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Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Jeffrey Epstein is dead, though, believe it or not, there are still some people who claim he isn't. His shadow still looms over questions of power, accountability and abuse, as nearly six years after his apparent suicide in a Manhattan jail cell. Of course, that's something else that people ask about. Did he take his own life or it's something else.

Survivors of his trafficking are still pressing for the truth. They want Congress to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act, a bill that would force the Justice Department and other agencies to release thousands of pages of sealed records. Now, at a news conference yesterday in Washington, one survivor, Anouska De Georgiou, made a direct plea to President Trump.

Anouska De Georgiou: President Trump, you have so much influence and power in this situation. Please use that influence and power to help us because we need it now and this country needs it now.

Brian Lehrer: President Trump's response was to call the whole thing a Democratic hoax. Epstein's accusers are also, however, considering compiling their own list of the people they say were in Epstein's orbit after years of government inaction and releasing that list to the public. Meanwhile, the Trump administration is dismissing the entire saga as a hoax, despite the alleged victims insisting it's not.

After the news conference, under intense political pressure, just enough Republicans voted yes on a resolution relating to releasing more documents, but it's not binding. Where do things stand now with the push for transparency, the role of Congress and the continuing trauma for survivors and what they may say publicly about other people who may have abused them? Joining us is Jacob Shamsian, legal correspondent at Business Insider, who's been reporting on the Epstein saga. Hi, Jacob. Welcome back to WNYC.

Jacob Shamsian: Thanks so much for having me.

Brian Lehrer: Listeners, we can take some phone calls and texts. Did you watch any of yesterday's news conference? What questions do you have today about the Epstein files and this new push in Congress? Or tell us how you think the government should handle cases like this where other powerful people might be implicated? 212-433-WNYC, 433-9692 call or text.

Jacob, let's start with the central demand here. Survivors are urging Congress to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act. What exactly would that bill force into the open? How is it different from what the House voted for yesterday?

Jacob Shamsian: What the House voted for yesterday is basically to keep the status quo, which is that the House Oversight Committee, which says it's looking into this Epstein stuff, that they're getting these Epstein files from the DOJ, that they're subpoenaing various people affiliated with Epstein to sit for questions, and that'll just keep going on and they'll just do what they do.

What this bill does, which unfortunately hasn't gotten much traction even after yesterday, it would force the Justice Department to publish all its documents within 30 days with, of course, redactions for privacy. It's a much more forceful bill. This is what a lot of the survivors, what the accusers are getting behind.

Brian Lehrer: Let's hear directly from another survivor, Lisa Phillips, describing what she and others are now preparing to do.

Lisa Phillips: Us, Epstein survivors, have been discussing creating our own list. We know the names. Many of us were abused by them. Now together as survivors, we will confidentially compile the names we all know.

Brian Lehrer: Jacob, we can only imagine what that news conference might be like if survivors or alleged survivors are naming names of prominent people other than Jeffrey Epstein, who they will say abused them. Do you think we're headed for something like that as long as the files remain under lock and key?

Jacob Shamsian: I think that certainly what Lisa is teasing here, she's saying we really want this transparency. I think one thing that's really interesting here is it shows that these accusers, these victims, they're done waiting around. They've been pushing for transparency for years now. Jeffrey Epstein died in 2019. Ghislaine Maxwell was convicted in 2021.

Here we are in 2025, and we don't have transparency. Trump, who said that he would make these files public, has backtracked on that. Now what they're doing is they're saying, "Hey, look, we have information. We know things. We were there. We're going to put together our own lists, our own resources. We're going to be here together to put the story together on our own terms." Of course, Lisa Phillips did not say that you make this stuff public. That's an important part of this as well. [crosstalk]

Brian Lehrer: In that clip she said, "We will confidentially compile the names we know." Then what's the point of that if they don't make it public?

Jacob Shamsian: I think it's this tantalizing, maybe X Factor, maybe the DOJ might be compelled to act knowing that that exists. Also later at the press conference, a couple of the attorney who's working with Epstein victims, Brad Edwards, specifically said that he'd work with these victims in making their own list and that they'd also be willing to maybe talk about it with law enforcement if any prosecutor wants to examine any of these cases, that they'd work together. There is some maybe action there from behind the scenes that could happen, that could, at a later date, spill out into the open, potentially.

