnesses to prepare them for a grand jury in a case that had supposedly settled.
Unsatisfied with Acosta's refusal to budge, Epstein's attorneys then took the matter to Washington. They had repeatedly threatened Acosta with this action if he didn't agree to material changes to the NPA, but he simply told them it was their right to seek a departmental review. The review went nowhere, but it did delay Epstein's sentencing for another five months. The most interesting thing about this is that it is the first time any of Epstein's high-profile friends were mentioned in connection to the case. However, it's not in a context one would expect; Ken Starr—yes, that Ken Starr—co-authored a letter to Deputy AG Mark Filip that in part alleged that the prosecution of Epstein was unfairly motivated by his personal association with Bill Clinton! Oh, if Starr had only then realized how ironic such an assertion would seem 15 years later.
That summer, Epstein finally pleaded guilty and began serving his sentence. This still didn't end matters entirely. First, he was evidently staying in the "stockade" at the sheriff's office instead of the county jail. Evidently, the NPA only specified "a county detention facility". Then he was granted work release for a position that hadn't existed before he was sentenced. 12 hours a day, six days a week at his attorney's office. Well, the NPA said that he would actually serve the 18 months, but it didn't say anything about work release. The USAO insisted that numerous emails between counsel indicated that he was actually expected to be in a physical jail during this period, but the defense disagreed. Work release was within the purview of the Sheriff's department, and they were just treating him like any other prisoner. And if he were denied, the matter would be litigated. There was little the USAO could do at this point. Though by this point, things had changed. Menchel had left the USAO for private practice the previous summer, as negotiations were going on, and his successor wasn't involved in the case. Lourie had taken a position in Washington, and he left South Florida shortly after the NPA was signed (though he did occasionally involve himself thereafter). Acosta was on his way out as US Attorney and had accepted a position in private practice which required him to recuse himself from the case. Villafaña and Sloman were the only two left at this point, and Sloman had been the least involved of the five.
So What Does This Have to Do with Anything?
The foregoing, as long as it is, is the Reader's Digest Condensed Version of the entire affair. There is a lot of detail I left out, so forgive me for, in the future, referring to facts not in evidence, as it were, but at least you understand the broad strokes of what happened. That being said, considering the obnoxious level of detail with which I have familiarized myself for this case, I can't help but laugh when someone suggests that Acosta said he was told that Epstein had something to do with intelligence and to leave the matter alone. First. the claim that he said that is dubious. To be clear, Acosta never said that publicly; a journalist for The Daily Beast reported that she was told by a Senior Trump Administration Official that during his interview for Labor Secretary he gave that as a response when asked about why Epstein got the deal he did. At best, that's double hearsay with an anonymous intermediary. At worst, it's a Washington rumor being reported as fact because it came from the right person; we don't even know that the official in question even heard the alleged remark.
I'm not going to defend the way Acosta handled the Epstein case, because it's clear that he exercised terrible judgment. But there's nothing in the record to suggest he left it alone. He gave the initial green light. He did nothing to impede the actual investigation into Epstein. The FBI was actively investigating the case all the way up to the point that the NPA was executed. They were still identifying new victims, including ones in New York. He stuck to his guns regarding his minimum requirements for a deal, even through defense shenanigans, and made it clear to his subordinates that they were to indict if a deal couldn't be reached by the deadline. There's no inflection point in the timeline where Acosta obviously decided to call off his dogs. If he had indeed been told to leave it alone, he could have done a lot more than spend months hammering out an agreement and even more months defending that agreement from collateral attacks. He could have simply said "This is a state matter. I'm not going to bootstrap solicitation of prostitution into a Federal sex trafficking charge just because some police chief doesn't like how the local prosecutor is handling the case. Furthermore, the evidentiary issues are real and they are just as real for this office as they are for the State's Attorney. I'm not going to second-guess his judgment here."
Such a theory also doesn't explain how other people acted during the investigation. If Epstein knew he was getting a sweetheart deal in exchange for his silence, he sure didn't act like it. His attorneys dragged out negotiations longer than necessary with little apparent benefit. They continued to fuck around for nine months after the agreement had been entered into, most of which was a complete waste of time. One can argue that it was all part of some big performance to make it look like Epstein was getting seriously punished, but it was a performance that nobody was watching. If there had been intelligence concerns, it certainly doesn't explain why the Deputy AG gave Ken Starr the bum's rush when he asked for departmental review. Sure, it stalled the case for five months, but that's all it did. Mark Filip basically told Starr that if he wanted them to look at the case he could get in line, and at that they would only do a limited review of certain issues, not the full review that Starr had requested.
So What Happened?
Acosta executed poor judgment, plain and simple. But it was ultimately a failure of management. Villafaña had informed him of the issues with the case from the beginning, but by involving senior management early on, senior management became more involved in the case than they should have been. The decision to charge Epstein would have typically been Lourie's, but he now felt obligated to run things up the chain to Miami for their opinion, and the people above him in Miami felt the need to get Acosta's opinion on how to proceed. The situation arose where Acosta was making all the important decisions, but was far removed from the actual work being done on the case. He was simultaneously too involved and not involved enough, and it was a recipe for disaster.
After reviewing the charging memorandum and draft indictment, his own understanding of the weaknesses of the case combined with his prosecutorial philosophy led him to make the decision to pursue a pre-indictment plea deal to state charges. Once he was convinced that this was the solution to the case, he refused to waver from this position, and he was too far away from the actual negotiations to have an understanding of why it might not have been a good idea. When Villafaña expressed her frustration with the process to Menchel and requested that everyone, including Acosta, sit down for a meeting, she was rebuked and told that she wasn't going to get a meeting with the big boss just to tell him she disagreed with his decisions. Acosta, for his part, thought that he was simply setting a broad policy that his subordinates were executing.
