"At the end of January, President Trump’s Justice Department released what it said was the last tranche of the Jeffrey Epstein files: millions of emails and texts, F.B.I. documents and court records.
It’s a huge dump of information. Journalists, investigators and the public are sifting through them. What’s amazing, though, is how much we still don’t know — or at least don’t know yet.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who was Trump’s personal lawyer before he joined the Justice Department, has said that investigators identified six million “potentially responsive” pages but released only about three and a half million pages to the public. So what’s in the two and a half million pages that haven’t been released?...
What has come into clear view is the infrastructure of Epstein’s power — and maybe through that the infrastructure of elite networks more generally.
Anand Giridharadas is a journalist who has written for The New York Times, The New Yorker and many other outlets. He publishes the great newsletter The.Ink and is the author of, among other books, “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World,” which he published in 2018, and the forthcoming “Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle and Belonging in an American City.”
I often think of his work as a kind of sociology of American elites and power, and that has been the perspective he has brought to his coverage of these files. I think it is revelatory and worth hearing.
Note: This conversation was recorded on Tuesday, Feb. 10. On Thursday, Feb. 12, Kathryn Ruemmler announced she would be resigning from her role as chief legal officer and general counsel at Goldman Sachs."
