Morning Wire - Epstein Documents Unsealed | 1.7.24

Episode Date: January 7, 2024

Several new batches of court records providing the names of prominent people who had close associations with Jeffrey Epstein have been made public. We speak to the people who fought for the release of the documents and what we learned from them. Get the facts first on Morning Wire. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

A new trove of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein's underage sex trafficking operation have now been unsealed. But some critics say authorities have been carefully managing this case to ensure the public isn't given a complete picture of his crimes, his death, and most importantly, his client list. In this episode, Daily Wire culture reporter Megan Basham explains what the latest Epstein documents reveal and why we still don't know more. I'm Georgia Howe with Daily Wire editor-in-chief John Bickley. It's Sunday, January 7th, and this is Morning Wire. Joining us now is Daily Wire Culture Reporter, Megan Basham. So, Megan, one of the most noteworthy things about the release of these latest documents is not necessarily the new names, but what many experts say is missing and exactly why

some of the information that we'd hope to see has not been released. Broadly speaking, the documents don't actually provide much clarity on how this sex trafficking ring worked, how he made his money, and that's kind of at the center of this case. Is that a fair assessment? Yeah, I think that's very fair to say, and it's something that I did hear from a number of people who have been following the Epstein case very closely for years. So the documents do provide more details about people we already knew were associated with Epstein.

One victim, for instance, told investigators that Epstein told her Bill Clinton, and I'm quoting, liked them young. And in another email released on Thursday, a victim alleges that Clinton threatened the magazine Vanity Fair not to write any articles about his, quote, good friend Epstein that might deal with those illegal activities. And as you said, there were a few new names like magician, David Copperfield, the late Stephen Hawking and Thomas Pritzker, who is the billionaire heir to the Hyatt Hotel Fortune and, in fact, cousin to Illinois's Democratic governor. But I'd say there were few new avenues of information. So Lisa Bryant is a filmmaker who produced two different documentary series on Epstein for Netflix. She told me that she's not surprised and that these documents were not the bombshell that she was hoping for. I don't know if I'll be surprised at all with anything that comes out.

I think you're getting a little bit more details like from the depositions like Prince Andrew, we all know. But there's also a deposition that will contain a little bit more information about, another woman, not this Virginia Jufray, who's been the one accusing him, who said, you know, he touched her breasts on an airplane. That's not a bombshell to me, that it's not anything new. I don't think there's going to be any big smoking gun that's going to put, you know, somebody famous behind bars. You know, sadly, I don't think it's going to lead to prosecutions. And a number of experts told me that they don't believe this lack of information is an accident. They said that there is explosive information to be had about Epstein, including just who his

clients were, but the case has been carefully handled so that powerful people won't face charges. So Mike Sernovich is the political pundit and attorney who fought to bring Epstein's crimes to light in the first place. In 2015, Virginia Jufre sued Epstein's accomplice Galane Maxwell for helping him traffic her as a minor. But those court records were under seal. So when the suit was finally settled in 2017, Sernovich took a journalistic interest in the case because he noticed that while it should have been getting widespread media attention, the press really didn't seem that interested. So what he did was to file a motion to unseal that evidence and those depositions. And he told me that he was shocked when he saw the first records and just how much had been

redacted from them. The way that the case should have went down was the law is very clear. If you file a lawsuit in federal court, everything other than social security numbers, credit card information, and other personally identifying information, has to be filed publicly. You're using the public courts. This is not controversial, but it took years and hundreds of thousands of dollars by me personally, and then the Miami Herald had joined in later on as well, and I anticipate that they spent at least a million dollars, and they may have spent millions of dollars to obtain these records, because there were a bunch of John Does, and they were all rich,

as we saw from the names that were being let out yesterday. They would all file, again, anonymously, Domechus brief saying everything has to remain private because this could be embarrassing information about me. When a year later, the Miami Herald took an interest and filed for those same records, other outlets at last begin to pick up the story. So a lot of this information came from Joufrey's civil suit against Maxwell. Why isn't there more information about the actual crimes in the charges against Epstein? Well, you know, a big part of that is because of who arrested Epstein and just,