The best example of how this led to poor decision making is the question of the missing computer equipment. If you remember way back at the beginning, the PBPD had executed a search warrant and computers hooked up to a taping system were missing. Around the time negotiations started, the FBI had discovered the name of the person holding the computer equipment. The FBI had information suggesting that the defense team had examined the computers. Villafaña requested that the defense turn it over. They refused. She filed a motion compelling them to turn it over. She wanted to condition negotiations on getting all of the requested documents, including the computers. Negotiations went ahead anyway. The hearing on the motion ended up being indefinitely postponed because of the negotiations.
One gets the impression that everyone assumed that since a deal was imminent there was no point in worrying about the motion or getting access to the computers. Acosta charted a course and followed it to the exclusion of all other options. It never once seemed to occur to him, or to anyone on the team save Villafaña, that the computers could contain evidence that would strengthen their negotiating position. It certainly never occurred to him that they could contain evidence that would strengthen their case to the point that he'd be able to ditch the negotiations and proceed with the indictment. It was also around this time that the FBI became aware that Epstein had photographed an underage girl at his home in New York. It was clear from the arrangement of the cameras that they would have captured sexual activity inside the Florida house. Most child predators possess significant amounts of child pornography. Had prosecutors discovered evidence that Epstein had transmitted images of underage girls between New York and Florida, it would have obliterated any Federal nexus question the defense threw at them.
But that's just speculative. More importantly, Acosta's insistence on a state charge made the prosecution completely dependent on a state office whose inaction led to the Federal investigation in the first place. Federal prosecutors did not have a good enough understanding of Florida law to realize how Epstein would be able to rig the system in his favor following conviction. Hanlon's Razor warns us not to attribute to malice what can be attributed to incompetence. But this isn't even incompetence. Acosta was facing a difficult case with determined defense attorneys, and in a normal case his strategy probably would have worked as intended. But this wasn't a normal case; the defense attorneys were skilled enough that they were able to sense the managerial dysfunction in the USAO. They knew that Acosta was committed to the plea deal and that they could keep throwing up roadblocks because he didn't want to indict. They knew he wasn't supervising the case directly, and that they could yank on the chains of his subordinates without affecting his position. It wasn't until after the NDA, when the collateral attacks started, that Acosta became more involved and ran out of patience, but by that time there was little he could do that wouldn't make things worse.
What's Missing
I don't want to get too into the weeds about specific allegations that were made about Epstein outside of the context of the initial investigation and prosecution, but it's worth noting what didn't come up. First, there was no mention of any prominent connections. None of the people involved knew who Epstein was prior to the investigation, and if it was subsequently discovered that he kowtowed with prominent people, this wasn't mentioned anywhere. None of the victims ever alleged that anyone other than Epstein had abused them. Prosecutors couldn't find any evidence that any victim had traveled interstate with Epstein, or indeed that they were abused anywhere other than his house in Palm Beach. This is despite desperately looking for such evidence, as it would have made the Federal prosecution a lot easier. The 2019 indictment of Epstein is limited to his abuse of three girls between 2002 and 2005. The indictment of Ghlisaine Maxwell is based on the abuse of two girls between 1994 and 1997. Maxwell's name didn't come up in the 2006/2007 investigation, and there's no evidence that the prosecution was even aware of her.
The idea that Epstein was running a whorehouse for the rich and famous that was really some kind of extortion operation, or even that powerful men were banging girls Epstein procured, is based on allegations made in civil lawsuits filed after the initial investigation ended. I haven't done a comprehensive examination of the materials involved in these lawsuits, because, well, this post is long enough as it is. Suffice it to say that only a few victims have ever alleged that they were abused by anyone other than Epstein. Bradley Edwards, who represented over 200 of Epstein's victims, including Virginia Giuffre, explicitly disavowed the notion that the girls were there for anyone but Epstein. He contends that a select few girls may have had sex with a select few of Epstein's associates, but that the vast bulk of victims were only abused by Epstein. The situation most of the conspiracy theorists envision is that which takes certain allegations raised by about 1% of the represented victims and spins it into a typical scenario, and at that it goes far beyond anything Giuffre actually testified to. None of these theories are based on facts, just conjecture.
Epstein's Death
I don't want to belabor this point, since I've been pretty vocal explaining how preposterous the idea that Epstein was murdered is since before the body was even cold, but there's one point that I would like to make. No one ever mentions the findings of the medical examiner. Forensic pathologist Michael Baden, who Epstein's brother hired to observe the autopsy, got publicity for stating publicly that he thought Epstein was murdered because his hyoid bone was broken, and that is indicative of manual strangulation and not hanging. Conspiracy theorists seized on this as evidence of murder. But, as I've said, more important is what Baden didn't say. The ME presented numerous findings that were indicative of hanging and not indicative of strangulation: The ligature pattern, the pattern of neck bones that were broken, the pattern of petechial hemorrhaging, the plethora, the presence or absence of other types of hemorrhaging, etc. And of particular importance, the absence of any defensive wounds whatsoever.
To me, regardless of the other evidence, this is the absolute showstopper. For Epstein to have been murdered, the assailant would have had to know how to do the job in such a way that it would cause certain things to happen but wouldn't cause other things to happen, and do it while Epstein didn't fight back at all. Baden focused on the hyoid bone, because it was all he had to go on. He hadn't seen a broken hyoid in a hanging in over 40 years of practice. Well, the literature estimates it happens in about 25% of hangings, and is particularly likely in older individuals. Baden didn't question any of the ME's other findings, even though he was there to observe the autopsy. He never felt the need to issue his own report, or conduct an independent autopsy, that listed the cause of death as homicide, or even undetermined. The medical evidence that Epstein was murdered is effectively zero. The non-medical evidence is nothing but a series of coincidences. There isn't any reason why any rational person should conclude that there was a conspiracy to have him murdered, when there's no evidence that he was even murdered.
