Latest / The Vault: The Epstein Files / The Epstein Files Expose How Prematurely DOJ Tried to Close the Case (Part 2) (10/23/26)

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The Epstein Files Expose How Prematurely DOJ Tried to Close the Case (Part 2) (10/23/26) · The Vault: The Epstein Files

• 0:00
  Speaker 1: What's up, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the
• 0:03
  Speaker 1: Epstein Chronicles. In this episode, we're going to pick up
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  Speaker 1: where he left off, talking about the DOJ and their
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  Speaker 1: gaslighting of the American public. New Mexico followed through on
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  Speaker 1: that threat on August 5th, 2026, and sued the Department
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  Speaker 1: of Justice and Todd Blanch in federal court. The complaint
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  Speaker 1: accused the department of blocking the state's effort to investigate
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  Speaker 1: alleged crimes at Zorro Ranch and asked a judge to
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  Speaker 1: force DOJ to address the record's requests lawfully. New Mexico
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  Speaker 1: said that it made 10 requests for key information that
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  Speaker 1: were ignored or denied. The federal government responded that some
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  Speaker 1: of the requested information could not simply be disclosed because
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  Speaker 1: of victim-identifying material and binding court orders. Those defenses deserve
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  Speaker 1: to be litigated on their actual merits rather than flattened
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  Speaker 1: out into a conspiracy theory. But the existence of the
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  Speaker 1: lawsuit demolishes the administration's earlier attempt to portray further Epstein
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  Speaker 1: investigations as unserious theater. A sovereign state was not asking
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  Speaker 1: Washington for gossip. It was suing Washington for investigative material
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  Speaker 1: it said was necessary to identify witnesses, possible criminal conduct,
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  Speaker 1: and people connected to alleged offenses within New Mexico. And
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  Speaker 1: Todd Blanche went from helping supervise the Federal Files operation
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  Speaker 1: to being named in litigation accusing his department of obstructing
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  Speaker 1: another jurisdiction's Epstein investigation. And that's one hell of a
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  Speaker 1: journey from no further disclosure is warranted. Then came October 21st,
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  Speaker 1: when Torres opened another front and sued Darren Indyke, Richard Kahn,
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  Speaker 1: the Epstein estate, and the 1953 trust. That complaint alleges
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  Speaker 1: that Indyke and Kahn did far more than perform routine
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  Speaker 1: professional services and instead help facilitate, finance, and conceal Epstein's
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  Speaker 1: trafficking operation. Now, of course, those are allegations, not findings
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  Speaker 1: of guilt, and both men are entitled to contest them.
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  Speaker 1: But the complaint is still devastating to the old federal
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  Speaker 1: claim because it's built around precisely the kind of third-party
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  Speaker 1: conduct Washington had encouraged the public to stop expecting anyone
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  Speaker 1: to investigate. New Mexico brought claims under the Federal Trafficking
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  Speaker 1: Victims Protection Act and the New Mexico Racketeering Act. It
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  Speaker 1: asked the court to block estate payments to end Icahn-Kahn
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  Speaker 1: while the litigation proceeds, to impose restitution, disgorgement, damages, and
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  Speaker 1: other relief if the allegations are proved. The state's criminal
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  Speaker 1: investigation also remains open. So, in October 2026, New Mexico
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  Speaker 1: was simultaneously investigating criminal conduct and litigating an alleged trafficking
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  Speaker 1: and racketeering structure around Epstein's closest financial administrators. That's not
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  Speaker 1: ancient history being reheated for clicks. What it is, is
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  Speaker 1: an attorney general using present tense investigative and civil enforcement
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  Speaker 1: power against people and entities still reachable by law. And
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  Speaker 1: of course, the financial allegations in New Mexico's complaint make
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  Speaker 1: the July 2025 shrug look particularly flimsy. The state says
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  Speaker 1: Zendyk received more than $ 16 million from Epstein and related
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  Speaker 1: entities between 2011 and 2019, while Kahn received more than
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  Speaker 1: $ 10 million. It alleges both men held leadership roles in
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  Speaker 1: Epstein-related entities, managed accounts, and authorized transactions connected to the
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  Speaker 1: enterprise described in the complaint. The state also points... to
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  Speaker 1: more than $ 3 million in payments from Epstein-related accounts to
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  Speaker 1: two girls or women between 2003 and 2013, for which
