It's Time For Consequences

Sunlight isn't enough to disinfect the Epstein rot.

If you’re anything like me, you’ve spent the past week struck dumb by the unspeakable crimes of the world’s elite. This latest Epstein files release is beyond eye-opening - US Representatives Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, who championed the legislation that made this possible, have achieved an unprecedented victory for transparency. But much still remains shrouded in mystery, and there is a deeper concern too: will any of the individuals appearing in the files ever be held accountable?

There are far too many revelations in the vast volume of material - reportedly running to millions of pages - to comprehensively cover here. But based on their shocking contents - and the fact that sensitive files were taken down shortly after release - it looks like we may be seeing more than the authorities are comfortable with. Officially, the takedown has been framed as a correction - a scramble to protect victims’ identities after redaction failures. Either way, it is a stark reminder that “transparency” without competence or accountability can do real harm.

It’s dizzying, really. This release drags the most powerful people in the world back into the orbit of Epstein’s crimes - including the President of the United States, whose past relationship with Epstein has long been a subject of public scrutiny and dispute. It also renews uncomfortable questions about how some of the world’s richest and most connected figures stayed close to Epstein - or sought access to his world - long after the warning signs were flashing red. And it exposes the sordid world of political lobbying, the under-the-table deals made between Governments and plutocrats to subvert democracy - the ways power protects itself, even when the stakes are supposedly moral, legal, and absolute.

So yes, these files expose a radioactive blight touching seemingly every corridor of power in the Western world. Across ideological lines, public figures are shown to have engaged in - or at least to have moved in proximity to - literally the most noxious crimes imaginable. And to be clear: a name appearing in a document is not, by itself, proof of wrongdoing. But it is proof of something else - how wide the circle of access can be, and how quickly elites learn to treat “scandal” as background noise.

And this isn’t even all of it. The Justice Department has claimed that this will be the final release, that their obligations under Massie and Khanna’s Epstein Files Transparency Act have now been met. They reportedly delayed this release for 43 days past the deadline set out in the Act, and now they’re going to try and simply move on. They want the public to believe the file is “closed”. If that’s true, they should be able to defend what they have withheld, why they withheld it, and who made those decisions - without hand-waving, excuses, or evasions.

This ordeal has brought me to an unfortunate realisation. There’s a popular axiom that ‘sunlight is the best disinfectant’, that acts of transparency like this one will trigger accountability, but I feel that the decline of democratic power has rendered us little more than spectators. That axiom comes from a bygone era, before elites got to isolate themselves in parallel worlds of their own design - back when they had to live right here with the rest of us.

The Trump administration is showing, again and again, how easily power can be bent towards intimidation, distraction, and selective enforcement - but it won’t go after this world of elite impunity, especially when scrutiny could reach uncomfortably close to the centre of power. Trump’s Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche confirmed over the weekend that the Department of Justice does not expect to bring new charges linked to the Epstein investigation. JD Vance, who has been vocal about the Epstein scandal in the past and generally can’t stop tweeting, has had remarkably little to say about what accountability should actually look like now.

I really do think that not so long ago, heads would have rolled for this. Just a whiff of something like Epstein’s ghoulish abuse enterprise would have led to an apocalyptic uproar. Be they Fortune 500 CEOs or peers in the House of Lords, powerful people couldn’t have simply dodged all of the rules the way they can today. This scandal reveals a huge entrenchment of wealth and power, a class that can buy its way out of democratic accountability.

Throughout my life, I’ve watched these people insulate themselves. The Wall Street bankers who gambled the global economy away and were bailed out without consequence. The COVID fraudsters and PPE profiteers who exploited a humanitarian catastrophe in plain sight. The Brexit swindlers who broke the law, trashed the economy, and still today posture as betrayed patriots. The ministers from both major parties who dismissed or downplayed credible warnings from international human rights bodies as Gazans were massacred in their tens of thousands. The donors ennobled, the contracts funnelled, the phoney promises, the scandals and the cover ups - the rules twisted and contorted to suit the whims of the Epstein class.

For anyone still not clued in about people’s grand disillusionment with politics today, I don’t think there’s a more salient example than this one. Seeing these horrific acts out in the open, and then seeing nothing happen, contributes to a pervasive sense of political despair. It fuels hopelessness, the feeling that our democracies have been inexorably hijacked by one giant perverse club.

But powerbrokers come and go. As hopeless as we may feel, this tide can still turn.

If we’re going to reclaim democracy in this decade - if the rule of law is to mean anything ever again - then sunlight alone is not going to cut it. We need to demand not only truth, but enforcement. The Epstein machine - and anyone who enabled it, profited from it, or participated in it - must be excised like the festering cancer that it is. If evidence supports it, those implicated - whoever they are, however senior, however famous - should face investigation and prosecution. And Britain must reckon with the system of impunity that’s utterly broken people’s trust in democracy.

Sunlight has done its job. Now justice has to do hers.