Listen to What Next:

Copy Link Share Share Comment

David Enrich’s whole life right now is the Epstein files. As an investigations editor at the New York Times, his phone and computer basically explode whenever new files are released.
Last Friday, his phone exploded again when the Department of Justice dropped about 3 million pages of documents into the cloud.

Back in November, Democrats and Republicans worked together to force the DOJ to release all they’d discovered about Jeffrey Epstein—the country’s most notorious sex criminal and probably one of the richest, too. With this latest release, the DOJ says it has satisfied that demand. But it’s not even all they’ve got.

The Times built its own internal search engine to sort through the sludge. It doesn’t just search for specific words; you can ask it to search for concepts like bribery. And these documents aren’t just emails about President Donald Trump, or giddy vacation planning for rich folks hoping to hop a ride to Epstein’s infamous island. There are photos and videos, even bank records.

On a recent episode of What Next, host Mary Harris spoke to Enrich about the latest Epstein file drop and what it says about Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Donald Trump. This transcript has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Mary Harris: Before we dig into exactly what’s in the file and what it says, what does the sheer volume of what’s been released tell you? 

David Enrich: I don’t have much confidence in the government. I don’t have much sense that the majority of this stuff has been read thoroughly.

When these files were released, a number of things seemed to have been released by mistake. The implication of that is that they didn’t know exactly what they were releasing. But it’s also really awful stuff. Pictures of women and young girls without any kind of redaction. They’re identifiable, nude. Very upsetting, essentially. And your team was part of the team that found that, right?

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

Advertisement

This has been a real mess by the government. The argument they make is that they only had two months to pull this stuff together because the Epstein Files Transparency Act was passed and signed into law in November, with a December deadline. But the truth is that Trump came into office saying he was going to be transparent about this and release the files, and they made a series of choices and decisions not to do that, which I think were based in part on their gradual understanding of the fact that what was in these may be damaging to Trump or his allies.

So they then entered this frenzied period, starting in November, and did not do a good job. There are a huge number of things in there that are identifying victims, a number of files that have a high likelihood of being child sexual abuse material, and all sorts of other damaging stuff that serves no public interest and was not, in fact, required by law to be disclosed. What they’ve done is all these haphazard redactions, redacting a bunch of things they’re not supposed to redact. We found that Steve Bannon had texted Epstein, and Epstein’s name was redacted, and Trump’s face was redacted. And it’s like, why on earth would that stuff be redacted? At the same time, we’re seeing victims’ names identified.

........

© Slate