The Rise of the Epstein Democrat
In February, 2019, the Democrat-led House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform organized a hearing with a star witness they thought would shine a light on the sprawling nexus of scandal engulfing Donald Trump’s first Administration. That witness was Michael Cohen, Trump’s former fixer, who had already pleaded guilty to orchestrating hush-money payments to two women with whom Trump had allegedly had affairs, and to misleading Congress about the extent of Trump’s involvement in talks to erect a building in Moscow with his name on it. Democratic leaders were wary of treading on the toes of Robert Mueller, the special counsel investigating Trump’s ties to Russia, but nonetheless hoped that Cohen’s testimony would be Watergate-level explosive. In the end, Cohen did not come armed with hard proof of Russian collusion but did present documentation linking Trump directly to the hush-money payments. Ro Khanna, a Democratic member of the committee, described this as a “smoking gun,” one that demonstrated Trump was, at minimum, guilty of “garden-variety financial fraud.”
At the hearing, Khanna was seated next to Stacey Plaskett, a non-voting Democratic delegate from the U.S. Virgin Islands; when it was her turn to question Cohen, she asked which other former Trump staffers the committee should haul in. Plaskett took input on that line of inquiry from Jeffrey Epstein—the financier who had been convicted of soliciting sex from a minor a decade before—with whom she was texting during the hearing. “Hes opened the door to questions re who are the other henchmen at trump org,” Epstein wrote, of Cohen. He also told Plaskett, “You look great.” Within months, Epstein would be dead in jail, following his arrest on charges of prolific child sex trafficking. That we now know about his exchanges with Plaskett is thanks to the Oversight Committee, which, last year, released tranches of files that it procured from Epstein’s estate. Meanwhile, Khanna worked with the gadfly Republican congressman Thomas Massie on a bill that would force Trump’s second-term Justice Department to make public all the Epstein documents in its possession, with minimal redactions. Trump—who had a long, if not provably criminal, relationship with Epstein and spent last summer railing against Democrats for perpetuating an Epstein “hoax”—finally caved, signing the measure into law. (The D.O.J. was later accused of withholding, before eventually posting, pages detailing allegations that Trump himself sexually abused a minor in the eighties, a claim that he has vehemently denied. Plaskett, for her part, has acknowledged that texting with Epstein was a “bad idea” but argued that, as a former prosecutor, she has “learned to receive information from sources I do not like to obtain information that helps me get to the truth.”)
The contents of the files have embarrassed Democrats as much as Republicans; in addition to Plaskett, they have cast a deeply unflattering (if, again, not necessarily criminal) light on the behavior of Bill Clinton, in addition to other former officials, aides, and donors. Khanna’s centrality to such a crusade isn’t a surprise, if only because of his career-long commitment to idiosyncrasy: he is a Bernie Sanders acolyte who represents Silicon Valley in Congress and has been described as an “ambassador” for the tech industry; J. D. Vance and Steve Bannon have praised him (even if Vance sometimes finds him “very annoying”); he preaches bipartisanship, then practices it—not by building consensus around managerial centrism, per the stultifying Beltway credo, but by allying with hard-core right-wing ideologues, including, on the Epstein files, the likes of Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Khanna would perhaps be the candidate most likely to win the 2028 Democratic Presidential primary, for which he definitely seems to be preparing himself, if only MAGA Republicans could vote in it. (Recently, he called for the assembly of a populist coalition of left and right, and Greene tentatively endorsed the idea.) He has said that there are “two different frames for me”—progressive coalition-builder or rank opportunist—proving that he is both politically unusual and unusually savvy about how he is portrayed in the media, where he is, as the old saw goes, unavoidable for comment.
What I do find surprising is how unifying a rallying cry “Release the Epstein files!” has become across Khanna’s party. Epstein’s crimes have long provoked bipartisan disgust, but their revival as a political concern in the second Trump Administration was initiated by right-wing conspiracy theorists adjacent to, if not soaked in, the broader QAnon belief that a cabal of liberal pedophiles controls the world. By the time Khanna and Massie’s bill came up for a vote, in November, only a single member of Congress voted against it, citing concerns about due process—and that was Representative Clay Higgins, a hard-right Republican. Earlier this year, nine Democrats on the Oversight Committee voted to recommend holding Clinton in criminal contempt of Congress as part of a push to question him about Epstein, and three likewise voted to do so for Hillary Clinton, even though she has no direct link to Epstein. (Khanna was not among the nine or the three; both Clintons avoided contempt proceedings by agreeing to be deposed in late February.) When Pam Bondi was ousted as Attorney General, top Democrats cited her mishandling of the files as among their primary grievances with her tenure, giving it comparable prominence to her (much more pressing) vengeance campaign against Trump’s perceived enemies. If the President’s Epstein stonewalling initially enraged his base, the issue is arguably now more animating for Democrats than for Republicans.
