Jeffrey Epstein is in the news again, this time after the House Oversight Committee released a whole library of his correspondence over the years. On one hand, the rare glimpse into the world of elite power brokerage this offers is fascinating. Like most rich people, Epstein and his conspirators clearly believed that they were above the law and often talked about their blackmail schemes in perfectly blunt terms. For example, in a letter to Epstein, journalist Michael Wolff says of Donald Trump, “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house . . . you could save him, generating a debt.”
Writing for the American Prospect, David Dayen has argued that Epstein is, at heart, a story of elite impunity for their crimes. He lays out the evidence about the human trafficking ring he ran and the endless number of rich people who were implicated in it; he then summarizes this as “a set of crimes perpetrated by a wealthy guy [that] reached into the heights of the political and economic stratosphere, and went largely unpunished for decades.”
The criminal dimension of the Epstein case is important, but I think Dayen’s focus on it misses something crucial: that much of what Epstein did was completely legal.
Epstein’s human trafficking organization depended entirely on the wealth management industry (WMI). It was how he obtained the capital to build it, and it was how he hid his activities from the authorities. And none of this was an abuse of the industry; it is precisely how the WMI is designed to work. Nor is it an abuse of the law, because both American and international law has been carefully designed to accomodate the WMI.
Dayen mentions in passing that “the source of Epstein’s wealth” comes from obtaining power of attorney over the estate of Les Wexner, “from which he appropriated bunches of money” — but this is easy to misread as a euphemism for theft. In fact, Epstein was Wexner’s personal money manager, and his “appropriation” of…
Auteur: Carl Beijer