just what he was charged with. So the case that he was awaiting trial on when he died in prison in 2019 was brought by the Southern District of New York. And Sernovich believes that Epstein was arrested quietly and specifically undercharged so that the powerful people who might be implicated in his crimes would be protected. You know, a great question about the Epstein criminal case filed in 2019 was, when does anyone notice the SDNY being low profile or low key? The SDNY, they hold huge press conferences, they do perp walks. They make a spectacle out of all their arrests, and they also have a reputation

pervy extremely aggressive. And they charged Epstein not for running an international sex trafficking operation. They charged him for paying underage girls for massages. That's a crime. If he paid underage girls for massages that were erotic in nature, then he should have been charged for that. But the question is, why did they limit the charges to the massages and they didn't bring the heat, which is what STNY does? They didn't say this was a worldwide sex trafficking ring involving at the very least, Galane Maxwell, as we all know. You would charge him with felony conspiracy. You charge him with Man Act violations. The Man Act, for example, makes it illegal to bring underage girls across state lines for illicit purposes. So what you would have done if you wanted to treat

the Epstein matter seriously and you wanted to get the truth is you would have charged Epstein under the federal conspiracy statute. You'd have charged Tim Hunter the Man Act and similar statutes. You'd have named Galane Maxwell in the original indictment as a co-conspirator. Sernovich argues that because the SD&Y did not file aggressive sex trafficking charges, Epstein's Island in the Virgin Islands was left unattended for weeks, as were his homes in Paris, New Mexico, and Palm Beach. So we can't know what might have been removed during those periods. And in addition to that, because SDNY lacked jurisdiction to search beyond his Manhattan mansion, a lot of evidence was likely lost and may never be made public.

What we do know is that in 2019, after the FBI raided that property, several agents testified that some evidence did go missing. They had used a saw to open a safe that had hard drives, jewels, and passports. And the agent said that they didn't have a warrant to remove those items, so they took photos instead. And when they returned to collect them, they say those items were gone. Right. That was a shocking detail when I learned it. Yeah. So speaking of those other properties, we also know that Epstein was worth hundreds of millions of dollars when he died. But it was never really made clear how he made that money. Did Cernovich have any thoughts on that? Yeah, he did. He has speculated, along with a lot of other people, I might add, that Epstein might have been a government

asset, and that would have allowed him to build vast wealth via blackmail. So Cernovich believes that might explain why he was prosecuted in such a way that his arrest did not trigger a lot of co-conspirator charges. Let's start from a hypothetical scenario that Jeffrey Epstein was an asset of the intelligence community, and that his role was to blackmail powerful people. And the world where Epstein is an intelligence community asset, he would make hundreds of millions of dollars that nobody could explain, he would be let free to commit whatever crimes he wanted, he would be able to fly around the world in a private jet, and he would get away with everything, and nobody would care.

Lo and behold, though, there would always be unforeseen circumstances of, for example, me filing to obtain records involving Epstein. And then ultimately the Miami Herald wanted those records. And that's what gave the case a really big second wind, because now you can't dismiss the Miami Herald. If you're the FBI, if you're SD&Y, you can say, oh, Sernovich, he's that kook, conspiracy theory guy, let him yap. But when the Miami Herald says, we're on the case, now there's an element of legitimacy. So what do you do? You think, okay, the Miami Herald wants these documents, they're being aggressive, they're going to report on how Epstein got away with all of this for over 10 years, maybe 20 years. What do we do? Okay, we got to charge Epstein with something. What can we charge

them with? Well, we'll charge them with the minimal bad acts that we can charge them with. And then the intelligence community can send a cleanup crew down there to obtain the information and seal it and make sure that no one who isn't supposed to see it sees it. Now, Sarnovich joke there about a conspiracy theory. So I think it's important to point out that he is far from the only person who is seriously discussing that hypothesis. Bicky Ward is an investigative journalist and best-selling author who has covered Epstein for everyone from CNN to Vanity Fair. And she was on Pierce Morgan Thursday night pointing out that the details that we do have about Epstein's life easily lend themselves to this notion that he was working with some government. if not multiple governments.