Brian Lehrer: Listener texts, "The survivors should release one name a day, or a fixed number of names until Congress acts." Another one texts, "Why is it so hard to put together and put out there a list of those that were at Epstein's houses, Island retreat or on his plane? Seems pretty basic." I guess in response to that listener, Jacob, it is important to say that just associating with Jeffrey Epstein doesn't mean that somebody committed sexual abuse of minors or anyone else, right?

Jacob Shamsian: Certainly not. He was a person who was very well connected, knew a lot of people, and certainly not all of them were sexual abusers. Itzhak Perlman was a violinist who flew on his airplane. There's all these random people from the arts, from politics, from finance, and just being in the same room as him certainly does not mean that you're a sexual abuser.

Brian Lehrer: About reading the names out loud, listener texts, "MTG, Marjorie Taylor Greene, promised to read the survivors list of criminals on the floor of the House, alleged criminals. She did promise that, didn't she?

Jacob Shamsian: She did. She said, "If these victims want to give me this list, then I will use this constitutionally protected power I have, which allows me to read stuff on the House floor without any legal consequence." She said she would use that to read the names, but that also has to come with the permission of these victims. We'll see if that goes anywhere.

Brian Lehrer: That leads us to the unusual alliances that have formed around the transparency bill, with progressives like Congressman Ro Khanna joining conservatives like Marjorie Taylor Greene. How did this coalition come together?

Jacob Shamsian: I think it's really important, and I think that just goes to show that this really isn't and does not have to be a partisan issue. It's become a partisan issue, I guess, because Trump, or someone in the Trump administration decided they didn't want to release these DOJ files anymore. Then the Democrats saw an opening to pressure him on it.

Then there is a split among Republicans, should we side with Trump in keeping these Epstein files away, or should we make them public, or should we go somewhere in the middle? It's become, like everything else in politics, unfortunately, this highly polarizing political issue. There's really nothing inherently political about knowing the truth and understanding what Jeffrey Epstein did and his sex trafficking operation.

I think this is what these different people come together, have been trying to say, is that this is not a political issue. This is an issue that really is about these victims who want to understand what they themselves went through. One of the victims said yesterday, and she was a person who spoke publicly for the first time, she was identified as Victim Number 1 in the indictment against Jeffrey Epstein before he died in jail, obviously.

She said, "I myself have not been able to get documents about my own situation from the Department of Justice. I am struggling to process what I went through because I still don't fully understand how this all came together." For something like that, that's not a partisan issue. I think that these Congress people have been really putting-- We know, we can say they have their own cynical motives, obviously. I think that it is important that we recognize that there's something beyond mere right or left going on here.

Brian Lehrer: Why aren't they releasing these files?

Jacob Shamsian: That is a great question. Maybe we can talk about what happens the other night, which is when this House Oversight Committee did purport to release these tens of thousands of files. It was honestly very confusing. As your listeners might remember, a moment ago we talked about how the House Oversight Committee is doing their own investigation into the Epstein files.

They subpoenaed the Justice Department for all their Epstein files. On Tuesday night, they released what they said was the first batch of documents that they got from them, which they said was 33,295 pages. I'm not going to stand here today and say I went through all of them, but it's very obvious, looking at them, that all this stuff has been released before. A lot of them are just public court records that have been public for years.

Very oddly, a lot of these documents were made into-- Each individual page is one separate document, which obviously makes it incredibly annoying to go through, especially considering that almost everything here was publicly filed to court in a single PDF that was text searchable, much more convenience, and they've somehow turned everything into one image.

There's some stonewalling here, either from the DOJ or the House Oversight Committee or both together. It's really quite unsatisfactory in my view, considering that all this is already public and they've made it in a less transparent format.

