Expert nails down 'the great mystery' at the center of the Epstein scandal

In late January, the U.S. Department of Justice (DOJ) released 3 million more documents pertaining to its investigation of the late Jeffrey Epstein. Yet many questions about the billionaire financier's crimes remain unanswered.

Journalist Anand Giridharadas discussed the Epstein scandal during an appearance on a New York Times podcast hosted by Ezra Klein and posted early Friday morning, February 13. During the interview, Giridharadas and Klein stressed that the DOJ files publicly released so far show how far-reaching Epstein's criminal network was.

Giridharadas told Klein, "There's that proverb 'It takes a village to raise a child.' I think we've learned that it takes a very powerful network to abuse so many children. We're getting a glimpse of an absolutely barbaric…. scandal at the heart of Jeffrey Epstein's life and intimate circles. But also, I would think about his many concentric circles of networks, connections, friends — what Congressman Ro Khanna calls an Epstein class — one could say that made what he did possible. We're getting a glimpse of how our world — how our country — is run, and it isn’t pretty."

Klein noted that the "range of Jeffrey Epstein’s elite network," pointing out that Epstein knew everyone from President Donald Trump and "War Room" host Steve Bannon to Tesla/Space X leader Elon Musk to leftist author Noam Chomsky.

Klein asked Giridharadas, "How is this one guy at the center of so many different kinds of people?" — to which he responded, "This is the great mystery. I think because we live in such a partisan and tribal age, when these things started to come out, a lot of us did what we normally do in this era, which is looking for revelations that would help our team and hurt the other team. There were a lot of people looking for the Trump connection who don't like Trump, and there were people on the Republican and MAGA side trying to find which Democrats were implicated."

Giridharadas continued, "But that's such a facile way of looking at what we've ended up getting, which is, as you say, coast to coast, industry to industry, right to left — as far left as you can go, as far right as you can go — different professions, different ways of moving through the world, some famous, some obscure."