“Inside the ‘Epstein Files’ Dump: What’s Real, What’s Redacted” | The Brief | PragerU

Pizzagate, Wayfair, Epstein didn't kill himself. Help me and help our audience separate fact from fiction. This story is so bizarre. There's a lot of information that sheds a great deal of light on exactly those questions. Are we really expected to believe that a man who had the heads of state on his Rolodex solicited minors for himself but never trafficked them to others? I'd be the first one to have a full forensic audit of how Epstein got every penny because he was certainly an enigmatic figure. His death shows a lot of strange irregularities. Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself? And welcome back to The Brief. We are joined today by Michael Tracy. Michael is an American journalist, political commentator, and I would say one of the most foremost experts on the Epstein conspiracy saga, whatever you want to call it. Michael, thank you so much for joining us. You know, I never consciously chose to become one of the foremost Epstein experts, but this is my fate in life. Nobody's perfect. So Michael, let's get straight into it. I want you to help me and help our audience separate fact from fiction. And I think the best way we go about doing that is first and foremost, discuss these politics of semantics. And by that, I mean, there has been so much terminology in the mainstream media the last few days. What are the Epstein files? What is the Epstein client list? What are these three and a half million pages from the Department of Justice? Can you help us make sense of these different terms and what specifically we're referring to when we talk about the Epstein list? What are the Epstein files? Well, they're actually statutorily delineated what they are after the passage in November of the officially titled Epstein Files Transparency Act, which codified a 30 day timeline for the Department of Justice to produce all records in its possession that relate to Jeffrey Epstein and or Dylane Maxwell. And that's a pretty capacious category because it goes well beyond just anything that might be strictly related to Epstein and or Maxwell. It's hard to know. I just don't understand how this latest tranche was released. And we're told by the Deputy Attorney General that something like 2 million files. I don't understand how everybody on the internet was able to draw such confident insta conclusions about what these files signify. You're telling me you like painstakingly already went through all 2 million. I guess I'm a stickler for actually looking at the evidence before I formulate a sweeping conclusion. So the Epstein files, I mean, it can mean a lot of things to a lot of people. I think primarily what people mean when they're referring to that is now these records that are being produced that have been produced by the Department of Justice. But the lawyers or the victims have been strenuously arguing to federal judges, especially Judge Berman and Engelmeyer in New York, that the Department of Justice ought to impose the most expansive possible redactions on these files. So it's ironic, right? The Epstein survivors or victims are thought to be the foremost advocates demanding full transparency and disclosure of these files, right, to get justice or what have you. But behind the scenes, they've been demanding for months that incredibly onerous criteria be put into effect to ensure that as few files are actually released unredacted as possible. And sure enough, when the first round came out, I don't know if you recall, in late December, and you saw entire files, giant black boxes of full-page redactions, people immediately assume, because of course they don't look at any of the underlying legal materials or any of the arguments that have been made in federal court, they just assume, this must be yet another phase of the nefarious cover-up to protect all these high-profile, pedophilic perpetrators. Meanwhile, the same lawyers who are writing these letters on behalf of the purported victims demanding the incredibly capacious redactions, they're also the ones who are leading the charge with the civil litigation against major financial institutions, against prominent individuals to extract the largest possible settlements. So what do they not want? They don't want any material to come out that could potentially undercut their case for these giant class-action settlements. I mean, the Epstein industry, as I take into calling it, is nearly a $1 billion industry at this point in terms of the massive payouts that have gone out to lawyers and alleged victims and all manner of others. So it's a mess. I don't know if I clarified much of that opening answer, but start. You did. And I do want to talk about the cash settlements, and I do want to talk about the Transparency Act, but just before I do, I want to clarify, though, is there or has there ever been an Epstein client list whereby on some piece of paper, on some document somewhere, Jeffrey Epstein was writing down the names of individuals, the heads of state who were trafficking women? Has that ever been a thing? To my knowledge, you know, the Epstein story has been a story to one degree or another for quite a long time now. You could date it back to 2006, if you really wanted, in terms of the legal imbroglio that engulfed Epstein and then, you know, obviously escalated dramatically over the years. But even if we go back to, say, 2015, when the first real salacious claims were made in a court filing by one of the marquee alleged victims, Virginia Roberts Gufres, around pedophilic sex trafficking and blackmail that ensnared prominent individuals, which is kind of like the crux of the theory at this point, right, as I call it, like a folklore or a mythology. The whole concept of an Epstein client list, as I can ascertain, only really originated