Brian Lehrer: On the politics, is it accurate to say the politics have generally flipped? Because it used to be people on the right, including Trump himself before he was president, who was pushing for the release of a so called Epstein client list because, I guess, he felt, and they felt it would fuel resentment of the establishment in a way that helped the political right, or that there might be prominent Democrats on any such client list if it actually exists. Now that it seems to be hurting Trump that this client list or just these files are being withheld, here's what he said yesterday after the survivors news conference.

Donald Trump: This is a Democrat hoax that never ends. It reminds me a little of the Kennedy situation. We gave him everything over and over again, more and more and more, and nobody's ever satisfied.

Brian Lehrer: Have we moved over the years, Jacob, from basically Republicans saying, "Hey, why don't you release these files?" To Republicans saying, "Hey, why are you asking us to release these files?"

Jacob Shamsian: That's a good question. I think it's a little more nuanced than that. I'm a legal reporter, I covered all these different Jeffrey Epstein related court cases. I'm not really a political observer in the same way you might be, Brian. I do think years ago this was not really a partisan issue. There was a great sense that the government was covering something up or not being transparent with Jeffrey Epstein.

We knew back in Florida, back in 2008, he got this very favorable plea deal. That wasn't really a partisan issue. His indictments in Manhattan years later was not really partisan issue. Wanting to understand what happened to him in jail when he died was not really a partisan issue. I do think ahead of the 2024 election, there was maybe a bit of a sentiments among pro-Trump people that this is part of how the government is rotten.

There's a big cover up happening, and this is the elites, and Trump is of course standing against the elites according to this narrative. I think there's that sentiment there. I also think that if you ask the average Joe on the street, "Do you think the government is hiding about something about Jeffrey Epstein and should they release more?" I think probably across the political spectrum they'd agree. They'd say yes to that question.

Now, of course, it has been filtered through this partisan lens. It definitely does seem like it's more of an issue that the left is eager to get answers on than the rights. I think still there's a broad base of a sense that the government should be releasing more and being more transparent about this.

Brian Lehrer: In so many cases, there's a distinction between an individual story of an individual or an individual controversy that gets spun one way and a larger systemic issue that gets spun another way. Here's a text from a listener who writes, "I heard a report yesterday outlining how the administration has defunded all the departments and programs that fight sex trafficking, including in FBI and police agencies."

Sure enough, here's a story from the news organization the 19th from July headline, Trump administration pulls back on work combating human trafficking, long a top GOP priority, says as Republicans reel from the fallout surrounding accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, advocates working on human trafficking issues say the administration has abandoned promises to prioritize the issue.

It continues, a key office charged by Congress with coordinating the federal government's work against human trafficking was gutted last Friday, the latest in a string of cuts across different agencies to the government's work on an issue that Republicans have long hailed as a top priority, and that was published in July. It's one thing to stand up and say, "Hey, we care about these Epstein victims." It's another thing to systemically gut the agency that works to prevent future human trafficking.

Jacob Shamsian: I've seen the same reports. I think one of the great ironies, Brian, is that you might recall earlier this year, the DOJ pulled all these people from across the DOJ to work on redacting these Epstein files. I heard from a source who's close to law enforcement back in March saying that they were unable to get the FBI to pay attention to this active sex abuse situation because all these people were busy working on redacting these Epstein files for public release.

They put a lot of resources into this taking away, in some cases from actual live sex trafficking issues because apparently people high up in the DOJ thought this was very important. Then they turned around and said, "Nevermind, we're not releasing it." In my mind, what was the point of all that? It seems like there were missed opportunities for actual law enforcement as well as obviously a missed opportunity for transparency in this Epstein situation specifically.

Brian Lehrer: Another listener texts, "Can you talk about all the missing jail footage showing up?" Do you know what that refers to?

Jacob Shamsian: Yes. You may recall earlier this year, among the small batch of Epstein files was released, the DOJ published, I think it was 12 hours, 24 hours, can't remember exactly, many hours of video footage, which I think a lot of people maybe not understand this. It was actually footage of a door outside the hallway, where the hallway that Jeffrey Epstein's cell block was.