Khanna told me that Democratic voters are indeed animated by the plight of Epstein’s survivors, but, more than anything, he characterized his focus on the files as a matter of reaching across the aisle, calling it “the first time since Donald Trump came down the escalator that we actually engaged with the MAGA base about their frustrations and anger at the system, and said, ‘We want to partner with you instead of shaming you.’ ” Whatever the issue’s current valence among the electorate, that so many high-ranking Democrats have taken it up hints at a profound, if not yet fully realized, break with the Party’s politics dating back to that escalator ride, and perhaps further still. “For the past fifteen, twenty years, Democrats have become the party of protecting institutions, and standing up for the rule of law, and arguing for everyone to get a fair trial, for the legal system to work its process,” Caitlin Legacki, a Democratic strategist who served as a senior adviser to Gina Raimondo, Joe Biden’s Commerce Secretary, told me. Legacki has been struck by “the extent to which Democrats have been willing to embrace the idea that, if the American people wanna see the files, show ’em the files.”
For Legacki, this approach carries a “huge risk”—of spewing out uncorroborated information, or tarring people with guilt by association—that is “a major departure from how politics in the U.S. has often operated” and also reflects “a breakdown of trust in institutions, on both sides.” I agree entirely. Given the scale of Epstein’s crimes, highlighting due-process concerns can feel small-bore, or even like apologism. Yet they are important not only to the Epstein saga itself but to a much bigger, and still unresolved, debate over the direction of the Democratic Party, which has traditionally been seen as defending the institutions that Trump has trashed. “I flipped the script,” Khanna told me. But what does the new script say? And what if portions of the old one are worth keeping?
When the Epstein story flared last summer, there was nothing inevitable about the script flipping. Khanna told me that colleagues had warned him he would undermine his “serious brand” as an economic wonk by tying himself to a “crackpot” conspiracy theory; one anonymous lawmaker complained to Axios that “this whole thing is just such bulls**t.” The Democratic National Committee and Hakeem Jeffries, the House Minority Leader, marshalled Epstein as a talking point, but in terms that left open the possibility that there was no grand conspiracy afoot and that Trump and his allies were merely reaping baseless nonsense they long ago sowed. Many Democrats initially dismissed what they saw as “QAnon nutty theories,” even as they recognized that they “really tripped up Republicans on their own stuff,” Paul Mitchell, a Democratic data consultant, told me. At the time, he likened Democrats harping on Epstein to the N.B.A. tactic of fouling Shaquille O’Neal because he struggled to score free throws—effective, perhaps, but a little unsavory.
For years, Democratic leaders had seemed wedded to procedural responses to Trump, and to the ideal that nobody is above the law, embodied most visibly by the Mueller probe, then Trump’s impeachments, then the criminal cases he faced after leaving office. During the first Trump term, the Democratic base thought of Mueller almost as a matinée idol—the ramrod-straight lawman come to restore order—and fans of Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg put her face on tote bags. Does the fact that none of this was effective—at least in the sense that Trump hasn’t been driven from the political scene for good—suggest that Democrats should now fight dirtier? With the midterms approaching, certain primaries have reflected broader debates about whether the Party might consider cursing more, capitalizing tweets, going Dark Woke. In Texas, James Talarico, an almost cartoonishly pious seminarian, defeated Jasmine Crockett, a Congresswoman whose many controversies have included calling Greene “butch” and ejecting a reporter from a rally for, per a member of her staff, being “a top-notch hater.” In Maine, Graham Platner, a rough-hewn populist who had to cover up a Nazi tattoo, looks set to handily beat Janet Mills, the polished seventy-eight-year-old incumbent governor. (Platner has said that he did not know about the tattoo’s Nazi associations when he got it.)