like during the Biden administration, when it tended to be the case that Republican-leaning or right-wing media personalities were the most exercised about the Epstein story. So there was never any basis for it, anything like it even existing, except in like the fever-brained imaginations of people on the Internet. That, I think, was more of like a right-coded invention. So let me respectfully push back then. Jeffrey Epstein is a guy with no college degree. He was teaching math in New York. And within a span of basically a couple of years, Leslie Wexner, one of the wealthiest Americans, is giving him millions of dollars. Epstein has his own private island. He has his own private jet. He has the former prime minister of Israel sleeping over at his house. Who was Jeffrey Epstein? How did he get his money? How did he become such an influential figure with heads of state, with policymakers, with movers and shakers, if by all estimations, he's kind of just a random guy? Yeah. Well, and just to be clear, for my own purposes, I don't go out and say, there is no client list. There is no blackmail. What I do is try to do a more kind of epistemically rigorous version, to use a sort of obnoxiously highfalutin term, which is that there's no credible evidence for any of this. Like, I like to think of myself as trying to at least strive to be evidence-based. Okay. But how did he get his money? How did he get his wealth? Okay. So look, I mean, there's a lot of information that has even just recently come into the public record that sheds a great deal of light on exactly those questions. I'm not saying we have comprehensive, absolute, thorough, and complete information on every aspect of Epstein's life or every penny of wealth that he accumulated. I've always said, since people have constantly asked me this question, I'd be the first one who would be eager to have a full forensic audit of how Epstein got every penny, because he was certainly an enigmatic figure. You mentioned Leslie Wexner. Yes. Epstein does become acquainted with Leslie Wexner and ends up essentially being the personal money manager for Wexner. So that explains a large amount of the wealth that he ultimately accumulated over the course of his life, because Leslie Wexner, who was like a titan of industry, essentially. He was the owner of women's clothing retailers, Victoria's Secret, the Limited, many other holdings, real estate, et cetera. Now, Wexner was one of the wealthiest people in the United States. He was a multibillionaire in the late 80s and 1990s. So just for inflation, right? If you're getting 1% of his yearly revenues over the course of, I don't know, 10, 15 years, I mean, I think that kind of adds up. Yes, he did have connections with high society. We know that Epstein pled guilty in 2008 for soliciting prostitution for minors. In 2019, he was indicted by the federal government for trafficking minors. I mean, are we really expected to believe that a man who had the heads of state on his Rolodex solicited minors for himself, but never trafficked them to others? It's not a matter of belief. That's what the evidence shows. And now we have far more evidence than ever before on the saga of Jeffrey Epstein. I mean, what more do people want? The DOJ says that they deployed hundreds of lawyers to work 24-7 over Christmas, Hanukkah, New Year's to scour every little nook and cranny of every government repository to find anything that could be even tangentially connected to Jeffrey Epstein and or Ghislaine Maxwell pursuant to the imperatives of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. And they put out millions of files. Now, I'm not saying it's totally comprehensive. I mean, I always want more. Like I always have FOIA requests to various government agencies to demand to try to cajole the government to concealing less information, including on the Epstein story. But like, we now have a lot of evidence. Okay. So you say, are we supposed to believe that he only trafficked women to himself? Okay. I don't really operate in the realm of belief. And we can have a theological or religious discussion on the nature of belief if you'd like, but this is a little, this is more empirical to me. And look, Epstein in the 2007-2008 prosecution was first charged in Florida on a state level with an indictment for solicitation of prostitution. Many of them who were not of legal age in Florida, so meaning below the legal age of consent, which is 18 in Florida, highest in the country, they would be told by other girls to lie about their ages and say that they were 18 so they could go to Epstein's house in Palm Beach. So I know you've been critical of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. And it's interesting because only four Republicans joined with the House Democrats to sign the discharge petitions. One of them was Congresswoman Nancy Mace, who was on our show talking about the Epstein list. So can I just get your quick take? Why were you critical of the Transparency Act? And in fact, there's video of you outside of the Capitol building. You were invited by Congressman Ro Khan, if I'm not mistaken, to document the Epstein Files Transparency Act with some of the alleged victims. So just in a nutshell, what is so problematic about an act that if I'm an outside observer, Epstein Transparency Act, that sounds good to me. Well, I did something that I guess is rather antiquated, which is that I read the bill when it was first introduced. I read the text. And I'm on principle or in spirit very much in favor of full disclosure. And that was the ground on which I had criticisms of the Epstein Files Transparency Act that did not actually provide for full disclosure because it included gigantic carve-outs and exceptions that would inevitably, I said at the time, before any files were released pursuant to this act, would