The camera is in that door, but it's actually another door in the corner of that video footage, that is the hallway that you're supposed to be looking at. The point of this video footage is to show, "Look, no one is going in and out here. No one came in to secretly murder him or anything like that." There was a missing minute of that footage, which was confusing and strange, obviously.

In this new batch of files that were released earlier this week by the Oversight Committee, that missing minute is there. I don't know why it was missing in the first place. That also shows nothing happening. If you accept this, I think we can all pretty safely assume that no one snuck in from outside and murdered him unless they got out of the camera's view somehow, which I guess is technically possible, but I'm not going to bet money on that.

Brian Lehrer: There are a number of stories online today, like this one from the Guardian, release of "missing minute of Epstein video contradicts Bondi claim, Attorney General Bondi, that cameras stopped recording video taken outside Epstein's cell and the night he died as part of new materials released by the House Oversight Committee."

It says conspiracy theories leapt on the development as proof, the fact that there was a so called missing minute, that there was something suspicious about Epstein's death, fueled by Bondi's insistence at the time that the prison's TV system was routinely reset every 24 hours. That she told a cabinet meeting on July 8 meant every night's footage would feature a missing minute.

CBS reported later that month that there was no blackout in the recording, and that the Justice Department Bureau of Prisons and the FBI had a full version, including the previously unaccounted for 60 seconds. Pam Bondi doesn't come off well in this whole story, does she? There's that, and there's the thing that she said earlier this year, "I have the client list sitting on my desk." Then she had to come out when there was more pressure and say, "No, there is no such thing as a client list. I wasn't referring to a client list when I said a client list."

Jacob Shamsian: These shifting explanations from Bondi, it seems like she really doesn't understand what's going on sometimes. Like when she made that remark about the client list, that's, I think, one of another big reasons that makes a lot of people think that they're covering something up, that there's something that's not right here.

Brian Lehrer: Obviously, on this prospect of survivors, or maybe Marjorie Taylor Greene will do it for them, as she asserts, but of survivors naming names of people who they would allege sexually abused them, maybe in acts of pedophilia when they were minors, maybe even if they weren't minors, it still matters.

One reason for them to be hesitant about that is, as some of them have said, they fear lawsuits or retaliation if they name people who haven't been criminally charged, if they can't produce a lot of evidence themselves. One last question, lawyers for survivors have said releasing financial records involving J.P. Morgan and Deutsche Bank is critical. Why are those banks central to the Epstein story?

Jacob Shamsian: I actually think that these records, and me as a journalist who's followed this case for a long time, are really the most important and central remaining piece that will help us understand what was going on with Epstein. These records are important because we know that Jeffrey Epstein paid people. He had various household employees who he paid to do various things for him, which may have meant ferrying people around to different homes.

He paid Ghislaine Maxwell a lot of money, more than $32 million over the years, according to court records that we found out in a criminal trial. We also know that he paid victims. He paid a lot of money to victims, presumably to keep them quiet, but also to keep them coming back to him. It was part of his abuse. All these transfers went through these banks, Deutsche Bank and J.P. Morgan, according to lawsuits that were later settled in which they did not admit any wrongdoing.

A lot of these actual transactions were obtained through this discovery process, but these cases were settled, and these documents are under seal. We know the Treasury Department has certain records that mirror these internal bank records. We know the DOJ maybe even has a bigger cache of these records themselves. We know that the DOJ also got Jeffrey Epstein's various hard drives when they raided his homes in Manhattan, the US versus [unintelligible 00:22:41]

I'm sure there are emails and bank records on those hard drives. Just like you might do a bank transaction, then you get an email confirmation about it in your email inbox. Having these records and understands how money was changing hands, where they moved hands, who they moved hands to, will really help us get a bigger picture of how Jeffrey Epstein did what he did, and certainly maybe who else was deciding to look away, taking a blind eye, or perhaps even maybe knew more about what was going on. I do think that this money trail element is supremely important and is largely misunderstood or not understood enough in the public imagination.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you for shining a light on that. Jacob Shamsian, legal correspondent at Business Insider. Thanks for talking about this whole topic and you're reporting on it with us.

Jacob Shamsian: Thank you so much for having me.

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