The Epstein Oligarchs

The files had to be released because they corrupted justice under both Democrats and Republicans.

Former federal prosecutor Daniel Richman has a new essay in the Times arguing that the Epstein Files should never have been released. Now a professor at Columbia, Richman implies that the files politically had to be released only because the Trump regime destroyed the public trust that government leaders would use incriminating portions of the files to prosecute Epstein’s elite conspirators.

The thing is, it’s not just Trump and MAGA that destroyed public confidence in our justice system. Matt Stoller and others have noted that the Biden administration and Attorney General Merrick Garland had possession of the Epstein Files for four years. It’s hard to say who should have been criminally investigated already. But there’s little sign that any billionaires were seriously investigated even if the files show that they had proximity to Epstein’s sex crimes.

And the rot goes deeper. Republican and Democratic corruption are not equivalent. But both Republican and Democratic politicians have written and enforced laws for decades in ways bent the knee to Wall Street and big tech. Their judicial and regulatory enforcement appointees have done the same. Their fealty didn’t just turn a blind eye to oligarchs’ abuse of power at the expense of others. They helped create oligarchs by green lighting power abuses as fair game.

American anger towards the establishment is unsurprising given the decades of double standards from both parties when it comes to justice for billionaires versus everyone else. Oligarchs have been treated with kid gloves at best when it’s come to monopoly tactics, tax avoidance, the 2008 mortgage crisis, or even targeting kids with addictive algorithms.

Elizabeth Warren had to overcome resistance within the party to create the Consumer Finance Protection Bureau even in the wake of the financial crisis. Lina Khan had to do the same to start finally chipping away at monopoly power.

Most people will only trust a future Democratic president to do the right thing with something like the Epstein Files if that president also gets the party and the federal government bring justice to oligarchs who have bent the law, or worse, at the country’s expense.