The question, who was Jeffrey Epstein? Here's what we do know that is not speculative. He did know the crown prince of Saudi Arabia. He did know Mohammed bin Zayyad, the ruler of the United Arab Emirates. He did know very well, Ahud Barak, a former Prime Minister of Israel. And we know that even after he got out of jail in 2010, He was clever enough to use the connections he had with the academics, with the former president of Harvard, with these other world leaders to draw in other billionaires like Bill Gates. He understood how very rich, powerful people around the world connect with each other.

He understood what very rich, powerful people want from each other. He understood how to connect the plutocracy and the people. the elite. Does that mean he was an asset? They're a speculation, but he certainly was a manipulator of the 0.001%. And in that same broadcast, hedge fund director and former MIT physicist Eric Weinstein were called Meeting Epstein, who he said had been described to him as a financial trader. This was Weinstein's reaction. I knew that he wasn't who he said he was almost from the instant. I started speaking to him. If I had to make a guess and you're calling for speculation, I would say that he really belonged

to what is almost certainly the covert operations community and that he did not appear to have a prime broker. Nobody seemed to have traded with him. Nobody seems to ask questions around him. So it's very suspicious that we don't, for example, ask for Form 13F. If he was a major hedge fund trader, it's almost impossible to move through the markets without leaving awake. If you have to speculate, I would say that he probably belonged to covert operations for one

or more nations. So again, that's just to highlight Sernovich's point there, that there is a lot of evidence pointing to the idea that not only powerful people, but powerful agencies may have an interest in preventing the full records regarding Epstein's crimes from being known. Well, that brings us to another area of speculation. that would be his death. It was officially, of course, ruled as a suicide, but, you know. Yeah, you know, and I did see quite a number of reports this week that took that ruling at face value,

but, of course, those who have tracked this case closely have serious doubts about that. So investigative reporter Alana Goodman wrote a book about who might have benefited from Epstein's death. And she told Morningwire, there's certainly a number of powerful people who would not have wanted a trial with Epstein to go forward. because they might be implicated. There are a lot of people around Epstein who had reason to potentially want him dead and not to sit through a trial. He had a lot of powerful friends,

people like Prince Andrew, Bill Gates, many billionaires who he knew, political figures, you know, Bill Clinton, Donald Trump. He was surrounded by a lot of very powerful people. There were allegations that he may have been blackmailing people. He certainly had cameras around. his house and there are other indications that he was recording people in his life.

And certainly you can think of a lot of reasons why people might not have wanted him to go to a trial. Sernovich told me that after tracking this case for six years, he simply does not believe that Epstein killed himself. They want to call it Jeffrey Epstein's suicide as fact because that ties the story up in a nice little bow. So if you're the regime, you're feeling pretty happy about how the Epstein case was sealed up. The safe from the island, who knows where that is, the other bad actors in the

Epstein case, who know where they are, they prosecuted Galane. She's been put away and she's been quiet. Clearly, she feels like people close to her could be threatened. Lisa Bryant told me that she's been speaking with Epstein's victims this week. And while they're glad to see new details coming out, they are still holding out hope that somehow there will be consequences for the crimes that were committed against them. They do feel relief. On one hand, it is a form of justice, and they do feel vindicated that the conversation is still going, and they feel like they're being believed.

But they also, they don't feel like it's enough, you know. Will these people be prosecuted? Probably not. And so they're still demanding accountability. So hopefully, for the victim's sakes, the media and the public will keep up this pressure and demand that more information come out. Right? and hopefully more of these documents will come out this month.

Megan, thanks for reporting. Anytime. That was Daily Wire Culture reporter, Megan Basham. And this has been a Sunday edition of Morning Wire.