Epstein is hardly the only issue that these and other Democrats are talking about. But the story line has become unusually sticky—a noteworthy feat under a President who floods the zone with so many outrages that it can sometimes be hard to remember last week’s scandals. (Even Trump’s genocidal threats against Iran didn’t wipe Epstein from the news cycle for long—and not just thanks to Melania Trump’s apropos of nothing-to-hide-with-regard-to-Jeffrey-Epstein press conference.) More notable still, perhaps, is the fact that calling for the release of the Epstein files has seemed to cut across the myriad divisions rending the Democratic Party. Crockett, who serves on the Oversight Committee, has been a vigorous inquisitor regarding Trump’s ties to Epstein, sparring memorably with Bondi on the matter, and warning the President that “we are going to be on his ass.” Even the mild-mannered Talarico has said that QAnon got “one big thing” wrong—the belief that Trump would dismantle “this secret pedophile ring when he’s right in the middle of it.” When the Oversight Committee deposed Hillary Clinton, she cast her subpoena as part of a D.O.J. coverup, saying, “I would like to know, like every other American deserves to know, what is in those files.” Asked whether she thought Epstein might have been a spy, she said that she didn’t know, but that it’s “absolutely essential” the committee find out.
It is possible to see the Party’s Epstein energy as less of a script-flipping than a natural evolution. Some Democrats I interviewed, including Pat Dennis, the president of the Democratic super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, insisted that they’ve been concerned about Epstein for years; Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, has claimed that he pushed for the release of the files in 2019, following Epstein’s arrest. (Though the “Epstein files” didn’t really exist as a unified political concept back then, Schumer did call for clarity with respect to Epstein’s lenient 2008 prosecution—and gave away sums that Epstein had donated to his past campaigns.) More broadly, Democrats’ current Epstein rhetoric could be said to echo the righteous fury that they expressed at the height of the #MeToo movement, during Trump’s first term. Less charitable observers, especially on the right, might cast it as the latest iteration of a years-long effort to smear Trump. (Schumer and others have certainly used the story to troll the President, calling him “Epstein Don” and asking, for instance, whether Epstein was “THE REAL REASON TRUMP HAD KIMMEL CANCELED?!,” exemplifying the extraordinarily annoying Democratic tic of interpreting everything Trump does as an attempt to distract from the files.) Dennis pointed out to me that the “cliché Resistance libs” who seized on the Mueller story are now seizing on the Epstein story, because they tend to “glom on” to whatever is prominently in the news.
I think that there are elements of truth to all these views. But, as the story has developed, the Democratic response has increasingly suggested less patience for the process-oriented guardrails of Trump 1.0. Mitchell told me that, once the files started to be released, lawmakers who might initially have been reluctant to take up the issue were, “like, ‘Wait, what?!’ ” (“I don’t know if this is a never-ending buffet of crime and pedophilia,” Mitchell added. “But it is something that Democrats are looking at and realizing that there’s just a lot more there than they ever expected.”) Recently, Democrats in Congress helped to force the resignation of the California representative Eric Swalwell, just days after he was accused of raping a staffer (a claim he denies)—an outcome that they likely would have sought prior to this Epstein moment but not, perhaps, with such lightning speed, and without waiting for the House Committee on Ethics or a court to weigh in first. In the aftermath of Swalwell’s departure, Summer Lee, a progressive congresswoman, told the Intercept that the Epstein story has exposed how deeply the existing mechanisms for seeking justice “are failing us—all while protecting perpetrators with money, connections, or status. That legacy demands more from all of us right now.”
The liberal discourse that surrounded the Mueller probe was hardly free of the conspiratorial or the crude—I’m sorry to have to bring the alleged Trump pee tape back to your attention—but the probe itself, and Democrats’ faith in it, was broadly rooted in the idea that the legal system could hold Trump to account. If those were the days of Mueller as matinée idol, what I and others liked to call the Mueller-industrial complex of legal pundits filled the prime-time hours by nerding out over D.O.J. arcana and prosecutorial procedure.
Mueller veneration—and the wider invocation of “norms” that defined this era of liberal commentary—was often toe-curling, and turned out to be naïve. But norms themselves aren’t all bad, and, as the Epstein-files story has unfolded, I’ve fretted about those which have been overridden: most centrally, the standard D.O.J. aversion to publishing millions of scarcely vetted documents in which the vast majority of people named haven’t been charged with a crime, and are, in many cases, victims, witnesses, or bystanders. The risks of this—in a case linked inextricably to fantastical thinking, in a country with a political-violence problem—have always seemed obvious to me, and being concerned about them doesn’t have to mean making excuses for the very rich people whose stomach-churning (if, again, mostly noncriminal) conduct has been exposed. Democracies have other ways of holding such people to account. Good journalism, for starters, involves careful vetting, and has been a prime mover of the wider Epstein saga.