Postmortem
About a week ago, a user here posted that Epstein's status as a Mossad agent was pretty much an established fact at this point, as sure as the sun rises every morning and sets every evening for anyone with half a brain, and then linked to a 5 1/2 hour compendium of Daryl Cooper podcasts to placate anyone who doubts this. There's only one problem: Daryl Cooper is full of shit. As I was writing this, I was intrigued to see what the other side of the story was, but I didn't have six hours to kill, so I pulled up the Tucker Carlson interview on YouTube and clicked to an arbitrary location. After listening for I while, I heard him say this:
If it isn't blindingly obvious by now, practically everyone involved in the case, especially the lead prosecutor, was heavily involved in the negotiation of the plea deal from the very beginning. Acosta, for what it's worth, was among the least involved in the whole process. Of the six meetings prosecutors had with the defense team prior to the agreement being signed, he was present at exactly one. Later in the process, after one of Epstein's attorneys attempted to reach Acosta directly, he directed Villafaña to return the call and told Lourie that he didn't want to open a backchannel. When the same attorney emailed Acosta asking for a phone call, Acosta said he would be happy to talk, but his staff would have to be on the call. Furthermore, the characterization of the NPA as a "done deal" is laughable, as it wasn't a done deal until nine months after it had been signed. And Acosta didn't even sign it; Villafaña initially put his name on it because she disagreed with it and expected him to own it, but he told her to put her name on it since she was lead prosecutor and it wasn't his role to be signing these things.
This information has been public knowledge for years. If Cooper wants to make bold claims about Epstein, the least he can do is look at it, and if he doesn't agree with its contents, explain the evidence he has to contradict it. I don't need to listen to any more Daryl Cooper. For a guy who claims to be a historian, he can't even get verifiable facts straight, and evidently isn't immune to making shit up if it doesn't support his narrative. More than likely, he had his narrative down and believed whatever media characterizations were made of the story without giving it a second thought. Then he repeated this without giving it a second thought because that was the public perception and who wants to read a bunch of boring emails that don't even contain any juicy information? He says a bunch of other shit that is equally factually incorrect but I don't have the time or the energy to dedicate my life to debunking Daryl Cooper conspiracy theories. All I ask is that anyone making claims like this take a look at the actual official sources before shooting their mouth off.
This is the part that boggles my mind. Just incredible incompetence not to seize and search the computers. The kind of mistake a first-year prosecutor would make. And to be clear, I think it was incredible incompetence, not a conspiracy.
Also true with those same (or at least potentially the same) computer items resurfacing in NY when his apartment was searched and the FBI failing to secure them.
What actually gets me is a different question: Why the hell is the US attorney even making calls like that? My general takeaway is that the US Government would greatly benefit by following the process most local prosecutors offices have: Police investigate crimes, sometimes they come to the prosecutors for things like subpoenas, search warrants, and legal advice, but largely they investigate cases on their own. THEN they present findings to the prosecutors who decide which charges best apply to the case. The prosecutor then files those charges and gets a grand jury to indict it (or very rarely they will deliver a no true bill, at which point the case is dead). This whole situation of prosecutors actively participating in the investigation of crimes and negotiating with defense counsel before investigations are concluded and charges are filed is just begging for corruption to enter into the process.
No, that is bad and stupid. They should not be meeting with defense until after charges are filed. If defense convinces you that the most serious charges are legally insufficient, you can move to have them dismissed and proceed on the lesser charges instead. This happens as a matter of course in state trials. A defendant may be charged with First Degree Murder, and then plead to 2nd Degree, or Manslaughter in exchange for dismissal of the higher charges. The US Attorneys seem to have tied themselves into knots with odd self-imposed regulations that seem to only serve two purposes: 1) Enable corruption; and 2) Keep their caseloads low by refusing to prosecute cases they might lose.
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To clarify, when police searched Epstein's house as part of the initial investigation, the computers had already been removed. Later, the FBI learned that they were in the custody of a certain individual, and the USAO requested that they be turned over. Epstein's attorneys initially agreed to produce them by a certain date, then asked for an extension, and on the extension deadline they took legal action to prevent having to turn them over. By this point negotiations were underway, and in the course of negotiations the USAO agreed to postpone the date of the hearing, which was then rescheduled for late September. By this point, the self-imposed indictment deadline was nearing, and the parties were close to a deal, and they agreed to postpone the hearing indefinitely, Once the deal was signed the matter was dropped.
I agree with you that they should have pushed the computer issue a little harder, but I can understand why they didn't. The idea that they would contain evidence that improved the prosecution's position was speculative. I wouldn't call it incompetence so much as poor judgment. If the computers contained video of Epstein engaging in the sex acts that they already knew about, it would improve the case, but not by much. They could have been a game changer, but that was conditioned on them containing child pornography, or worse, containing evidence that he transmitted CP over the internet.
We need to step back and consider what they were likely dealing with. This was 2005, and the taping system probably wasn't brand new. You were looking at 480p tops, compressed, taken with a wide angle lens. I don't have any information about the camera equipment that the police discovered, but they did mention that the cameras were hooked up to the computers for recording. Epstein could certainly afford commercial-grade recording equipment, but most such equipment would have recorded to disc at the time, and not a PC. So we're likely looking at webcams. In either event, though, any video would have been low-resolution and recorded from a fixed vantage point. Webcam videos from 2005 weren't great, and commercial surveillance video wasn't much better. There would have been problems authenticating the video and identifying the victim as a minor.
I think that Acosta's plan was stupid and ultimately ineffective. It's certainly not what I would have done had I been in charge. However, once they were committed to that course of action, I don't think that yielding on the computer issue was a huge mistake. A mistake, yes, but not a huge one. It's pretty clear that the defense strategy was to draw out the process as long as possible. If the prosecutors had insisted on sticking to the September hearing, it would have required postponing the indictment deadline again, since they'd need to give time for the defense to turn over the computers and for the FBI to analyze them, and then to figure out what what to do with the information. The defense holding back could have just been a ruse to get another extension. I personally think that once they became aware that the defense had the computers they should have put everything on hold until they got them, but Acosta was hell-bent on state charges and thought a deal would be easy. I think Acosta just figured that the indictment was ready to go and if they made a deal he'd be happy and if they had to indict there was plenty of time to get the computers. I don't think he wanted to delay things based on the speculation that there might be evidence of other crimes. It was a bad decision but it was understandable.