result in hugely expansive and excessive redactions at the behest of supposedly deferring to these benighted victims. And that was totally contrary to the basic notion of transparency. Why is it that anybody who can just claim that they're a victim, again, not adjudicated, there's been one victim total who was ever formally adjudicated in an adversarial criminal proceeding to have been a bona fide victim. It was one person in that Florida case. She was 17, nearly 18, when she told a police detective that she had a consensual sexual encounter with Epstein. That's the one victim who's ever been adjudicated as such in a formal criminal proceeding vis-a-vis Jeffrey Epstein. And yet, anybody could just come out of the woodworks and say that something that happened to them, I don't know, 25 years ago, where they accepted a free vacation to a luxury island in the Caribbean, they can now just recast in hindsight as, quote, trafficking, which is an incredibly amorphous concept. That's why prosecutors love it so much. They can stretch it to mean anything that they want it to mean. Why should they be able to undermine this prerogative for transparency that I thought we all agreed upon? Interesting. Right? So if you look at the text of that bill, it includes exceptions for victim-identifying information, which is pretty broad. It's not just the name of the victim. People would say, what do you mean? You want just the name of the victim to come out? Well, that's not it. It's any information that could be surmised by the DOJ could in some way be tangentially connected to an alleged victim such that it might be revealing of their personal details in some way. So a lot of these files, I always told people, are going to be essentially victim files in that, of course, if the FBI is investigating whether a victim was in fact a victim and they could then charge Jeffrey Epstein for having victimized this person, they're going to develop a comprehensive file going through many personal details related to this alleged victim. Whether or not they had any information that any particular woman was a victim of anything or they didn't do the slightest, take the slightest effort to examine their claims in any way or even understand whether they could be properly categorized as a victim, any woman was going to be presumptively redacted in the files with the exception of Ghislaine Maxwell. So Ghislaine Maxwell, the most prominent or infamous accomplices of Jeffrey Epstein, her father was Robert Maxwell, who has credible accusations that he was involved with foreign intelligence, especially the Mossad. We already mentioned Leslie Wexner, who is the most or one of the most prominent Jewish Zionist billionaires who was funding Jeffrey Epstein. We know that former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak not only was staying over at Epstein's townhouse on the Upper East Side of New York, but they were in regular communication. So let's address the elephant in the room here. Are we expected to believe that Jeffrey Epstein was not an agent of foreign intelligence, especially Mossad? Because again, if I'm an outside observer, I just see that there's too much evidence supporting the fact that Epstein clearly had connections to Mossad. So where am I wrong on that? I've always said that I would never deny flatly that Epstein had any, quote, ties or connections to any Israeli intelligence services or state agencies. Again, by mere fact of his well-documented and well-known relationship with Ehud Barak, as a former Prime Minister of Israel, Ehud Barak would have previously run the Mossad, right? So if he's this close personal contact of Epstein, it stands to reason that Epstein is only not too far removed from passing along information that he might think would behoove some faction within the Israeli government. Epstein also flew around on his private jet with Bill Clinton. He was also partied for years with Donald Trump and Mar-a-Lago and Manhattan. So he obviously has these connections and ties to lots of prominent individuals. Prince Andrew. There's even talk now after this latest production of Epstein having even more extensive, quote, ties to Russia or Putin. I don't see much evidence that he actually had personal dealings with Putin, but Russian state actors on some level. So, yeah, there are these ties, but the question then becomes, OK, so what do these ties supposedly signify? Like, to what end are these connections supposed to have been, you know, marshaled, right? People often will, like, phrase their sort of interrogation of me here in the form of, like, a rhetorical question. Because what I would ask in turn in giving my own question is, OK, so let's say that these connections did exist between Jeffrey Epstein and some official in the Israeli government. We already know basically that that did in fact occur given the Barack relationship. OK, so tell us, like, what are we supposed to therefore conclude from that? Because the underlying presumption or the hunch, right, is that, of course, this is all supposed to signify that Epstein was running a child sex trafficking, pedophilic blackmail operation at the direction of the intelligence service. Like, that's really the main reason why we're talking about Jeffrey Epstein right now in February of 2026. Not because he might have had some, like, anodyne business relationship with a former Israeli prime minister. Explain to me how that adds up. People just want to make these leaps of logic because they want the mystery to persist. That's what makes the story so exciting. Right. That's how they could do this guilt by association routine where, like, everybody from Noam Chomsky to Steve Bannon can be fervently censured just because they exchanged some chortling emails with Epstein or, like, socialized with him or something. And it's a moral