Epstein’s Emails Are An Indictment Of The 1%

Written By Leeja Miller

Sources:

Transcript:

Hi welcome to Why, America? I’m Leeja Miller. I have been struggling with putting together this episode today because of the sheer magnitude of not only the number of emails that have been released from the Epstein archives but also the sheer magnitude of the despicable behavior and ideologies put on full display by those emails and the sheer magnitude of just how many of our leaders–in government, in business, in society–are implicated in the emails. And the fact that this is just the tip of the iceberg–the actual Epstein files haven’t even been released yet. Add onto that the multitude of talking heads online combing through the lurid details, it makes me want to throw my laptop out the window and my phone into a ravine and just call it quits, truly. Every week lately I’ve been posting here on YouTube asking you for questions so that I make sure to answer them during these videos, and one person this week asked how I prioritize my mental wellbeing and how mental health and wellbeing are crucial for fighting fascism. And the truth is that they are right. And the truth also is that I don’t think there is a way to successfully prioritize your mental wellbeing right now. I’m also entering the doldrums of winter here in Minnesota so I’m certain there’s some seasonal affective disorder happening as well, but it is really hard to feel hopeful right now. But it is also not your fault for struggling to feel hopeful or to manage your mental health while struggling to survive in all of this. Even if you don’t closely follow the news, the evidence of a crumbling country is all around us, there’s truly no way to fully insulate yourself. And if you DO watch the news, which odds are if you are a regular viewer or listener of mine then you probably are more tuned in than the average public, it’s even more difficult. That’s not your fault. And there is no secret answer for how to manage it all successfully, I certainly don’t. I was crying literally this morning. For a while I was trying to do Friday videos as well as my Monday and Wednesday videos because there’s just so much to cover and last week I finally decided that I simply cannot muster a third video every week. It feels like shit to step back from responsibilities, to admit I can’t handle something, and to feel like actually right now I can’t handle much at all. It’s embarrassing frankly, there is so much pressure to appear like I know what I’m talking about at all times, to be constantly plugged in, to have something new and insightful to say about every new piece of breaking news. Sometimes I don’t have anything profound to say. Some days it feels like I’m just adding to the constant endless noise of the outrage machine online and that feels so fucking futile. So I come on here and I try my best to provide information and value beyond just adding to the noise but that can be a tall order some days. Today is one of those days. So I’m going to try to add nuance and to add my take which will hopefully be useful, but please know that if you are struggling with your mental health right now I am right there with you and it’s not your fault, there isn’t something wrong with you for not being able to handle the complete societal upheaval that Trump has created in just 11 months, for not being able to function well in end times capitalism, for feeling hopeless while watching video after video of innocent people being kidnapped off the streets while your government cheers. It is so deeply fucked up here right now, things are not okay, it’s okay if you are not okay. This is why I always preach about having a community right now, because there is power in having a shoulder to cry on, there is courage in reaching out to someone to say hey I’m not okay can we talk or even just sit together for a bit. There is also power in being mad as hell about all of it.

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Because I’ve been struggling so much and I know so many other people have as well, it makes the latest revelations in the Epstein case all the more vile and infuriating–while we are out here struggling, while the wealth gap grows ever wider, these people, mostly men, with all the power and all the money, weren’t content to simply exploit people for their labor and exploit our democracy for their benefit by buying out our politicians (or literally becoming our politicians). They couldn’t stop there. They were also intent on exploiting vulnerable children for their own twisted pleasure–either directly or indirectly by ignoring it and looking the other way in order to keep their position in the social order intact. And then the dumbest one of all of them became the president. Twice.