That's such a huge game changer, and should be painfully obvious to any prosecutor with experience. Possession of CP triggers all kinds of mandatory minimums that increase the prosecution's leverage by absurd amounts (federally, anyway. I don't know if Florida law has mandatory minimums for it). Even a 1% chance of the computers containing it dramatically changes the case, and it's a tiny mental stretch made by prosecutors every day to say, "hey, we're investigating this guy for sex crimes, perhaps he's a CP collector, too."
You could be right that his homemade videos at the time would be worthless in strengthening the case against him with regards to the known victims. But the chance of finding CP has had every prosecutor I've dealt with jumping at the chance to seize every single electronic device possible from suspects. Proving a hands-on offense with a victim with credibility and reliability issues is tricky; proving possession of CP doesn't have those problems. I don't have training materials from USAO from that era, but even in 2005, I have a hard time believing it wasn't common knowledge that finding CP on a suspect's computer was the "easy win" button.
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I think you could have a more charitable take where the government isn't sending a lot of resources and doesn't have a lot of leadership buy-in (because the crimes are ironically not very sexy, ultimately pretty small, and it is somewhat sketchy that it is federal at all) and the person they are prosecuting is throwing every last financial resource at it because he doesn't want 20 years in jail.
This can easily result in the prosecution being tired, busy, buried in paperwork with minimal resources and therefore forgetting things that now seem brain dead obvious.
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In our previous conversation, Rov dismissed my argument saying if there was a conspiracy, the entire DOJ would have to be in on it. Isn't arguing for this level of incompetence effectively arguing that no, you just have to get the guy on the top, and the rest of the apparatus will be happy to bumble along, no matter how absurd their decisions are?
There are many ways that Epstein would know about the investigation ahead of time. Given the entire high school knew, chances are one of the girls just told him long before police came knocking.
I'm not sure where you're going with that. That Epstein prepared himself by hiding / deleting evidence? Isn't Rov's point in this post that one way or the other, there was more than enough to lock him up, and it was only due to Acosta's poor judgement that he got off easy?
And again, what was his re-prosecution based on then, some decade later, with even less physical evidence, and witness testimony even more dubious? How was Maxwell sentenced for so long?
Or am I misunderstanding your argument, and you meant something else entirely?
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Just for the protocol: 4 weeks ago 2rafa effort-posted that it is very implausible that Epstein was propped up by Mossad or that Israeli Intelligence was using him to blackmail people:
https://www.themotte.org/post/2240/culture-war-roundup-for-the-week/345489?context=8#context
This is the polar opposite of an "effort-post;" this might actually be the Platonic ideal of "Reasoning From First Principles" being nothing more than Rationalists making wildly invalid assumptions, insisting they're the only logical position to have, and adamantly refusing to verify if the conclusions accurately reflect reality.
The notion that intelligence agencies would ever say "why bother, these guys are already in the bag?" is profoundly stupid; even if one's only experience with intelligence is exclusively through fiction, one would not say something so incredibly clueless, yet hewre we're holding it up as proof "Epstein was Intelligence" is tinfoil-hat territory?
For decades, some of the most successful (and aggressive) intelligence operations against the US are run by our allies; Japan, South Korea, France, Israel, and Taiwan in particular have consistently been labeled as tops threats by the U.S. National Counter Intelligence Center. Most of these efforts are focused on obtaining business, industrial, and technological secrets, but no small amount also goes into gauging just how sincere America's commitment is to our alliances. Anyone raising their hand and saying "why worry about blackmailing this rich and powerful man, he's already on our side?" would be quitely assigned to work nothing of any importance, with "advise" to their immediate supervisors to find any pretext to fire them, that wouldn't result in any problems.
Not if you wanted any chance of your intelligence operation working.
Again, "Reasoning From First Principles" being utter nonsense. Yeah, you'd like them to not do that, but if they're successful - and it is a known-fact that Epstein was named as a middleman for various African and Middle Eastern deals - you're gonna ignore that problem, until such time as you no longer can. "I can't believe X would do Y, because that would be stupid" should not ever be something that occurs to you.
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Personally, I am not unconvinced of the murder theory based on priors. Epstein's testimony wrt any clients of his would likely not have convinced any jury. I would basically have expected him to accuse everyone up to the pope and the holy spirit if it means that he got to spend another day in a courthouse instead of his cell.
He would only have been more than an inconvenience for his murderers if he had more evidence besides his testimony, such as videos of his clients abusing minors. But the way digital storage works makes it unlikely that he had a copy of that evidence on him when he died, and even more unlikely that it was the only copy.
That guy was obviously not stupid. Even if he literally had nobody whom he could trust (which I doubt), schemes to set up a dead man's switch are not that hard to set up. For the purpose of anyone which was blackmailing him, he could have set up any number of horcruxes, and killing him before you have found all of them would be fatal. Sending a letter to a random attorney with 1000$ of cash and instructions to forward an encrypted message (or the decryption key) to the media in case of your death is something which could work and will be very hard to find even if you are closely observing someone.
From a game theory perspective, this seems like a scenario where the best interests of both Epstein and any blackmailed high level government official would be to cooperate. If your opponent has the power to murder you (or even influence in what prison you end up), then cutting a deal with the prosecutor (which would likely not have greatly reduced your sentence) would have been a bad idea. And if there is a 20% chance that your blackmailer will be able to leak the dirt on his death, then offing them seems like a terrible risk. Much better to meet in the middle where he tells the prosecutor that only he fucked anyone, and then gets quietly moved to a facility where he does not face the risk of prison rape, and perhaps gets pardoned after a decade or so.