panic. It's a mass hysteria. And, yeah, when you say that, I can attest that people will assume that means, oh, you must be defending child sex abuse. I mean, are you kidding me? The nice thing about the story is that it actually seems that there's far less pervasive child sex abuse than people, like, for some weird reason, like, want to believe exists. So that should be a welcome revelation to people. But they somehow need it to exist to somehow undergird their whole blinkered worldview on this subject. And that's exactly the point. You know, anyone who is convicted of child sex crimes, throw the book at them. You know, my opinion, give them the chair or throw away the key, whatever it may be. But the theme I'm noticing from you, which is why I appreciate the conversation, is we're not necessarily saying yes or no. What we are saying is, where is the evidence that supports the claim? So, for example, when COVID happened in 2020, I thought the COVID lab leak theory was a conspiracy. And then a few years later, there was more and more evidence that suggested maybe it wasn't. On the opposite end, when I was younger, I thought that JFK was absolutely murdered by the Mossad or the Mafia. But I never really had evidence to back that up. And now I'm not of that opinion. EDKH, Epstein didn't kill himself. That is a hashtag I've seen all over social media. People would put it on banners over, like, highway overpasses. Yes, literally. So let me just play devil's advocate just for a moment. There are weird security failures. So there are two cameras in front of his cell that mysteriously malfunctions. The guards in Manhattan failed to check on him as required on the night he died. There are obvious suspicious circumstances. He was previously taken off of suicide watch list despite him trying to commit suicide prior. He was alone in his cell. And then obviously it's widely believed, and I know we're going to take issue or umbrage with the fact that I said believed, but it was widely believed that he had compromising information about elite individuals giving away many powerful people as perhaps a motive for his death. So let me just ask you point blank. Did Jeffrey Epstein kill himself? So this might come as, I guess, maybe a pleasant surprise to you or to the audience who think that they could peg me in being a real downer on all the most exciting aspects of the story. But his death in federal custody in August of 2019 is the one area of this story, one aspect of the story where I'm much less certain that the maximalist, let's say, conspiratorial views are untrue. You know, again, I'm evidence based. There's a lot of evidence. You point to some that shows a lot of strange irregularities around the circumstances of his death. For example, he reported in July of 2019, so like about three weeks before he ended up dead, that he was attacked by his cellmate. He reported that he had been attacked to the prison psychologist, but then he retracted it. And so it's just very unclear what exactly was going on. He was adamant when asked that he was not suicidal. He was engaged in pretty vigorous discussions with his defense lawyers about their strategy for pre-trial motions at that phase. But ultimately, you would think a trial. There was even like rumors or talk that I just saw recently in one of these files that there was even maybe some preliminary discussions around a plea agreement. But he had some potentially workable arguments. The sort of fallacy is that one can recognize that there are some tentatively legitimate grounds to suspect that perhaps there was some foul play in the manner of his death. And actually, Epstein's brother, Mark Epstein, who's like sole survivor, essentially, who had to come and handle his autopsy, basically settle his affairs once he died because Epstein had no spouse or no children. So it fell to his brother. Mark Epstein is convinced, and I've spoken to him personally, and he's not an irrational person. He's pretty actually measured in what he says. He's not just like somebody who does this recreational conspiracizing. He's convinced that there was foul play or what he's convinced of is that the autopsy, like the impact of the death on the body was not consistent with suicide, more consistent with homicide. Now, having said that, one does not have to therefore make the leap that if it's a reasonable possibility that he might have actually been killed rather than committed suicide, it doesn't have to be that the Mossad or, I don't know, the KGB or like the French legionnaires or whomever stormed into the federal detention facility and off them because they are protecting these high-profile clients who are going to get implicated in child sex trafficking crimes if Epstein had his day in court or something. Think about what Epstein's reputation was at the time, rightly or wrongly. I think wrongly because really there's no evidence that he actually had pedophilic attraction to any females. If we're going to use what has been the political definition of pedophilia, not that I love litigating the definition of pedophilia, but if you look in the medical literature, it's a sexual attraction to prepubescent children. Epstein never evinced any sign of that. But his reputation in prison at that point would have been that he was maybe the most notorious pedophile in the United States, maybe in all of American history. If you know anything about prison culture in the United States, pedophiles are at mortal threat 24-7 of being killed, murdered because an inmate who is seen to tolerate their presence, they themselves could then face violent reprisal. Epstein had a cellmate who's this guy basically in the street prison gang of raging corrupt cops. My theory, and I can't prove this, is that I got to think that if this guy, if his buddies found out that he was the cellmate of the