After more than a year of partisan bickering and posturing over whether Congress should release its voluminous files on Jeffrey Epstein, it decided to dump online 3 million documents about him, his business, his behavior with women and his political associates Jan. 30.
Epstein was a successful financial advisor to capitalist investors. After cutting a secret plea deal with prosecutors, he ended up in jail in 2008 on charges of solicitation of prostitution with a minor. In return, he got immunity from federal prosecution for himself and four named accomplices on a host of other charges.
After his release, Epstein faced a slew of additional accusations, and prosecutors reneged, saying they were no longer bound by the plea deal. He was arrested for sex trafficking and committed suicide in prison in 2019, before going to trial. Ghislaine Maxwell, his longtime associate, is in prison today after being tried and convicted of sex trafficking in 2021.
Since then, the Department of Justice under both Presidents Joseph Biden and Donald Trump decided not to lay any further charges against anyone else who appeared in the files.
So why are the files being exposed now, leading to speculation about possible dirt on the rich and famous? Is this really an effort to advance the rights of women, or a display of government transparency?
Both of the capitalist rulers’ two main parties — the Democrats and Republicans — are using the release of the files to try to ruin one another and vilify each others’ leaders. Democrats hope to find something to pin on Trump, while Republicans are going after Bill and Hillary Clinton. Wealthy individuals mentioned in the files are being publicly shamed, and some forced from their jobs, simply for having known Epstein or declining to renounce him.
“Time’s Up!” for “Epstein’s friends and high-flying associates,” National Organization for Women President Kim Villanueva declared Feb. 6 — one of many calls to drive people who knew Epstein from public life.
There is an “Epstein class,” House Rep. Ro Khanna claimed Feb. 10. He released the identities of six wealthy individuals whose names had been redacted in the files Feb. 10, alleging they may be “co-conspirators” and were “likely incriminated.” Incriminated in what, Khanna doesn’t say. Nonetheless, he demands an immediate investigation.
Despite the fact there is no evidence that either Bill or Hillary Clinton were involved in sex trafficking, both are being forced to testify at congressional hearings, while pictures of the former president in a swimming pool with Maxwell are plastered all over the press. Hillary Clinton testified she never met Epstein, and no one has said otherwise.
Perhaps the most salacious comments have come from Democratic Rep. Ilhan Omar, who smeared Trump as “the leader of the Pedophile Protection Party.” She claims his unleashing immigration cops on Somalis in Minnesota was an effort “to deflect attention from his name being all over the Epstein files.”
“At least in Somalia they execute pedophiles not elect them,” she added.
One example of the whirling hysteria is the call for Casey Wasserman, chair of the Los Angeles 2028 Olympics committee, to quit. His “crime” was emailing flirtatious comments to Maxwell in 2003, years before she was charged with sex trafficking or any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes became public.
Former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers faces no criminal charges, but resigned from Harvard after Sen. Elizabeth Warren and others used the fact his pictures are in the files to demand his ousting. Summers’ “offense” was continuing to correspond with Epstein after the financier’s 2008 conviction.
Many of those caught up in the scandal are capitalist politicians and wealthy businessmen. But they’re not being targeted for any crime they supposedly committed, but merely an association with Epstein. The presumption of innocence and the right to due process are being trampled on.
Like many other wealthy businessmen, Epstein used his fortune and connections to try to get richer and buy political favors. But the release of the files is not aimed at exposing the abuses of power under capitalist rule by Democrats and Republicans alike. Or ensuring that people who say they’ve been sexually assaulted get their day in court.
Instead, the lurid scandalmongering is an effort to get workers to align with one wing of capitalist politics, based on smears and innuendo against the other. It fuels endless partisan claims of a “cover-up” and promotes an explanation of politics as the work of conspiracies by all-powerful mysterious forces.
One “theory” claims Epstein procured child sex slaves for the so-called global elite and then blackmailed them, including a number of former U.S. presidents. Another alleges, with no evidence presented, that Epstein worked for the Israeli spy agency Mossad, stoking all-too-familiar reactionary notions that he was part of an international Jewish conspiracy seeking world domination.
Scandalmongering a danger for workers
Conspiracy theories are based on rejecting any idea that the workings of society can be explained by unfolding the class interests involved, let alone that workers are capable of organizing to fight to change our conditions. The files’ dump also sets a dangerous precedent for document releases in criminal frame-ups in the years ahead, targeting trade unionists, communists and opponents of Washington’s wars.
The dangers of bourgeois scandalmongering for the working class are explained clearly in the article “Imperialism’s March Toward Fascism and War” by Jack Barnes, Socialist Workers Party national secretary, in New International no. 10.
“The greater vulnerability to scandals today,” Barnes writes, “is a reflection of the instability of the world imperialist order and the growing lack of confidence in this system and its leading personnel expressed both by its beneficiaries and by millions of others.”
“Scandalmongering is an effort,” he writes, “to exacerbate and profit from middle-class panic and to drag workers … into the pit of resentment and salacious envy.” Barnes aptly describes this as the “pornographication of politics.”
“What the working class needs is not exposés of bourgeois politicians,” Barnes says. “We need to be able to explain politically why the working class has no common interests with the class these bourgeois politicians speak for.”
Along this road, workers can take steps to build a party of our own. This course, not infatuation with allegations about the dissolute and corrupt behavior of capitalists and their politicians, is the road to workers developing confidence in our own capacities and advancing the struggle for our class’s emancipation.