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For years, the powerful men in Jeffrey Epstein’s orbit counted on time, money and a Justice Department that looked the other way. That’s starting to break. With no criminal investigations coming from the DOJ, members of Congress are now making public the names the department redacted from the files. And COURIER’s started keeping track of what happens next. Our Epstein coverage at epsteincoverup.us now follows what happens after someone turns up in the files. Each report carries a status showing where that person stands today: still in power, under investigation, or resigned. The Contradictions Tracker compares what people said with what the files reveal. These updates show what it’s costing them.
The First Status Update: “Resigned”
Leon Botstein led Bard College for half a century. Last Wednesday, he resigned from the remaining positions he held there.
Botstein had already announced in May that he would step down as president, after Bard’s own review found that he had visited Epstein’s New York townhouse 25 times and stayed on his island. But as Reps. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) and Madeleine Dean (D-PA) pointed out in a press release last week, Botstein had continued serving as president, living in the president’s house and conducting a Bard orchestra.
What ultimately forced him out was a letter from Rep. Raskin, the top Democrat on the House Judiciary Committee, centered on a 2014 email that the DOJ released to the public with the sender identified only as “President.” The unredacted version available to members of Congress reveals that the email came from president@bard.edu.
In the email, the sender asked Epstein whether a woman he may have been trafficking was “for me, or are you keeping her for yourself?” Committee members say the woman, identified as Jane Doe, was a young foreign model and aspiring singer Epstein was grooming. According to Raskin’s letter, Epstein used his relationship with Botstein to convince her she could have a music career and in May 2014, sent her to meet Botstein so he could assess her talent.
“It is hard to construct any kind of innocent explanation for Botstein’s question and the surrounding events,” Raskin wrote.
Botstein denies the allegations and says he didn’t write the email. “Any assertion that I knew of or was involved in Epstein’s criminal behaviour is wrong,” he said in a statement, adding that he resigned “to protect Bard from any distraction.”
Bard’s board chair says the college is undertaking “a full review.”
The Names They Protected
Ready to get even angrier? Rep. Raskin says the evidence against Botstein “meets the federal standard for opening a criminal investigation,” yet the DOJ and FBI apparently had it for at least 18 months without acting. Instead, the department redacted the sender’s identity while releasing the young woman’s name hundreds of times.
“These emails implicate the DoJ in a widespread and knowing cover-up,” Raskin continued.
Now, lawmakers are “taking matters into their own hands,” according to The Times, which reports that Botstein is unlikely to be the last target. More than a dozen powerful figures have already resigned over what’s in the files, including former UK ambassador Lord Mandelson and former Harvard president Larry Summers. Not one person in the US has been criminally charged.
“The Jeffrey Epstein saga was never just about Jeffrey Epstein alone,” Raskin wrote. “It was about a network of accomplices, enablers, and co-conspirators that made his path of serial exploitation possible.”
Survivors Aren’t Waiting Either
Washington won’t put the files in front of the public, but survivors are bringing them directly to the people. Over the weekend, the Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Bookmobile — a van carrying tens of thousands of pages from the released files — rolled into Lewiston, Maine.
Dani Bensky, an Epstein survivor, told WMTW the number of survivors is likely around 1,400. She said the government’s releases have left out documents and botched redactions so many times that it no longer looks accidental.
“It feels like incompetence is the strategy here,” she said.
Find the bookmobile’s upcoming stops at trumpepsteinreadingroom.com/tour.
This is What Accountability Looks Like
A college president is out. Congress is unredacting what the DOJ buried. Survivors are driving the evidence from town to town. None of this happened because the people in the files decided to come clean. It happened because others refused to let it go.
Every time a name in the files turns into a consequence, we’ll track it, and you’ll hear about it here first.
Its weird how slow epstein data goes around while silly bullshit goes viral in no time at all.
Emails implicating NY Giants owner Steve Tisch in Epstein’s crimes are so much worse we need to put the same pressure on coward Roger Goodel, owner of the National football league, to drive Steve Tisch out of the NFL for Tisch’s terrible disgusting participation in Epstein’s global trafficking crimes
This is a great article on the great work reps Raskin & Dean are doing against the Epstein Class & scumbag academics like Leon Botstein!