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  Speaker 1: it says no discernible business purpose was apparent. According to
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  Speaker 1: the complaint, later payments included money to survivors, recruiters, legal expenses, rent,
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  Speaker 1: and tuition. One cited 2017 email from Conda Epstein referred
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  Speaker 1: to payment of the latest batch of medical expenses for girls. Again,
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  Speaker 1: we have to reiterate, A complaint is an accusation, and
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  Speaker 1: it must be proved. It's not a verdict delivered by
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  Speaker 1: press release. But these are concrete financial allegations tied to
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  Speaker 1: bank accounts, entities, payments, dates, and people, not vapor floating
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  Speaker 1: around the internet. They're exactly the sort of questions financial
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  Speaker 1: crimes investigators are built to test. The administration's great achievement
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  Speaker 1: was apparently to declare the third-party investigative cupboard bare shortly
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  Speaker 1: before another law enforcement office started inventorying the shelves. Congress, meanwhile,
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  Speaker 1: behaved as though it had never received the memo announcing
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  Speaker 1: that curiosity was obsolete. House investigators spent 2026 conducting transcribed interviews,
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  Speaker 1: collecting records, releasing testimony, and comparing witness accounts with newly
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  Speaker 1: available documentary record. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sat for a
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  Speaker 1: House oversight interview on May 6th and was questioned about
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  Speaker 1: his past contacts with Epstein, including a 2012 family lunch
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  Speaker 1: on Epstein's Island. Katherine Rumler was interviewed in July and
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  Speaker 1: questioned about her relationship with Epstein and documentary material showing
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  Speaker 1: contacts after she knew of his 2008 conviction. Leon Black
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  Speaker 1: appeared for a voluntary transcribed interview in June and was
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  Speaker 1: hit with subpoenas when committee members sought additional testimony and records.
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  Speaker 1: Those proceedings did not establish that every witness committed a crime.
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  Speaker 1: but they did establish something simpler and fatal to the
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  Speaker 1: administration's narrative. Congress still had factual questions that could be
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  Speaker 1: asked of living witnesses and tested against contemporaneous documents. The
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  Speaker 1: files created lines of questioning that did not vanish because
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  Speaker 1: DOJ had previously pronounced the investigative landscape barren. Members could
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  Speaker 1: put an email in front of a witness, put a
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  Speaker 1: financial record next to an answer, and decide whether the
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  Speaker 1: two matched. That's called an investigation everywhere except inside the
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  Speaker 1: talking point designed to convince people, investigations were pointless. Congress
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  Speaker 1: also had reason to examine the government itself, because the
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  Speaker 1: EFTA turned DOJ's conduct from an internal management issue into
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  Speaker 1: a question of statutory compliance. The law gave the department
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  Speaker 1: a deadline, and the December 2025 release did not end
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  Speaker 1: the dispute over whether the DOJ had met it. On
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  Speaker 1: January 30th, Blanche announced the enormous additional production and said
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  Speaker 1: the department had satisfied its production obligations. Members of Congress
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  Speaker 1: continued challenging the claim, questioning redactions, missing material, withheld categories,
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  Speaker 1: and the department's accounting of what it had collected versus
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  Speaker 1: what it had published. The department wanted credit for an
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  Speaker 1: exhaustive review, credit for protecting victims, credit for releasing millions
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  Speaker 1: of pages, and credit for deciding what remained outside the
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  Speaker 1: public release. Congress, unsurprisingly, was less enthusiastic about letting the
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  Speaker 1: defendant grade its own exam. The fight therefore moved from
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  Speaker 1: whether the files should be released to whether the release
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  Speaker 1: itself complied with the law. A controversy the administration had
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  Speaker 1: tried to bury in July of 2025 had become an
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  Speaker 1: ongoing separation of powers fight by 2026, and hopping overseas,
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  Speaker 1: France applied another brutal answer to the claim that the
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  Speaker 1: release files contained nothing capable of generating serious investigative work.
