No List, No Revelations, No Plot—Just Epstein The only real mystery left in the Epstein saga is why so many refuse to believe there’s no mystery left. By Roger Kimball
https://amgreatness.com/2025/07/13/no-list-no-revelations-no-plot-just-epstein/
In the moderately large compendium of things I do not care about, details of the depravity of the late Jeffrey Epstein occupy a random page or two.
I had never heard of the “financier” and sex-trafficking impresario until shortly before his final encounters with the law in 2019. Like many, I received the news that he committed suicide in a New York jail in August of that year with a dollop of incredulity. Where were the jailers? Why was there a missing spot on the videotape just when the deed was done? Had Epstein threatened Hillary Clinton? What about that picture of Bill Clinton in a blue dress that was found in Epstein’s New York home?
There was plenty of food for doubt.
Unlike many, however, my incredulity was seasoned with indifference.
Okay, Epstein was a creep of the first order. He had attracted a bunch of famous men to his Caribbean island for sex romps with (mostly) underage girls. He apparently liked to videotape the proceedings. Why? In order to blackmail those stars of stage and screen was the consensus, natch. But did he?
I was glad that Epstein was nabbed by the law. I hoped his victims found recompense. But in the scheme of things, The Saga of Jeffrey Epstein was a narrative I was pleased to absorb in a highly distilled, cheat-sheet version. I’d lived through such entertainments as the anatomies of Bill Clinton’s odd taste in cigars. Epstein was worse, but from the point of view of the spectator’s interest, it seemed cut from the same bolt of cloth.
I understand that the public’s appetite for scandal is a hardy perennial. The story of who is doing what to whom—especially if the “who”s are celebrities—is calculated to give prurient interest the gratifying cover of “the public’s right to know,” not to mention an opportunity to indulge in a little tongue-clucking moral outrage.
Donald Trump campaigned, in small part, on getting to the bottom of the Epstein scandal. The question of how the gilt-edged lowlife died continued to circulate, but the main point of interest now prompted two larger questions. Was Epstein working for someone? The CIA, perhaps? The FBI? Some enterprising yarn-spinners have suggested Mossad. I wondered whether the mastermind was Colonel Sanders, an innocent-seeming old chap, true, but it is always the least likely who are the most likely, right?
The word that one heard most often as the story of Epstein matured was “list.” Surely, he kept a list of the rich and famous who came to his little bit of paradise in the Caribbean. So it was a marked deflationary moment last week when Attorney General Pam Bondi released a DOJ memo that contained the sad news that 1) Jeffrey Epstein did die by his own hand and 2) the DOJ had discovered no list, not even of any kind.
This systemic review revealed no incriminating “client list.” . . . There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.
What a letdown. Midway through the first season, the latest blockbuster is cancelled. Many people, including several friends, were not taking no for an answer. Tom Fitton of Judicial Watch, for example, pooh-poohed the memo and noted that Judicial Watch, “in addition to its ongoing Epstein lawsuits … is now independently investigating this mess.”
What do you think? One item that has been made a lot of is that AG Pam Bondi claimed back in February 2025 that she had Epstein’s file “on my desk.” Had she seen anything incriminating? “Not yet.” Later, after reviewing the file, she said it was full of lots of graphic pornography, including child pornography; those files will never be released.
But there was no list. How could that be? Well, there is a difference between a “file” and a “list.” Perhaps the two terms were conflated by a media eager for dirt. Many media outlets spoke, without warrant as far as I have been able to discover, of Epstein’s “little black book” full of the names of his randy clients. But would someone like Jeffrey Epstein maintain such an incriminating document, embossed, perhaps, with the legend “Candidates for Blackmail”?
I rather doubt it. And that brings me to the word “conspiracy.” Is the whole drama of the Jeffrey Epstein story a conspiracy, with shadowy government/business/celebrity figures pulling the strings in the background?
Or is it merely a conspiracy theory, i.e., a tale fabricated by people who want to believe in a nefarious puppet master in the background and are determined to go on believing it, evidence be damned?
I should note for the record that there are such things as real, legitimate, bona fide conspiracies. Just ask Calpurnia. There was lots of talk about a conspiracy against hubby’s life. She found out on the Ides of March, 44 B.C., that it was a conspiracy in fact, not a “conspiracy theory,” the word “theory” in this context meaning “made-up,” not true, la-la land.
But in this instance, I suspect that the commentator Hugh Hewitt is correct. Those peddling the “there-has-to-be-a-client-list” narrative, he wrote a few days back, have set themselves up for disappointment.
When Jeffrey Epstein took his own life on August 10, 2019, the circumstances were so bizarre that, instantly, conspiracy theories were hatched as to who had had him killed and why, along with how they made it into his cell and disguised the murder as a suicide.
Because of that original enormous leap from known fact—Epstein was dead—to the unsubstantiated theory that he was murdered and all that followed from that ridiculous lead of logic, many millions of hours have been wasted in chat rooms and Reddit threads as well as on better-known podcasts.
Now all the speculation and theorizing are reduced to ashes and wasted time, and many, many dealers in the conspiracy trade are going to be not only deeply disappointed but also very likely to lose money.
The most difficult revelation to come out of the Epstein investigation, Hewitt notes, is that there are no revelations. The moral? It is “Time to move on! There really—really!—is nothing to see here. Spread the word if you know anyone afflicted with the malady: It is OK to walk away from the conspiracy.”
Parting can be sweet sorrow. But sometimes it is time to say goodbye. Donald Trump certainly thinks that it is time to bid adieu to the obsession with Epstein. Is that somehow self-serving, as some have suggested? Or is it merely rational?
Doubtless, there will be other conspiracies coming down the pike soon. Sometimes they are real conspiracies, as in the example of Julius Caesar. Very often, however, it is just a matter of grassy-knollers hoping, praying that the Commie Lee Harvey Oswald was not the man responsible for killing JFK. Memo to that coterie: Oswald killed Kennedy. He acted alone. End of story.
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