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Of course, if he was a full-time Mossad agent, then it is plausible that he did not have unfettered access to any incriminating video material, or anything incriminating Mossad. Killing him would then be a matter of tying up loose ends and avoiding embarrassing if unsubstantiated accusations.
I do not believe this theory for other reasons. It is not like supporting Israel is so icky in American politics that only someone who was blackmailed would possibly even consider it. Your average congressman is happy to vote in Israel's interest in exchange for AIPAC support. Running an underage sex ring would threaten this status quo (which is great for Israel) if it became public knowledge.
The risks/rewards would be different if it was an intelligence op by a country which the US generally hates, like Iran or North Korea. Blackmailing a dozen officials into being inexplicably reluctant with sanctions would be valuable, and if the op becomes public knowledge, the relations between the US and the country can hardly get much worse -- nobody is going to invade Iran over an underage sex blackmail ring.
Still, I think that any country who ran such an op would put someone more reliable than Epstein in charge.
To the lawyers in the audience: are random requests like this common? I realize direct anecdotes might be subject to confidentiality, but are these sorts of things heard of?
No. This is Frederick Forsyth novel stuff.
The most likely outcome from doing so would be that the weird letter would be reported to the police/fbi/whoever.
I would just keep the money and forward whatever they sent me to whoever the instructions said to send it to. More likely, I'd look at it and give the scoop to a local TV producer I know. That way, in addition to the big story, there will be a sub-drama of how a guy who mostly did sports stories for a station in Pittsburgh managed to break the story of the century.
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Thank you for this, it really explains what happened when at the time of the alleged "sweetheart deal". But the above makes me wonder - the initial girl (Jane Doe) was 15, yes? So if there is evidence (or at least accusations) that he got 15 year old girls to strip down to their underwear, 'massage' him while he was naked, and he used vibrators on them and/or jerked off in their presence, then paid them - surely that is something more than "well he did a little bit naughty in paying for a massage from an unlicensed person"?
I get that the girls weren't credible (all the dirt the defence dug up on them) and it really was 'he said/she said' but that only makes the computer evidence, if any, more urgent: get the computers, see if there are recordings of him doing what was claimed, or doing more.
If the state prosecution was slow-pedalling on all this because they weren't sure what they could charge him with, then the rest all falls into place, but I do have to ask why they were slow-pedalling at the start: naked man with semi-naked fifteen year olds and money changing hands is surely enough to bring a charge?
I agree that the Ken Starr/Bill Clinton connection is hilarious, and even more hilarious in this context: all the accusations that Trump is a paedophile (for true! proven!) and that this is why he's covering up the papers, and it could come out that Epstein got a soft punishment in Florida because of Clinton's influence 🤣
How much of what was admitted to was actually illegal at the time? It’s not illegal to show people your underwear, even if it will likely result in being asked to leave a public place- but had these girls went to Walmart like that they would have been charged with trespass, not a sexual performance or whatever. Masturbating in front of the girls and touching them with a vibrator might legitimately have been loopholes in the law- it’s entirely possible that the girl would have had to have touched his penis to trigger statutory.
Yeah, I can see the prosecution problem (is this prostitution? so are we gonna charge a 15 year old schoolgirl for being a prostitute? that's not gonna fly with the public) but it's also the kind of thing where if a father learns what some guy has been doing with his 15 year old daughter, at the very least someone's nose is gonna get broken.
Epstein was probably smart enough to get the kind of girls that were already into sex with boyfriends, even if underage, and drugs and the rest of it - that's why he used them to recruit other girls as in the Jane Doe anecdote. He wasn't out there debauching nice respectable girls by getting them drunk/high, he was targeting the kind of girls who were already colouring outside the lines, as it were. That's what gave his lawyers the edge in digging up dirt to discredit the victims and witnesses - after all, the girl had already tried to claim that the $300 was drug money, how could she be any kind of credible witness or complainant?
Still sleazy as hell, but it doesn't automatically mean he was running a literal paedophile ring. I think if he scoped out some potential partygoers were also interested in 14 and 15 year olds, he'd have been happy to hook them up (and record all the blackmail material) but I don't think he was doing that as a full-time service, too risky in the long run (as it turned out anyway). Plausible deniability would have been the name of the game: parties and events that were must-attend attractions for high society where he hosted attractive young women (the girls enticed in with promises of getting them started on modelling careers, and he had legit connections there with the Victoria's Secret CEO: "Epstein often attended Victoria's Secret fashion shows, and hosted the models at his New York City home, as well as helping aspiring models get work with the company") who may have been on the young side but were assumed to be of legal age, and if they were happy to be friendly with the attendees, and maybe if a pretty girl and a rich guy hit it off and they got intimate, well sex is no longer confined to marriage only and that's their own business, right?
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See also
I could go on with all the Florida statutes he could have been charged under, but I don't have all night.
827.04 Contributing to the delinquency of a minor seems to apply to dirty old men offering teenage girls cash for sex-adjacent acts.
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I'll preface this by saying that I don't have access to full transcripts of OPR interviews with the people from the State's Attorney's office, and while the grand jury transcripts have been released, I can't find anything specifying what charging options were presented. But my speculation based on what has been released is this: The State's Attorney was concerned about the ethical implications of charging Epstein with prostitution-related offenses without charging the prostitutes themselves. Krischer had previously charged girls as young as 14 with prostitution, but he clearly recognized that the girls here had been taken advantage of, and the office was uneasy about charging witnesses who came forward.
I think that more importantly, though, Epstein was already offered a misdemeanor plea he refused, and if he tried to nail his ass to the wall he'd be looking at a trial that would be a fucking mess. You mention credibility issues, but it's not just a matter of whether the jury believes the girls, but whether the jury believes they were abused. Remember, this was a time when the public was sneering at kids like this on a daily basis, as Maury Povich sending incorrigible teens off to boot camp was mainstream (if lowbrow) entertainment. It wasn't so much that a jury wouldn't believe what happened, but that they wouldn't be able to view the girls as victims. Adding to the problem, the case hinges on the girls testifying to all of this bad behavior in open court, and even if you can keep some of it out, the fact still remains that they have to admit to prostituting themselves, some on multiple occasions, and to recruiting other girls to do the same thing.