These 20,000 pages of correspondence from Epstein’s emails were released by the House Oversight Committee, evidence they obtained during the course of their investigation into him. It’s truly a mess–PDFs, screenshots of emails, spreadsheets, all poorly labeled and hard to read. And these aren’t even THE Epstein Files. The trove of documentation that is still under seal is likely so huge, disorganized, convoluted, and redundant, while also being deeply horrific in its contents, that these 20,000 pages are truly just a taste of what’s to come, if the full documentation ever comes to light. We’ll get into what happens next. If you are interested in searching through the documents, Courier has created a helpful searchable database of the documents, I’ve linked it in the sources which can always be found in the description below. Reading through these documents and thinking about these files and what they say about very powerful people in our society brought me back to some important lessons I learned early in my legal career. It also got me thinking about Hannah Arendt’s theory on the banality of evil. Banal meaning boring, lacking in originality. Arendt was one of the most influential political theorists of the 20th century, she lived through the Holocaust and spent much of her career unpacking that trauma through writing and teaching about totalitarianism and fascism. She coined the term “the banality of evil” after sitting in on the trial in Israel of SS officer Adolf Eichmann. Eichmann handled the logistics behind the Final Solution and was found guilty of being a major organizer of the Holocaust. He was also a slight, boring, balding bureaucrat who had been painted as this monster but showed up to court looking and acting like nothing more than a boring little guy who was just following orders. Of course he was undoubtedly evil, but he didn’t present as the monster that he had been painted as and that the public would presume him to be given his horrific crimes against humanity.

Before I had ever heard of Arendt’s “banality of evil” line, I had experienced it myself early in my legal career, specifically during a very brief stint as an intern at the US Attorney’s office in Boston, working for Assistant US Attorneys by, mostly, sifting through a lot of very boring documents that looked a lot like those Epstein files to find evidence of very heinous crimes. There was the perpetrator of a major Ponzi scheme whose primary target was elderly people, who he convinced to invest their entire life savings with him, promising major returns but, in the end, leaving most of them completely destitute. Preying on the elderly. But sifting through his emails revealed a very boring man who mostly sent very boring emails about the logistics of his various investments, received a lot of spam emails, and occasionally sent very boomer-coded memes and political cartoons via email to his business contacts and golf buddies. There was the child predator, emailing with his friend who was still in jail about planning a trip to Eastern Europe to find young girls but also about his job search, his loneliness, and his annoying neighbors. Then there was the sentencing of a man convicted of numerous crimes. Ahead of attending his hearing, I read the indictment against him and sifted through some of the evidence. He was convicted of numerous computer-based crimes. He had called in several bomb threats, repeatedly, to schools across Massachusetts, causing some schools to close down multiple times over the course of the previous school year, disrupting the lives and educations of literally hundreds of school children, but that was just a passing phase. His real passion was harassing various women, including a roommate he had found on Craigslist whose computer he hacked, obtaining her private images, plus information about her family, friends, and employer. He proceeded to send, via her email address, explicit images of her and of children, threats, and other horrific content to her employer, her family members, and her acquaintances. After she moved away, he proceeded to find her address, sign her up for kink websites and give out her address to men seeking violent sexual encounters. Men she didn’t know would show up to her door, to her mom’s door, to her sister’s door, seeking to engage in violent sex acts. This went on for years, ruining her reputation, causing her to go into hiding, and causing immense trauma, all in a sick twisted game from which he gained nothing other than the feeling of power that comes from ruining another person’s life like that. After reading about his crimes, I walked into that sentencing hearing expecting to see a monster, expecting to feel vindication when the judge handed down his sentence. The courtroom was packed. Victim after victim stood up to give statements, including first responders whose lives were completely overtaken by responding to bomb threat after bomb threat, families whose children were traumatized, and the roommate from Craigslist whose life he had ruined. After the victims were done speaking, the man had the right to stand up and speak on his own behalf before the judge made her final sentencing decision. He was a small, meek, computer nerd. He was slight and wore glasses. He spoke with a soft voice. He didn’t look like a monster. He didn’t act defiant, he didn’t act proud of himself, he didn’t act angry or bitter or defensive. He read from a prepared statement about how he was regretful of his actions and hoped to use his skills with computers to make the world a better place someday. But his demeanor and his tone came across as unfeeling. He didn’t seem to grasp the weight of his actions. Like he didn’t feel any particular way about any of it, it was just a thing he did for fun in his free time but didn’t think much of it and still didn’t seem to grasp why his actions were particularly bad. In the end, the judge sentenced him to 17 years in prison, one of the highest sentences for a computer crime in the history of Massachusetts. And I left the courtroom after the hearing feeling just deep sadness. What a pointless thing, that he would cause so much hurt and destruction, that he would ruin this girl’s life, and now he’ll be in prison for almost 2 decades, will likely learn nothing, and nothing will have come of any of this.

