It is possible to see the Party’s Epstein energy as less of a script-flipping than a natural evolution. Some Democrats I interviewed, including Pat Dennis, the president of the Democratic super PAC American Bridge 21st Century, insisted that they’ve been concerned about Epstein for years; Chuck Schumer, the Senate Minority Leader, has claimed that he pushed for the release of the files in 2019, following Epstein’s arrest. (Though the “Epstein files” didn’t really exist as a unified political concept back then, Schumer did call for clarity with respect to Epstein’s lenient 2008 prosecution—and gave away sums that Epstein had donated to his past campaigns.) More broadly, Democrats’ current Epstein rhetoric could be said to echo the righteous fury that they expressed at the height of the #MeToo movement, during Trump’s first term. Less charitable observers, especially on the right, might cast it as the latest iteration of a years-long effort to smear Trump. (Schumer and others have certainly used the story to troll the President, calling him “Epstein Don” and asking, for instance, whether Epstein was “THE REAL REASON TRUMP HAD KIMMEL CANCELED?!,” exemplifying the extraordinarily annoying Democratic tic of interpreting everything Trump does as an attempt to distract from the files.) Dennis pointed out to me that the “cliché Resistance libs” who seized on the Mueller story are now seizing on the Epstein story, because they tend to “glom on” to whatever is prominently in the news.
I think that there are elements of truth to all these views. But, as the story has developed, the Democratic response has increasingly suggested less patience for the process-oriented guardrails of Trump 1.0. Mitchell told me that, once the files started to be released, lawmakers who might initially have been reluctant to take up the issue were, “like, ‘Wait, what?!’ ” (“I don’t know if this is a never-ending buffet of crime and pedophilia,” Mitchell added. “But it is something that Democrats are looking at and realizing that there’s just a lot more there than they ever expected.”) Recently, Democrats in Congress helped to force the resignation of the California representative Eric Swalwell, just days after he was accused of raping a staffer (a claim he denies)—an outcome that they likely would have sought prior to this Epstein moment but not, perhaps, with such lightning speed, and without waiting for the House Committee on Ethics or a court to weigh in first. In the aftermath of Swalwell’s departure, Summer Lee, a progressive congresswoman, told the Intercept that the Epstein story has exposed how deeply the existing mechanisms for seeking justice “are failing us—all while protecting perpetrators with money, connections, or status. That legacy demands more from all of us right now.”
The liberal discourse that surrounded the Mueller probe was hardly free of the conspiratorial or the crude—I’m sorry to have to bring the alleged Trump pee tape back to your attention—but the probe itself, and Democrats’ faith in it, was broadly rooted in the idea that the legal system could hold Trump to account. If those were the days of Mueller as matinée idol, what I and others liked to call the Mueller-industrial complex of legal pundits filled the prime-time hours by nerding out over D.O.J. arcana and prosecutorial procedure.
Mueller veneration—and the wider invocation of “norms” that defined this era of liberal commentary—was often toe-curling, and turned out to be naïve. But norms themselves aren’t all bad, and, as the Epstein-files story has unfolded, I’ve fretted about those which have been overridden: most centrally, the standard D.O.J. aversion to publishing millions of scarcely vetted documents in which the vast majority of people named haven’t been charged with a crime, and are, in many cases, victims, witnesses, or bystanders. The risks of this—in a case linked inextricably to fantastical thinking, in a country with a political-violence problem—have always seemed obvious to me, and being concerned about them doesn’t have to mean making excuses for the very rich people whose stomach-churning (if, again, mostly noncriminal) conduct has been exposed. Democracies have other ways of holding such people to account. Good journalism, for starters, involves careful vetting, and has been a prime mover of the wider Epstein saga.