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  Speaker 1: On February 18, 2026, Paris prosecutors opened two broad investigations
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  Speaker 1: after the American document release produced what French authorities regarded
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  Speaker 1: as new leads. One inquiry found on human trafficking, including
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  Speaker 1: recruitment and solicitation, the other focused on possible financial offenses,
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  Speaker 1: including money laundering, corruption-related conduct, and tax fraud. Paris prosecutor
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  Speaker 1: Laura Bacow said, said investigators would use the full body
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  Speaker 1: of available Epstein data, together with complaints, media reporting, and
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  Speaker 1: material from earlier French proceedings. She described the analytical job
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  Speaker 1: as enormous, which is an interesting description for evidence Washington
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  Speaker 1: had spent months encouraging Americans to stop caring about. French
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  Speaker 1: authorities also ordered a comprehensive reanalysis of the earlier investigation
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  Speaker 1: centered on Jean-Luc Brunel. That meant old evidence was being
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  Speaker 1: compared with newly released American records to identify connections that
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  Speaker 1: may not have been apparent before. No French prosecutor needed
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  Speaker 1: to believe every allegation in the files to recognize their
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  Speaker 1: investigative value. They simply did what investigators normally do when
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  Speaker 1: millions of pages create new names, new links, new timelines,
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  Speaker 1: and new corroborative possibilities. They opened cases. The French inquiry
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  Speaker 1: soon demonstrated another thing the American finality narrative had conveniently ignored.
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  Speaker 1: Disclosure can cause witnesses and alleged victims to come forward.
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  Speaker 1: By August, Paris prosecutors said 24 women, who described themselves
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  Speaker 1: as victims of sexual violence by Epstein, Brunel, or Daniel Syed,
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  Speaker 1: had either come forward or been identified in the renewed work.
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  Speaker 1: 16 had been interviewed by investigators by late July. Prosecutors
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  Speaker 1: were examining allegations involving Syed, A modeling scout, whose name
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  Speaker 1: appeared throughout, released material, and who denied wrongdoing through counsel
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  Speaker 1: before his death. They were also reviewing the possible recruiters
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  Speaker 1: beyond the people who had dominated the older French case.
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  Speaker 1: That's how dormant information becomes active evidence. A document supplies
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  Speaker 1: a name. A name leads to a witness. A witness
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  Speaker 1: supplies an account. The account gets tested against travel, financial, telephone, calendar,
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  Speaker 1: or other records. Washington's July memo treated the absence of
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  Speaker 1: a ready-made prosecutable case as though it were the same
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  Speaker 1: thing as the absence of investigative leads. France treated leads
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  Speaker 1: like leads. The difference between those two approaches is now
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  Speaker 1: sitting in police files in Paris. And of course that
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  Speaker 1: brings us to England, because Britain managed to find investigative
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  Speaker 1: value in the same supposed nothing as well. On February 3rd, 2026,
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  Speaker 1: the Metropolitan Police opened a criminal investigation into former Minister
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  Speaker 1: Peter Mandelson over allegations that he passed market-sensitive government information
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  Speaker 1: to Epstein while serving as business secretary. The trigger was
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  Speaker 1: material contained in a massive U.S. document release, including emails
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  Speaker 1: that appeared to concern government deliberations during the financial crisis.
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  Speaker 1: Three days later, police searched two properties linked to Mandelson
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  Speaker 1: as part of the misconduct in public office investigation. Mandelson's position,
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  Speaker 1: as reported by the BBC, was that he had not
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  Speaker 1: acted criminally and had not been motivated by financial gain.