Even if you believe, as I do, that cheering on this sort of mass disclosure of sensitive material represents a quietly radical break from the Democrats’ Mueller-era posture, it would be wrong to say that the Party has abandoned proceduralism altogether, including in its Epstein-files push. At least one progressive strategist believes that, on Epstein, the Party has been overly process-oriented, and it’s true that the Oversight Committee, a body that trades in hearings and depositions, has become the hub of the action. Lee, the progressive congresswoman, serves on that committee, where she was one of the three Democrats to recommend holding Hillary Clinton in contempt. She has cast this vote in institutionalist terms, arguing that she was seeking to protect the legitimacy of the committee’s subpoena power, even if this particular subpoena was an example of G.O.P. “weaponization.” Khanna has argued that he doesn’t generally support changing D.O.J. norms surrounding disclosure and sees the Epstein case as a unique exception.
But Khanna’s reasoning—essentially, that the intense public interest in the files demands transparency and that the American public can be trusted to be judicious with unverified claims therein—is not very convincing. If anything, great public pressure being brought to bear is a terrible reason to dispense with due-process protections designed to protect the legal rights of individuals, and crafting one exception would seem to create a precedent for crafting others. Khanna put to me a somewhat stronger argument: that, in this case, the demand for disclosure had to work its way through the legislative process. “That’s the check,” he said. “It’s very, very, very hard to pass a law.”
This is true, now more than ever, but even a sclerotic Congress is susceptible to public passions. The release of the Epstein files hasn’t yet led anyone to, say, take a gun into a D.C.-area pizza parlor to confront a Clinton-led pedophile ring, but it has inevitably fanned conspiracies online (some of them very pizza-y) and exposed information that should clearly have remained private, including explicit images, and details identifying both survivors who’d wished to remain anonymous and incarcerated people who apparently coöperated with federal prosecutors. The D.O.J. was required by Khanna and Massie’s law to protect victims’ privacy, and the department is, of course, primarily responsible for failures to do so. And yet, at least as a practical matter, the tight timeline that the law imposed on the D.O.J., and that body’s manifest Trump-era incompetence, made such errors utterly foreseeable. In February, Khanna went on the House floor and named six supposed co-conspirators of Epstein’s whose identities, he felt, had wrongly been redacted in the files. The Guardian subsequently reported that four of the men had no connection to Epstein’s case whatsoever, beyond having appeared in a photo lineup. Khanna has maintained that a D.O.J. mistake was to blame, though he thanked the Guardian for pointing out his error, and stressed that he quickly corrected himself online. (More recently, he concluded that “you don’t want members of Congress just naming people in the Epstein files without any context.”)
Khanna has said that he doesn’t “want pitchforks”—not “even against people who are billionaires”—and, over all, it’s untenable to characterize the release of the Epstein files as a witch hunt, owing to the very real grotesqueries therein. And more may yet emerge: although the D.O.J. has put out millions of files, Khanna and his colleagues have accused it of withholding, or excessively redacting, millions more. (This week, the department’s inspector general said that it was reviewing whether the law had been followed.) At least for now, however, it’s possible to reach several conclusions simultaneously: that the number of powerful people whom the files have painted in a bad light is shockingly high; that the odds of criminal accountability for most of those people currently seem slim; that the available files don’t offer proof of a widespread child-sex-trafficking conspiracy in any case; and that using them to make broad claims about predation by élites is a clear example of availability bias, given that the vast majority of powerful people aren’t meaningfully implicated in them. Much Democratic rhetoric has elided the nuances of these concurrent truths. This, too, represents an intriguing shift in the Party’s Trump-era approach—even if this one might not be as radical as it first appears.
For certain Democrats, the Epstein saga has long been a way into talking about other topics, or at least to reëstablishing the trust needed to earn a hearing. Khanna has said that the Epstein-files story is symbolic of a rigged system that people are furious about and that Democrats won’t be able to use government to execute their priorities—in Khanna’s case, a vision of renewal that he has defined, variously, as “progressive capitalism” and “economic patriotism”—until they acknowledge that anger. Indeed, he claimed, last summer, that the Epstein files constituted “the beginning of the rebirth of the Democratic Party as a populist party.” More recently, he and others have started talking about an “Epstein class.”