These days juries are much more sympathetic to the idea that kids in these kinds of situations often have serious problems, and it's easier to paint a guy like Epstein as someone who recognized how vulnerable they were and took advantage of them. But it wasn't clear yet in 2006. Federal prosecutions require a grand jury indictment, but in state court the normal procedure is to file an "information", which results in some kind of preliminary hearing in front of a judge to determine if there's probable cause to go to trial. Grand juries are only used in unusual situations; they can be investigative tools since witnesses can testify under subpoena, and they're often used for complicated cases involving organized crime, public corruption, etc. I think that the decision to take the Epstein case to the grand jury was a consequence of the State's Attorney's uncertainty about how a jury would react to the evidence, especially in the face of an aggressive defense. It would give them a chance to defer the charges to somebody else, rather than filing the charges police wanted them to file and taking the chance that the case would fall flat.
As I said, I don't know what charging options the grand jury was given, but for the sake of argument I'll assume that the charges the police were pushing for were among the options. After the transcripts were released last year, prosecutor Lanna Behlolovick was criticized extensively in the media for apparently sandbagging her case by only having two girls testify and bringing up all the bad behavior. I disagree with this assessment. I think she knew that the defense was going to bring it up at trial and she wanted to see how a jury would react. One difference between grand juries and trial juries is that grand jurors have the opportunity to question witnesses, and the questions asked by the grand jurors don't evidence much sympathy. Some of them made glib comments to that effect. This was especially the case when a detective presented the evidence of other girls who had been abused (hearsay is admissible in grand jury proceedings), and they weren't at any risk of offending the girls directly. If they were offered a full slate of charges but only indicted on the solicitation charge, it's evidence that the case was a loser. There's also evidence that the grand jury's unwillingness to indict factored into Acosta's decision to seek a pre-indictment plea, since a Federal jury wasn't likely to be any better on that front. Having immersed myself in this whole mess, it causes me to wonder what the public reaction would be now if Epstein had been charged with serious crimes but acquitted. Would this even be something we're talking about now?
Yeah, that was probably it. Same as with Rotherham - in some instances the police tended to go "well these are trashy little slappers anyway, how can you say they're being abused when they probably ran off with their older Indian/Pakistani boyfriend of their own free will?"
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Hey, I wanted to say thanks under our other Epstein conversation, but I'll do so here. I appreciate your correction on Acosta's alleged statement in particular, and taking the time for writing your response in general.
I don't know when I get the time to read through this one, but I'll try to go through the whole thing as well.
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Excellent deep dive. Probably mostly wasted, alas. I could have predicted the weak conspiratorial rebuttals. "Well...I just don't believe it. Because we know They're lying!" It's all unfalsifiable. You see exactly this same rejoinder to anyone who does a deep dive on JFK, or 9/11, or Elvis. "Okay, yeah, that's what the 'official reports' and the 'evidence' says, but of course we can't trust it."
There's always a They with unlimited evidence-manipulating powers.
Every narrative will have holes you can poke in it with enough motivated reasoning. Some people can cast doubt on the color of the sky. Once they become attached to a theory that properly identifies a nefarious They, nothing is going to convince them that reality is actually mostly tawdry and just what the evidence says it is.
I'm still sympathetic to the pro-conspiracy responses' general conclusion ("something weird is going on"), but what confuses me is how some attempt to defend that conclusion.
If it was strictly a matter of saying, "yes, Rov_Scam has reduced the apparent probability of there being a conspiracy by undermining some folk narratives, but there are still discrepancies x, y, z which may still outweigh the anti-conspiracy evidence" then I wouldn't be aghast at it (as someone who has absorbed the Epstein death conspiracies through osmosis I'm still on the fence about the security camera issues but don't feel confident staking out a position) but some of the responses almost sound like a parody of conspiratorial reasoning, taking it as a given that Epstein was murdered and then discounting evidence against it per the anticipated conclusion.
Exactly so.
Some "conspiracy theories" do turn out to be true, but you won't get there by reading the motivated and frequently unhinged takes from people who already made up their minds based on the players involved.
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Or Imane Khelif, oh wait, they were right about that one, let's pretend it never happened. Oh, how about the Lab Leak? What, it's gaining mainstream mainstream acceptance? Quick, pretend we were only deboonking the bio-weapon people!
It's not unlimited, but two cameras going out, and two guards taking a nap simultaneously, is pretty impressive, no?
It may suggest foul play rather than coincidence, but that foul play could more parsimoniously be "his lawyers bribed guards to let him commit suicide like he wanted" or similar. Murder is only the obvious theory if we accept the premise that Epstein was a prolific pimp with dirt on a metric ton of people in high places, and that is what OP's post pretty successfully disputes.
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Not really, no. Prison guards are not America’s best and brightest, are mostly on the take, and do not consider sex offenders worth protecting.
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If you can't see a qualitative difference in those theories, well, you make my case for me.
No.
It's a nice trick to pretend like I just cosigned the Elvis / JFK / Moon landing conspiracies, but it's dishonest.
You made an unqualified claim about conspiracy theories, if you want you want to qualify it now feel free. If not, at least don't misrepresent me.
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It's only impressive if the base rate is cameras have 99.999% uptime and guards never ever sleep through shifts.
What if cameras being in a general state of disrepair and guards routinely falsifying records because "they didn't see nothing"
is the norm and you generally never know because usually this huge gap in accountability never counts against, and in fact is to the benefit of the corrections officers?
No, at those odds it's not "impressive", it actually starts leaning towards "unlimited". Even, if the chances of each failure (either camera, or either guard) is as high as 50%, you end up with a ~93% chance of some part of the system catching the incident.