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  Speaker 1: That presumption has to remain intact unless evidence proves otherwise,
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  Speaker 1: but here again the files did not land with a
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  Speaker 1: thud and disappear into an archive. They generated a criminal
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  Speaker 1: investigation by a major foreign police force, and search warrants
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  Speaker 1: executed at properties tied to a former senior government official. Apparently,
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  Speaker 1: the authorities in the UK also failed to understand that
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  Speaker 1: every meaningful Epstein lead had already been exhausted in Washington.
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  Speaker 1: The administration's international communication strategy might have benefited from mailing
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  Speaker 1: everyone a copy of the memo. Put New Mexico, France, Britain,
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  Speaker 1: and Congress side by side, and the central absurdity becomes
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  Speaker 1: impossible to miss. Different institutions, operating under different legal systems,
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  Speaker 1: examined the released material, and independently concluded that there were
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  Speaker 1: questions worth pursuing. They did not pursue all the same people,
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  Speaker 1: the same offenses, or the same theory. And that's precisely
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  Speaker 1: the point. Epstein's world crossed jurisdictions, financial systems, properties, political circles,
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  Speaker 1: professional networks, and national borders. So a competent examination was
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  Speaker 1: never going to fit neatly into one prosecution file. The
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  Speaker 1: July 2025 posture pretended the absence of one cinematic master
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  Speaker 1: conspiracy case meant the investigative universe had reached zero. The
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  Speaker 1: post-EFTA reality looks nothing like zero. It looks like trafficking
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  Speaker 1: inquiries in Paris, a public corruption investigation in London, criminal
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  Speaker 1: racketeering work in New Mexico, and continuing witness examination on
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  Speaker 1: Capitol Hill. Some of those paths may dead-end. Some may
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  Speaker 1: produce civil findings rather than criminal charges. And some may
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  Speaker 1: exonerate people whose names appear in ugly context. But dead-ends
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  Speaker 1: discovered after investigation... are very different from doors declared locked
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  Speaker 1: before anyone outside the DOJ was allowed to try the handle. Now,
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  Speaker 1: the administration's defenders have tried to escape this contradiction by
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  Speaker 1: moving the goalposts from nothing left to investigate to nothing
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  Speaker 1: released automatically proves a crime. Of course it doesn't. A
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  Speaker 1: name in a calendar is not a conviction, a photograph
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  Speaker 1: is not a trafficking charge, an email is not automatically criminal,
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  Speaker 1: and social proximity to Epstein is not proof of participation
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  Speaker 1: in his abuse. I don't think that anybody doing serious
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  Speaker 1: work on the case is pretending otherwise. But that standard
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  Speaker 1: was never the real dispute. The dispute was whether credible
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  Speaker 1: investigative avenues remained open after the government effectively told the
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  Speaker 1: country they had been exhausted. A financial trail can warrant
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  Speaker 1: inquiry without guaranteeing indictment. A witness can warrant an interview
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  Speaker 1: without guaranteeing prosecution. An email can justify a subpoena. without
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  Speaker 1: proving the sender guilty of anything. By pretending that anything
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  Speaker 1: short of an instant conviction is meaningless, the administration's apologists
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  Speaker 1: created a standard no investigation in American history could survive. Yo,
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  Speaker 1: the gaslighting charge stops being rhetorical when the dates are
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  Speaker 1: placed next to one another. The government said further disclosure
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  Speaker 1: was unwarranted, then Congress enacted a law forcing further disclosure.
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  Speaker 1: The government said it found no evidence that could predicate
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  Speaker 1: investigation of uncharged third parties. Then, New Mexico reopened the
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  Speaker 1: criminal investigation based on information emerging from previously sealed FBI material.
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  Speaker 1: The government acted as though the public fixation was unserious
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  Speaker 1: when its own files helped trigger French trafficking and financial investigations.
