Deception and Dependency: Inside the Latest Epstein Files

From the New York Times, I'm Michael Barbaro. This is The Daily. Another Epstein files dump today, and not just a dump, it was a blizzard of files. More than 3,000,000 pages are now being posted to the Justice Department website. The latest government release of documents related to Jeffrey Epstein, the single largest release so far, has revealed the depth and intensity of his relationship with the global elite long after he became a sex offender. Some of the names mentioned in the files dumped today, Bill Gates, Elon Musk, and Steve Bannon. Peter Mandelson, a former senior power broker for the governing British Labor Party and an ex ambassador to The US. Exposing intimate communications with the world's most powerful business leaders. Doctor Peter Attia, the celebrity longevity influencer, appears in the files more than 1,700 times. In 2015, Attia wrote, the biggest problem with becoming friends with you, the life you lead is so outrageous, and yet I cannot tell a soul. Top government officials, prestigious academics, and renowned experts. Some of the people, Noam Chomsky, that was like the deal breaker for me. Noam Chomsky, Deepak, Deepak Chopra. And in many cases, contradicting years of their careful denials about their closeness to Epstein. This is not the end of the Epstein case. This is just maybe the end of the beginning, but this is actually gonna drag on for years as people sort through the documents and connect the dots. Today, as the fallout from the new documents ricochets across the globe, I gathered three of my colleagues, Deborah Kamen, Nick Confessori, and Matt Goldstein, to talk through what they found. It's Tuesday, February 10. Deborah, Nick, Matt, thank you to the three of you for being here. Thanks for having us. Thank you. Good to be here. All three of you have spent the past week or so reading through hundreds, maybe even thousands of emails from the latest release of Epstein documents. And I want us to begin a conversation with the release itself, the scope of what the government has published, why it's published it now, and what's different about these documents from what was released in the previous batches. So, Deborah, can you just start right there? Yeah. I mean, the thing that's most noteworthy about this document release is its sheer size. We're talking about more than 3,000,000 pages of documents. There's also a lot of photos, a lot of videos. In tandem with its size is the amount of chaos that came with this rollout. The release itself was more than a month after the government's self imposed deadline, and there were a lot of things that went wrong with this release. There were a lot of unredacted names of victims that never should have made it into the public, and they did. There were images of women in the nude that the New York Times found and flagged the Justice Department, that then had to be pulled back. So …