The Origins of Jeffrey Epstein

From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily. The latest release of files related to the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein left key questions about his rise to power and his connections to the president unanswered. Today, my colleague David Enrich explains how he and a team of reporters worked to fill in those mysteries and reveal the truth about Jeffrey Epstein's origins. It's Tuesday, December 23. David Enrich, welcome to the show. Thanks for having me. David, I think this is probably your fourth or fifth appearance on the show this year to talk about Jeffrey Epstein. And this time, we're having you back because on Friday, there was obviously this massive file release from the Justice Department that, as far as I understand it, did not really advance our understanding of Jeffrey Epstein or his question because there were not huge takeaways, and we got lots of bits of incremental color and detail that reinforced the deep depravity of Epstein's crimes and the horrible things he was doing. We also got some new tidbits. We saw, for example, Bill Clinton in numerous photos with Epstein and his associates, including in a swimming pool. We saw that one of Epstein's victims back in 1996 had reported him to the FBI for having child sexual abuse material, and that's a decade before we know the federal prosecutors actually started investigating Epstein. So that was a definitely a new development, but for the most part, there was nothing here that fundamentally altered our understanding of Epstein and his network, and notably, also, very little about Donald Trump whose name was barely mentioned in these files. And it was Trump's relationship with Epstein that triggered a lot of the political interest in this investigation to begin with. Right. Just to remind people, this whole file of release is coming about because of a massive pressure campaign, mostly from Democrats, but also from some within the MAGA orbit for Donald Trump and his administration to release the so called Epstein files. Right? And that basically forced Trump to sign legislation authorizing these files to be released from the justice department. Yeah. It's worth noting that the justice department did not do what it was legally required to do, which was release all of the files. And those files that were released were, in many cases, so heavily redacted that you couldn't make any sense of them. And why didn't they release them? The justice department has said that they will release the rest of the files on in kind of a rolling basis over the next few weeks and that they need this additional time to be able to properly review and redact these huge quantities of materials. Okay. So knowing that there would be this sort of staggered release, what were you expecting to get? Or or maybe more importantly, what questions were you hoping that this batch of files would actually answer? I mean, it depends on …