The Root of the Epstein Saga is Elite Impunity
There's a lot we don't know about Jeffrey Epstein. But what we do know is that in America, powerful people often get away with it.
About a decade ago I was volunteering at an historic nonprofit outside Atlanta that serves the homeless and indigent population. I was on the Employment team, where my role was to help homeless and unemployed Georgians tailor their resumes and work through job applications to obtain gainful employment.
A client who I was serving had spent years of his life in prison and had just gotten out. He bought a bargain bin smartphone (a Windows phone, back when they still made those) to get Internet access that enabled him to apply for jobs.
He had a really hard time using it — when he had gone into prison, nobody had smartphones yet. But it turned out I had the same smartphone, so I was able to teach him how to use his device so he could use it to get work.
The experience of volunteering at MUST Ministries was in some ways more educational for me than anything I learned at the University of Georgia or Syracuse University, where I did my undergrad and graduate school, respectively.
It offered me a window into the lives of America’s poor that you don’t get from a textbook or seminar. One of my big takeaways from my months at MUST was that the poorest people in this country receive little in the way of mercy.
When they need a bailout from the federal government, they can’t hire an army of lobbyists to make their case (a Member of Congress once said something like this to me verbatim about why lawmakers could so easily cut food stamps or aid to the poor).
When they want to run for public office, they can’t count on generational wealth from their parents to keep them afloat.
When accused of misconduct or even a crime, they can’t surround themselves with publicists and lawyers to protect their image or keep them out of prison.
They can’t keep getting away with it, can they?
I think that last point is why public interest in billionaire tycoon Jeffrey Epstein remains so high six years after his death in a New York prison.
From the ubiquitous cries that “Epstein didn’t kill himself” to the anger at President Donald Trump for dismissing the calls for further disclosure about Epstein’s associates and ties to the global political and financial elite, it’s clear that the American public is convinced that something is terribly awry here.
Yes, there’s a lot we don’t know, and that means we can’t definitively conclude anything.
It’s not a crazy hypothesis to say that Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell were alone culpable for child sex trafficking and that the vast network of powerful people he had in his orbit was simply the consequence of being a very wealthy person who took pains to establish himself as a dilettante.
But it’s also not crazy to suspect that Epstein, who had deep ties to political and governmental figures at home and abroad, had shared some his perverse proclivities some of these VIPs. Because if he had, what are the chances that any of these people face any official sanction?
After all, one of the most remarkable things about the Epstein case was that he himself was caught and prosecuted at all.
Americans are right to suspect that we live in an age of elite impunity.
Recall that as millions of Americans lost their homes during the Great Recession and unemployment hovered at close to double-digit numbers, most of America’s banking elite went untouched by the Department of Justice. Former President Barack Obama said it would “have required a violence to the social order” to prosecute Wall Street banks or take tougher action against the financial elite. Obama had the same attitude about likely violations of domestic and international law by the Bush Administration, which authorized a torture program run by the Central Intelligence Agency; Obama counseled that it was wise to “look forward” rather than backwards at the crimes of his predecessor.
Donald Trump, too, seemed to have little interest in actually pursuing the criminal elite. He relished in his crowds chanting for the imprisonment of former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, who had failed to follow proper protocol when it came to information security. “Lock her up” chants may have helped elevate Trump to the White House, but once he got there he found himself with little interest in the topic. In February, Trump took this disinterest in elite crime even further when he signed an executive order that appears designed to limit prosecutions under the Foreign Corrupt Practices Act. If you’re in line to bribe a foreign government to do your bidding, stay in line. The administration is making it much more difficult to prosecute you.
So when people in Trump’s orbit insinuated or outright stated that they would get to the bottom of the Epstein saga — that they’d expose the vast list of powerful people who had been part of the late billionaire’s child sex trafficking ring — many Americans felt hope for the first time. Here was an outsider — a businessman not a politician — who was ready to expose the elite for who they really were.
But Trump’s 180 on the issue this month suggests that the president did one of two things. Either Trump and his elite coalition spent years affirming his base’s belief that there was a coverup in the Epstein case when no such coverup existed or the coverup is very real and they are the ones overseeing it now.
“He can’t just keep getting away with this,” Jesse Pinkman pleaded in the television show Breaking Bad, making meme history by decrying the lawless behavior of antihero Walter White. The problem, in America, is that elites often do get away with just about anything they want. If you’re a billionaire CEO, general, head of an intelligence agency, or U.S. President, the rules just don’t apply to you the same way they would anyone else.
Whatever the literal truth is in the Epstein saga, the reason so many Americans distrust the official narrative — including many in Trump’s base, which risks toppling his political coalition — is because their intuition about elite impunity is directionally correct.
Maybe Epstein wasn’t a Mossad spy who blackmailed dozens of politicians and billionaires through the use of horrific child trafficking.
But the problem is, people with lots of money or lots of political power regularly do things just as awful, and they get away with it. Until that changes, you can hardly blame people for believing in conspiracy theories. Or conspiracy facts.
On a more optimistic note, I have a piece this week in New Lines Magazine chronicling the sweeping social and political changes taking place in my state of Georgia — where a massive transformation is underway. The piece was the result of a year-long fellowship I did with New America. I collected so much material I could’ve written a book, but I hope that I was able to capture the zeitgeist here well enough for readers. It’s a rosy story about how conservatives and liberals, urbanists and traditionalists, blacks and whites, are coming together to build a state that is neither progressive nor reactionary but something else altogether. Read the whole piece here.
This is good.
But the net-net of this situation reminds me of Geraldo and Al Capone's vault.
Remember all the hype?
And it was all a big nada. .... Nothing Nyet.
The shameless bipartisan lawlessness at the highest level of our government and justice system allow foreign and/or domestic bribery and blackmail operations like Epstein's to flourish. It is ironic that the unfortunate antisemitic resentment some American citizens might feel when they witness Israel blackmailing and/or bribing their 'representatives' is used by Israel to justify its existence. It is also the perfect environment for creatures like Trump to thrive and grow to the delight of genocidal wack jobs like his top donors.