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  Speaker 1: The president called the controversy a hoax. Then British police
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  Speaker 1: used material from the American release in a criminal public
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  Speaker 1: corruption investigation. The department insisted its work had been exhaustive,
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  Speaker 1: then New Mexico, spent months fighting it for unredacted records
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  Speaker 1: needed to investigate conduct the state says occurred on its
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  Speaker 1: own soil. The administration wanted the public to accept the
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  Speaker 1: conclusion while resisting the very transparency that allowed outsiders to
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  Speaker 1: test that conclusion. Once the testing began, the neat story
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  Speaker 1: disintegrated almost immediately. No grand theories required to see the contradiction.
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  Speaker 1: You only need a calendar. And looking at that calendar
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  Speaker 1: brings us back to July 2025, when they gave us
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  Speaker 1: the memo. Or November, that gave us the 427 to
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  Speaker 1: 1 House vote and unanimous Senate action. Or how about January,
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  Speaker 1: when it gave us millions of pages. Or February, it
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  Speaker 1: gave us a reopened investigation in New Mexico and France.
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  Speaker 1: And the months that followed produced searches, subpoenas, lawsuits, interviews,
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  Speaker 1: and new allegations tested. by authorities. The timeline is more
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  Speaker 1: persuasive than any administration surrogate telling the public not to
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  Speaker 1: believe its lying eyes. It also explains why the hoax
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  Speaker 1: rhetoric has become so threadbare. A hoax does not normally
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  Speaker 1: require Congress to pass a transparency statute because lawmakers do
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  Speaker 1: not trust the executive branch's handling of the evidence. A
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  Speaker 1: hoax doesn't normally cause a state attorney general to reopen
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  Speaker 1: a criminal investigation based on federal investigative records. A hoax
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  Speaker 1: does not normally produce a lawsuit by the Attorney General
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  Speaker 1: against the Justice Department for access to unredacted evidence. A
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  Speaker 1: hoax does not normally lead Paris prosecutors to opening trafficking
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  Speaker 1: and financial crime investigations or Scotland Yard to execute search
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  Speaker 1: warrants in a related public corruption case. Those actions don't
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  Speaker 1: prove every suspicion about Epstein's orbit, but they prove something
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  Speaker 1: the administration plainly doesn't want to concede. There was more
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  Speaker 1: to investigate, and there still is. The administration can keep
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  Speaker 1: sneering at the issue, and its allies can keep pretending
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  Speaker 1: that anyone who asks hard questions is demanding that every
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  Speaker 1: famous name in an address book be hauled away in handcuffs.
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  Speaker 1: That caricature is useful because it avoids the actual record.
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  Speaker 1: The actual record contains a federal memo claiming no investigative
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  Speaker 1: predicate for uncharged third parties, a transparency law passed almost unanimously,
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  Speaker 1: roughly 3.5 million pages, the department says it released. More
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  Speaker 1: than 6 million pages initially collected as potentially responsive. A
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  Speaker 1: reopened New Mexico criminal investigation. A federal lawsuit against the DOJ.
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  Speaker 1: A racketeering and trafficking complaint against Epstein's longtime lawyer and accountant.
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  Speaker 1: Congressional witness examinations. French trafficking and financial probes. And a
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  Speaker 1: British public corruption investigation. These aren't vibes. They're dates, filings, statutes, interviews, searches, complaints,
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  Speaker 1: and official acts. And listen, people are free to argue
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  Speaker 1: about what each one will ultimately prove. What they are
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  Speaker 1: no longer free to argue with any credibility is that
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  Speaker 1: the investigative landscape was empty when Washington told us it was.
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  Speaker 1: The door was not kicked in and cleared. It was
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  Speaker 1: shut by people controlling the key, and the EFTA forced
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  Speaker 1: it back open. Now everyone can see investigators walking through
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  Speaker 1: rooms we were assured contained nothing. The only remaining hoax
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  Speaker 1: is the claim that we were foolish for asking, what
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  Speaker 1: was behind the door? All the information that goes with
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  Speaker 1: this episode can be found in the description box.