Barry Levine
This article has been updated to include new information about President Trump’s knowledge of whether his name appeared in the F.B.I.’s files on Jeffrey Epstein.President Trump and members of his administration teased us with the prospect of making public Jeffrey Epstein’s F.B.I. files. Instead, we got zilch.
Mr. Trump then ordered the Department of Justice to seek the release of some grand jury testimony — a request that a federal judge in Florida denied on Wednesday. But even that information, though it might have filled in some gaps in the Epstein story, would have been only a sliver of what’s in the F.B.I. files — which include a mind-boggling “300 gigabytes of data and physical evidence,” according to the Department of Justice and the F.B.I.
The American people — and above all, the victims of Mr. Epstein’s crimes — deserve answers to outstanding questions about how he operated, with whose help and in whose service. With the exception of redactions required to protect the innocent and materials that must be withheld while under court seal, the complete F.B.I. files should be released.
Here are nine unanswered questions about the Epstein case — ones that a curious, non-conspiracy-minded citizen might have — that the files might help answer:
No. 1: How did Mr. Epstein make his money, and how did he finance his sex trafficking over two decades?
At the time of Mr. Epstein’s death in 2019, his estate was worth an estimated $600 million. He worked briefly on Wall Street and built his wealth with the help of several billionaires, including the L Brands founder Leslie Wexner and the Apollo Global Management co-founder Leon Black, for whom Mr. Epstein provided consulting, tax advice and other financial services. But it’s still not clear how Mr. Epstein amassed such a large fortune — or how he was able to fund such a complex trafficking scheme.
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