This is a pithy label, but what exactly it invokes is unclear or, at least, mutable; at times, it seems to blur into the idea of the élite, writ large, and yet Khanna has specified that it refers only to a subsection that has engaged in “heinous” acts. Political shorthand needn’t always be precise to be resonant, but the stakes for Khanna’s politics, in particular, feel significant, given that he represents Silicon Valley. He has recently drawn an apparently billionaire-backed primary challenge after supporting a wealth tax, but since his election, in 2016, he has attempted to build bridges between tech tycoons and the disenfranchised working class in the name of wealth creation and rejected the progressive slogan that “every billionaire is a policy failure.” Khanna told me, “If you are a business leader . . . committed to the rebuilding of America, to investment in the working class, then we want you on our side.” But if you are “extracting” wealth, and using the resultant power and status to evade justice, then “we need to call you out.”
Many billionaires who are extracting wealth, however, do not appear in the Epstein files, and the implication that they might be part of an Epstein “class” strikes me, perversely, as both an unfair taint and somehow letting them off the hook; the files certainly do demonstrate élite impunity, but, at some point, focussing on them risks putting a face on corruption that is cartoonishly, personally evil, rather than structural. The Epstein-files story gaining purchase across the ideological breadth of the Democratic Party may represent a departure, but its embrace by even corporate Democrats suggests that, as a populist rallying cry, it may only be inch-deep. Objecting to the invocation of an “Epstein class” can feel dissatisfyingly close to crying, “Not all billionaires!” But what if it’s an impediment to a more substantive message for the Democratic Party: “Yes, all billionaires!”?
Last year, before the Epstein-files story blew up, Khanna wrote that the country was at a “fork in the road.” The Democrats, he continued, would need to offer transformational change or watch it “continue to succumb to a burn-it-all-down political nihilism.” Perhaps the latter must be indulged a bit to build a platform for the former—forests sometimes need to burn in order to thrive. But what happens if the Epstein-files story razes the entire forest, torching whatever trust is left in the political establishment, the Democratic Party very much included? Releasing the files, at least, is not a burn any politician can control. The idea that transparency offers a route to closure is already proving illusory. If it no longer feels quite right to refer to the Epstein-files story as a conspiracy theory, given what the documents have revealed, it remains of that world in the sense that, whatever new truths are unveiled, those who go down the rabbit hole will always be tempted to go further.
Perhaps the most consequential conundrum for Democrats is the one Legacki mentioned to me: that the wider Democratic interest in the Epstein-files story appears, in part, to channel liberal voters’ disenchantment with the institutions that not only failed to protect Epstein’s victims but didn’t act as a brake on Trump, either. Voters of both parties “don’t trust the processes we have for accountability,” Lee, the progressive congresswoman, told me. “The American people do not think that our institutions, our leaders, can be self-governing. I don’t think that they’re wrong.” Some Democrats doubtless see this moment as an opportunity to put tired, ultimately ineffectual talk of “norms” and “democracy” behind them; those more minded to rebuild institutions on the scorched earth of Trumpism are already having to reckon with the fact that a return to normalcy doesn’t seem possible and that much of their base may not want it anyway. Mitchell, the data consultant, told me that, in some ways, the Epstein-files story “rhymes” with last year’s redistricting initiative in California, in which Mitchell played a central role. Initially, liberal voters weren’t expected to approve the suspension of anti-gerrymandering rules as a means of countering the G.O.P.’s dirty tricks in other states; in the end, the suspension easily won. (This week, voters in Virginia approved a similar measure, though the margin was finer.) It’s an “open question,” Mitchell said, whether Democrats will “return to our better angels” upon eventually regaining power or “instead say, basically, for lack of a better term, ‘fuck this.’ ”
For now, nothing is settled, and the Party hasn’t totally shed its old skin. In anticipation of regaining the House in the midterms, lawmakers on the Oversight Committee, for example, are preparing to intensify probes regarding not only Epstein—they plan, for one, to call in Trump, claiming that the recent Bill Clinton subpoena set a new precedent with respect to Presidential testimony—but other aspects of Trump’s corruption that would sound more familiar to those who followed the battles of his first term.
Last month, Khanna appeared on the radio show “The Breakfast Club,” where he was asked what he considered to be the bigger failure of Merrick Garland, who served as Biden’s Attorney General: not prioritizing the Epstein files or not successfully prosecuting Trump. Without hesitation, Khanna picked the latter, then said that Kamala Harris would have been more effective as Attorney General, citing her fierce committee appearances as a senator during Trump’s first term. “When we get power again, I’m all for reconciliation, I’m all for bringing the country together, but we cannot move on without accountability,” Khanna said. He listed people who will need to be prosecuted: the agents who killed Alex Pretti in Minnesota, the DOGE wrecking crew, officials who committed war crimes. And, he added, “the Epstein class.” ♦