Now, you can argue that a 7% chance is nothing to scoff at, but aren't conspiracy theorists the ones being accused of picking the less likely option for ideological reasons?
Also if the rate of these incidents is so high in that prison, at some point you have to start questioning the decision of sending Epstein there to begin with.
What do you mean that prison? I'm certain they're all alike because they all have the same incentives.
Epstein is like the 1 in 10,000,000 prisoner that society didn't want to wind up dead in his prison cell with no surveillance.
That is an interesting question: to what extent is "suicide watch" in a prison actually taken seriously, versus as a rubber-stamped "well, we tried" box to feel better about ourselves without substantially changing things. It's a somewhat dark thought, but I guess not surprising.
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"Your conspiracy theory conflicts with these official reports" as if the official reports are some objective source of truth is such a weak argument. Giving a bone to the truth while slipping in falsehoods and lies is a staple of getting away with a cover-up to begin with, we would expect the official documents to conflict.
This is something especially true when it comes to sensitive matters. Half the point of an intelligence agency is spreading lies and misinformation! I don't believe there's much evidence linking him to being an intelligence agent, but it's not so easily dismissed either.
And when we have plenty of bold faced lies happening even now around Epstein, my trust is greatly diminished. Why are they lying about the "raw footage" that was clearly edited? Why did the Trump admin officials continually claim there was a list that they were gonna be releasing beforehand? Trump is claiming his letter to Epstein is fake, but there's tons of evidence that the birthday book is real and hes even had other birthday books done for him! It's a tradition!
He says he never wrote a picture in his life, meanwhile he would send off an autographed doodle every year for charity.
Why say he was never on Epstein's plane when we know he was on Epstein's plane?
They're lying and lying and lying. It seems like they're either innocent people trying to make themselves suspicious for ??? reasons, liars addicted to lying for the hell of it or there's something deeper going on.
Because people lie when you accuse them of something that makes them look bad. It's practically a universal response.
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Which of the statements I made above do you think are falsehoods?
Because Trump tells his base what he wants to hear and doesn't expect to have his feet held to the fire. He knew damn well all along that there wasn't any evidence that would satisfy whatever wild fantasies his base harbors, so he figured he could make empty promises and then forget about them when it came time to deliver. Except he hired morons like Pam Bondi who might actually be true believers and who like him don't know when to shut up, and all of the sudden people were actually expecting him to release stuff that would blow the case wide open, and the whole thing has turned into quicksand where the more Trump tries to wriggle out the deeper he sinks.
Honestly, I don't really give a shit about Trump's role in the whole thing. Believe me, there's nothing I'd like more than for his entire presidency to be destroyed, but I don't see any actual evidence of malfeasance. I think Trump has a reflex where he tries to automatically put as much distance between himself and anything he thinks will hurt him, to the point where he never stops to consider that there may be definitive contradictory evidence. Then again, maybe he just has a horrible memory. It was the same thing with the Billy Bush pussy tape, where he initially claimed to his staff that he wasn't worried about it because it never happened, and then the tape came out. This is a guy who said that of course he didn't rape E. Jean Carroll because she wasn't hot enough for him to be interested in, only to mistake her for his wife in a photograph. If you're going to ask me for a logical explanation of why Donald Trump or certain people in his administration do things, I don't have an answer for you.
I just don't extend that same level of skepticism to anything that came out before January of this year. Previous administrations, including the first Trump administration, seem to have been run, at least at the "deep state" level, by professionals who largely knew what they were doing. I don't have any reason to believe that the Justice Department Office of Professional Responsibility was, in 2019 and 2020, filled with partisan hacks looking to effect a coverup. I have no evidence that such is the case even now. I haven't seen any "official" evidence that contradicts any unofficial evidence of the same caliber. If you want to argue that something is incorrect, then I welcome your argument. But you can't just dismiss everything out of hand because you don't like the people in charge.
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I think it’s fair to question the official report, you just need to be clear about what it is you doubt and what evidence points to the conclusion.. If I think the ME is wrong about the hanging, I better be coming with statistics and medical evidence and so on.
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Because he stoked the flames of this conspiracy while campaigning, and his government is a mixture of incompetent true believers and cynical yes men.
Because Trump is a habitual liar and says whatever he thinks will benefit him.
The demand for such footage outstripped supply, so they embellished what they had. The "clearly edited" parts I've seen are the missing minute and file metadata indicating editing software involved, both of which could be irrelevant technical details of how the security system works and how the file was produced. Neither are definitive evidence of tampering. Of course, tampering is still possible even in a "Epstein wasn't murdered" world if They are sufficiently worried about the mob.
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Just as a linguistic aside, "bold-faced" lie is not incorrect according to some dictionaries but is probably the wrong word; the original is "bald-faced" (or the less common "barefaced") and meaning unconcealed, as opposed to "bold-faced" which meant impudent. It's been mutually confused for long enough that most won't call it wrong, but IMO it properly still is.
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I admire your willingness to deep dive. I mostly accept the government's account of the Epstein story because I'm a normalfag and also I'm not going to put in anywhere near the effort required (like you did) to form an opinion on this. There's just no alpha in trying to figure out what actually happened given the work involved, and absent that, going with the government's explanation is probably a good heuristic.
What can one learn about how to get away with serious crimes from this? Perhaps, obviously, hire extremely competent well-connected bulldog attorneys? Because actually the government kind of sucks, and leaves a lot of stones unturned, and exists in a political economy with finite resources and competing interests and you can make life extremely annoying for them?
A friend of mine, who did not have any money at all and had a public defender the whole time, eventually arranged for a work release from a county jail where he'd spend 12 hours a day at a strip club and smoked weed managing their web site for minimum wage. He was just really gregarious and met lots of people inside and outside of jail. So my assumption already is if you're not stupid and not utterly reprehensible you can make going to jail a lot more comfortable than you'd think from cop dramas.