I’ve talked about this before but justice often doesn’t feel particularly fulfilling. It doesn’t feel like closure or like something good coming from something evil. It’s deeply anticlimactic. It’s often banal. Movies and TV hype it up to keep us interested and to tell compelling stories, but the reality is often much more boring. It is evil sewn into the fabric of the everyday. Small acts which add up to human atrocity but which are perpetrated by a person who is also in many ways just living a normal life. I don’t know why the main cartoon villain coming to my head is Rasputin in the Anastasia movie as kind of the archetypical movie villain–a person so consumed by evil that it is all they think about. They are constantly scheming, motivated solely by their very evil self-serving ends, nothing else in their heads but committing evil acts, they live in a cave or perhaps an empty apartment the walls covered with incoherent ramblings. They live and breathe evil they are the embodiment of it. The reality is rarely like that, which I find to be far more sinister. It’s a man who steals money from the elderly and goes golfing in the afternoon. A guy who loves computers and coding and calls in bomb threats on a whim. A man like Jeffrey Epstein who appears obsessed with taking advantage of young, vulnerable girls but who’s also sending like the dumbest most boomer coded poorly spelled email you’ve ever read to Bill Clinton’s Treasury Secretary Larry Summers about how to flirt with women. It’s stupid. It’s boring. It’s everyday life interspersed with the most evil shit you could ever imagine. And it’s perpetrated by people who have by and large convinced themselves that they are not evil, they are just doing what they have to do to get ahead, to survive, to fall into line. I am NOT insinuating that they just didn’t know what they were doing was wrong, let me be clear, they knew it was wrong but they were willing to do the mental gymnastics necessary to convince themselves it was worth it, for whatever reason. Whether you’re an Adolf Eichmann just “following orders” or you’re running in circles with the rich and powerful and they all say Jeff likes them young with a wink and a nod or you’re like Megyn Kelly, who herself has 14 year old daughter, and you are willing to argue that 15 is different than 5, evil often intertwines itself with self preservation, insecurity, ego, greed, and the banality of everyday life so you have people not completely obsessed with being evil like the Rasputin in a cartoon movie but instead just living their lives convinced that they did what they had to do, or what they did wasn’t that bad, or that what they did is permissible because other people are doing it. Jeffrey Epstein wasn’t conniving in his lair, he was sending stupid emails and knew how to somehow say the right things to make powerful people comfortable enough in his presence that they figured they could get away with saying the horrible shit percolating in their brains. It’s like some white people who think they can say racist shit to you because you’re also white and like it’s fine it’s just our little secret it’s not a big deal. Things become permissive, they start to slide, people with a lot of money and influence and power see other people in their orbit doing horrible shit and they realize they can also do horrible shit and they’re among friends so no one will find out, and actually maybe this is fine and normal. And so the numerous children embroiled in Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes have their lives ruined, forever, and there is no real justice that will undo that or provide them with closure. Epstein is an easy scapegoat because in his death we can make documentaries about him that paint him as this evil Rasputin figure, close to the powerful, completely consumed with evil, but his crimes were the result of a system already set up that gives powerful people the leeway to do evil shit and pass it off as ordinary or hide it behind tall hedges in their private islands because the rules don’t apply to them like they do to the rest of us. They know that. It’s easy to yell and scream and say wow they really think the rules don’t apply to them how awful, they will get their just desserts. But they won’t. They won’t. Because the problem with law and courts is that they don’t do a great job with connecting dots. The thing with the banality of evil is that it also means there is rarely a smoking gun. Sometimes there