most notorious pedophile in America and he didn't try to kick his ass or maybe even kill him, he himself would have got his ass kicked. It could have been a lower level conspiracy, maybe with the complicity of the prison guards who often collude with prisoners all across the country in every prison for all manner of things, ranging from very picky to more serious stuff in terms of covering up crimes or smuggling drugs or looking the other way when something goes down. You could see a potentially lower level conspiracy taking place that maybe served to facilitate the homicide of Epstein. Now, I think probably if I had to, if you put a gun to my head and you ask me, did he kill himself? I would probably say, yes, he did. I'm just saying that there's reasonable doubt. One of the most hilarious ironies of this whole thing is that it has united Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz. Both Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz are now being besmirched as craven enablers of Jeffrey Epstein, where I'm sure you're probably aware they have been the most bitter rivals probably of any public figures for decades. They were at each other's throats doing these hardcore debates. I mean, they loathe each other. And yet this story is so bizarre, which again is why I cannot begrudge people for being fascinated. I'm fascinated, probably to an unhealthy extent. We got to the point where everybody from Noam Chomsky and Alan Dershowitz are now both tarnished by their association with Jeffrey Epstein. It's so strange. And last thing, Donald Trump was right about this. Donald Trump wasn't right when he would just blur it out on Truth Social. The entire Epstein thing is a hoax, right? What does that even mean? That's a very vague way of even framing this. But he was right in that the maximalist theories that kind of drove this story and continue to and make it such an enduring object of public outrage and intrigue and fascination, those maximalist theories are just not grounded in any credible evidence. And I think Donald Trump probably had a unique perspective in being able to ascertain that, because he did have a personal long-standing relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. He even knew Gilead Maximal decently well. And a lot of these charges that were lodged against them and then the broader charges that people made in terms of their whole mythological outlook on this thing did not coexist with, I think, his direct firsthand experience. And also, when people were wondering, why is he so hell-bent against the disclosure of the Epstein files? Because he did oppose the Epstein Files Transparency Act for months, and it only got through because the four renegade Republicans signed the discharge petition and it led to a giant falling out with Marjorie Taylor Greene, which I wouldn't have expected a year ago. So that was pretty weird. But one of his arguments, to the extent that he really articulated one, and it's not that cogent when he does articulate it, but the thrust of what he would say is that if this stuff gets dumped out en masse indiscriminately, it's going to wrongfully impugn lots of people as pedophilic sex criminals who committed no crime, for whom there is no evidence that they committed any crime whatsoever. Because we know a lot of these marquee victims did make false claims. Dershowitz is one example. The signature victim, Virginia Roberts-Gouffray, she lodged these sensational claims against Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, and a scattershot assortment of others back in 2014. And Dershowitz adamantly denied that he ever had sexually abused this person, that he never met her. And he was 100% vindicated. I don't agree with Alan Dershowitz on some things, especially Israel. I agree with him on civil liberties issues. Whether you agree or disagree with anything he's ever done in his career is sort of irrelevant. The man was totally vindicated on this score. And Virginia Roberts-Gouffray, she had to admit that she made false statements about a whole host of people. And she's the one who had this bestselling memoir. So Trump was right in that, yes, there is a danger in that these files are wrongfully defaming people. We're seeing it now. Domshofsky, really? I mean, Musk got raked over the coals because of some email. So I'm enough in favor of disclosure that I do think it's an unfortunately necessary cost that these materials might wrongly besmirch people. Because this has become such a dominant political and legal and cultural issue, it does require some unique remediation. But again, we're not really getting the full disclosure because the victims and their advocates think that they're entitled to this carve out where the American public is deprived of full disclosure. But these alleged victims who are now in their 30s at minimum, they're not children anymore. They're entitled to perpetual concealment of records that are central to how this whole thing has played out. I think what has been lost in the Epstein saga is people are, to your point, they are producing beliefs without producing evidence. So to my audience, whether you agree, whether you disagree, certainly check out Michael's social media, especially his sub stack, really interesting stuff. Michael, thank you again for making the time and all your insight. We really appreciate it. I enjoyed it. Well, thank you so much for watching. Make sure to like and subscribe if you have any questions, comments, or if you want to see a particular topic addressed, make sure to put it down in the comments and feel free to keep the conversation going through all of your questions or yellings or rants. Find me on social media. Just type in Shabbos Kestenbaum. You're not going to find many other Shabbos Kestenbaums. And I'm looking forward to speaking with you all very soon.