Very little. This isn't about a man getting away with serious crimes, it is about the fact that elites don't consider sexual abuse of chavettes a serious crime. It's a nothingburger when well-connected celebrities do it, it's a nothingburger when Mirpuri Pakistani gangs do it, and it's a nothingburger when Mum's new boyfriend does it.
After the Acosta plea deal and Epstein's "release" from "jail", he returned to being a star of the Manhattan social scene despite everyone knowing he was a sex offender. Nobody who mattered cared - apparently Neri Oxman's female graduate students were upset at being drafted into being part of a dog-and-pony show being put on for Epstein as a major donor to the MIT media lab, but Oxman's boss expected her to shut them up with the normal tools used by senior academics to discipline junior ones, and she did.
Less true, he still knew a lot of powerful people but became more reclusive and increasingly met them only at his home after 2011. Maxwell and him also appear to have stopped being so close, she moved onto another relationship and other work. He mainly cultivated relationships with people outside the Manhattan social scene, tech people and academics.
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Did you read the effortpost? At this time Epstein's known victims were 18+ish girls who willingly sought him out to fuck him for money. He doesn't sound like a good person but I can see how it might be hard to get the legal system fully fired up over this. Seemed like the feds couldn't even convince themselves to get involved, understandably.
Also, third paragraph in my reply. My own friend was not a well-connected celebrity and had the softest jail experience imaginable. He was poor, but what he had going for him was that he was likable and not dysfunctionally insane and his crime didn't fit neatly into reprehensible crimes like murder or assault with a deadly weapon.
I think it is an error to believe the legal system will by default inflict the appropriate amount of suffering fit for a crime, especially if the accused has any shred of sympathy and resists at all levels and can pull the right strings.
I think people miss how foul tempered the vast majority of "real" criminals are. Half the patients I treated in prison felt entitled to call everyone a faggot then demand thirty different types of controlled substances. If you make at any attempt at all not to be a huge asshole than the system is extremely more likely than not to go extremely soft on you.
Sure - it isn't guaranteed too, but I met guys who committed incredibly heinous murders and because they were nice they were treated like they committed a white collar crime.
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Uh, the victim that originally came to the law’s attention was 15- everyone knew that epstein’s victims were younger than 18.
That being said, thé law doesn’t get too worked up about Randy the trucker’s activities with teenaged prostitutes either.
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I've only skimmed so far. If this is the case, what was his re-prosecution based on? How was Maxwell sentenced to 20 years? Was she railroaded?
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If the medical report is real and evidence-based. You can just write a fake medical report. You can just release fake documents, or misleading documents, or documents that lack the key facts. Official sources release fake documents all the time, there's no need to believe government data on potentially embarrassing topics like unemployment, military intelligence, espionage or whether politicians actually did commit a scandal. They can produce masses of evidence for why a policy has been a success, that doesn't make it a success.
I want to see camera footage of Epstein killing himself. If no such footage is provided, then it didn't happen. Footage of corridors is not a substitute. There's no excuse for 'oh we lost the camera footage, my bad'.
Having a camera or a guard or a cellmate or anything watching a high-profile prisoner (a prisoner so high-profile we are still talking about it today) is not an optional extra. The US is a rich enough country to have at least one prison cell with a camera that works.
What makes you so sure that Epstein is even dead? The whole hanging thing could have been the perfect ruse to get him out of the jail and never seen again, while all you rubes focus on conspiracy theories relating to his demise. That would make more sense than what everyone seems to be proposing.
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The prison system broadly does not give a shit about the lives of inmates, guards are mostly on the take, and having done prison maintenance before the standards are extremely low.
I think allowing Epstein to kill himself would have cost less than $30k- and thats taking into account New York being more expensive than Texas.
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There are two problems with that proposal.
One is privacy. Traditionally, prison was not a panopticon, and turning it into one would alter the character of a prison sentence. Of course, this privacy cuts both ways -- most guards would likely prefer not to watch prisoners jerk off in front of the camera.
Another is that while a prisoner is unlikely to disable a camera in the corridor, they could easily disable a camera in their cell. There is not a ton of stuff which you can legally do to coerce a prisoner who is already in solitary to stop them from smearing shit on the camera lens. (Sure, you could place a glass ceiling and have a movable camera above it, but that sounds really expensive.)
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Besides that, not allowing prisoners to kill themselves (easily) is SOP. Epstein should not have had the tools to hang himself. I am not very surprised that he had them, from the post it seems clear that his legal team was very resourceful, and prison guards are less vetted than CIA employees. If you have unlimited money, finding a prison guard who has a family member on which you have exclusive dirt or who is in the kind of trouble which could be solved with a quick 100k$ in cash is likely not all that hard.
However, a chewing gum to stick on the lens of the cell camera is not a very difficult item to smuggle in. If his guards were not in on his suicide, "camera in cell 5736 went dark" seems much a lot less likely to prompt an urgent response than "that guy in cell 5736 is hanging in an noose".
The only reason why Epstein would have left the camera running while killing himself would have been to make it public knowledge that his death was suicide. I do not think that he wanted that. He did not write any suicide letters (afaik), and his brother casting doubt on the circumstances of his death was likely acting in his best interests.
So in short, if there had been a camera in his cell, then both the suicide theory and the murder theory would predict that there was no usable footage of his death.
What if you conceal it in a mirror or somewhere non-obvious? Neither Epstein nor the average prisoner is a secret agent with bugfinding tools.
Another option is to put the camera in the hall outside positioned so it can see inside the cell.
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Yeah exactly, "your conspiracy theory conflicts with these official reports" as if the official reports are some objective source of truth is such a weak argument. Giving a bone to the truth while slipping in falsehoods and lies is a staple of getting away with a cover-up to begin with, we would expect the official documents to conflict.
This is something especially true when it comes to sensitive matters. Half the point of an intelligence agency is spreading lies and misinformation! I don't believe there's much evidence linking him to being an intelligence agent, but it's not so easily dismissed either.
And when we have plenty of bold faced lies happening even now around Epstein, my trust is greatly diminished.
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