is, perhaps buried within the Epstein files there is a smoking gun on Trump, an email where he explicitly acknowledges an illegal act, video from Epstein’s security cameras, something, to implicate Trump. But even that would be met with every denial in the book–it’s doctored, it’s taken out of context, you can’t prove I sent that email someone stole my email address, that’s not what I meant, that’s not me in that video, that girl was 18, and all it takes is just enough to create a reasonable doubt in the mind of a jury and the person is off the hook, smoking gun or not. And that’s even if the case is brought and it makes it all the way to a trial, which rarely happens. And despite the fact that the Venn Diagram of Trump supporters and people obsessed with the Epstein Files has some serious overlap, I don’t think there’s anything he could do, anything that could come out about him, that would actually lose him the support of his base. I don’t. We’ve had smoking guns. He declared a love of grabbing women by the pussy. He was found liable for sexual assault multiple times. He’s a literal convicted felon. It doesn’t matter. And now Megyn Kelly is out here saying there’s a big difference between a 5 year old and a 15 year old. The banality of evil makes its way into the minds of the people who support evil people as well. The mental gymnastics to say well it’s not as bad as it looks, a 15 year old isn’t the same as a 5 year old, what was she wearing, everyone else was doing it, other people did worse. The danger of the banality of evil, especially with fascist leaders, is that it doesn’t die with the leader. Hannah Arendt knew that the evil of the Holocaust didn’t die with Hitler or Eichmann or anyone. And that evil, then as now, involved deciding that some peoples’ lives are worth less than other peoples’ lives. That is of course very obviously what happened during the Holocaust but that is also what is happening today in the minds of the rich and powerful. It is a foreseeable outcome of the growing wealth inequality. The rich and powerful have never been more rich and powerful, they are untouchable. Problems can be fixed by throwing money at them. Friends can be made by throwing money at them. Laws can be bypassed, people can be exploited. And the worship that American society at large has of consumption, of ostentatious wealth, only makes it worse. There is an inherent assumption that someone with money has earned that money through some feat of ingenuity or amounts of hard work above and beyond that of the average person. But the reality is that to get to those levels of power and wealth requires a level of kind of baked in sadism. A belief that your time is worth more than someone else’s. A belief that someone who works for you deserves less than you and any excess profits they generate through their labor are not theirs but yours. It takes a special level of sadism to believe that so deeply that you become a billionaire off that belief. But it is also so baked into our society, our economy, our belief systems, our self belief, that it’s like the proverbial fish in water. It’s so ubiquitous we do not see the water because we are completely submerged in it. It takes some rewiring to be a business owner who DOESN’T exploit the labor of your employees to make a profit. The mental gymnastics needed to decide that someone’s labor is worth less than yours has already been done for us by the system we exist within, so we’re just “following orders.” We’re just doing what everyone else is doing. We’re just going along with the idea that people with wealth have more inherent value than people without wealth. THAT is the insidiousness of this type of evil. The banality IS the insidious piece, there isn’t anything extraordinary about buying into this, in fact it is easier to buy into it than to go against the grain. And the clearest outcome of this system that places greater worth and value on the lives of people with money, thereby giving them more power and clout, is what we’re seeing come out in these Epstein documents. A group of people catapulted to the upper echelons of power through sheer force of their own greed in a society steeped in money worship discovering that there is no limit to how far they can push boundaries because there is no one who is going to hold them accountable because everyone can be bought and sold for the right price. Their comfort with exploiting people doesn’t end with labor and it never has.

So, that’s my soapbox but what happens next? After doubling down on his orders to NOT release the Epstein Files, over the weekend Trump flip flopped, saying the files should be released because he has nothing to hide. Many of you asked me whether that means that there is a major coverup, that everything with Trump’s name has been scrubbed. Anything I say about this is going to be speculation at best of course but we’ve already heard rumors from earlier this year that Pam Bondi was ordering a team of FBI agents to comb through the Epstein Files to find mentions of Trump. Remember, I say this all the time, that “national security” is a really easy argument to make in court that many judges are quick to respect as a blanket excuse for all sorts of cover up. I don’t think this will be any different. Given the power of the names that have been implicated in just the file dump so far, it is not a stretch to assume that if the DOJ releases the full trove of documents that there will be heavy redactions, especially of Trump’s name.

Despite a memo from July in which the DOJ and the FBI announced that it had found nothing in the Epstein Files to warrant any further investigation into uncharged third parties, Pam Bondi also flip flopped on Friday, saying actually that she had tapped interim US Attorney for the Southern District of New York Jay Clayton to begin an investigation into Democrats implicated in the Epstein files. Is it any wonder, then, that Trump made an about face just days after Bondi’s announcement? Because with those investigations opened up, it gives the DOJ even greater leeway to keep certain of the Epstein Files from being released under the pretext that they are involved in an ongoing investigation and thus must be kept from the public. It is probably true that Trump has nothing to hide because the DOJ will be sure to redact and restrict anything that particularly implicates him under the guise of an ongoing investigation, even though it would be an investigation into Democrats, not the numerous Republicans named in just the documents released so far.

However, Trump is acting like a cornered animal–denying, throwing tantrums, diverting attention, saying Democrats are deeply implicated while also saying the entire thing is a Democrat hoax, acting completely irrationally. But he has people behind the scenes working to do as much damage control as possible. But because of his irrational behavior, it is unclear what will happen to these files. The House is set to vote on the discharge petition this week which would force the release of the documents. It then goes to the Senate, which has not confirmed whether it would move forward with the vote or not. And then it has to be signed by the President. If he refuses, there would need to be a 2/3rds vote in Congress to override his veto. There are a number of hurdles and there’s no telling whether Trump’s new stance that the documents should be released because he has nothing to hide will turn back into desperate attempts to keep the files from being released. And listen–this government is very good at keeping secrets. We’ve known this for decades. Given the power and influence of the people implicated in these files, the government really is only going to release exactly what it wants to release, whether or not the discharge petition passes through Congress and gets signed by Trump. Because, again, and I’m sorry to be so cynical, despite the heinousness of Epstein’s crimes and the potential implication that potentially hundreds of the most influential people in our society were participants or knew about it and did nothing this type of evil existed before Epstein and it will continue to exist even if a few people get taken down in the fallout from the Epstein Files. Justice is never swift, these cases would take years to play out in court if they ever make it there to begin with, a few people might take the fall, and it will be anticlimactic and it will change nothing. The rich and powerful will continue to do whatever they want with impunity. Trump will die but the ideas he espouses–that some people are worth less than others–will continue in his acolytes, in his mentees, in his followers.

But I’m also not leaving you with complete hopelessness, okay, I’m not trying to put that out into the world. Despite all this, and despite how cynical and exhausted I’m feeling, I still genuinely believe that most people are mostly good. I think fear and desperation make people act badly, and there is a lot of that happening right now. But I think it takes a special kind of sadism and lack of empathy to become the type of people that would do the heinous things that Jeffrey Epstein and his accomplices did. I don’t think it comes naturally to people but I do think our society primes people for it, to believe that some people are worth less than others. And I think the antidote, as Hannah Arendt also believed, is free thinking. Being willing to imagine and believe in something different and to not fall in line with what everyone else is doing. And I once again return to the idea of community–no one is coming to save us, at least not the most powerful people that could do the most good. We have to save us. Meet your neighbors. Talk to each other. Get organized. That is going to look different depending on the needs of your community, but the only way to find out what your community needs is to go out and meet them. Y’all are always asking me WHAT DO WE DO and I keep telling you meet your neighbors. And you’re mad because that’s not enough to which I respond of course it’s not enough but you cannot know what needs to be done until you talk to your neighbors and figure it out. Again, use your free will and that big beautiful brain of yours to stand up and think differently. That is the only way to counteract the banality of evil, and it’s hard and it takes work and commitment and it’s slow and mostly unsuccessful but you do it anyway because the alternative is intolerable.

And if you’d like to support my work, consider joining here on YouTube by clicking the big join button below, or supporting me over on Patreon, patreon dot com slash Leeja miller, where you get access to all these episodes completely ad free. Thank you to my multi-platinum patrons Marc, Sarah Shelby, Art, David, L’etranger (Lukus), Thomas Johnson, and Tay. Your generosity makes this channel what it is, so thank you!

And if you liked this episode, you’ll like the one from last week about 50 Year Mortgages.

Leeja Miller
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