Fail upwards, Epstein Class
'The Epstein class: What the files reveal about the global elite'
The Epstein class: What the files reveal about the global elite
Politicians, top business leaders, high-ranking professors, royalty. A select network of global ultra-elites, and how they paved the way for Epstein himself.
Guests
Anand Giridharadas, publisher of the newsletter The.Ink, where he has a new series called “The Epstein Class.” Author of “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.” He wrote the New York Times op-ed "How the Elite Behave When No One Is Watching: Inside the Epstein Emails."
On Point listeners: Sign up for Anand's newsletter The.Ink here. Anand has offered to donate a free one-year subscription to a randomly selected group of On Point listeners today.
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Fergus Shiel, managing editor at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists.
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The version of our broadcast available at the top of this page and via podcast apps is a condensed version of the full show. You can listen to the full, unedited broadcast here:
Transcript
Part I
MEGHNA CHAKRABARTI: Marie Antoinette never actually said, 'Let them eat cake.' That quote was misattributed to the French queen decades after her execution in 1793. But the story has sticking power because it so perfectly captures the cruel indifference of the global elite. In Antoinette's case, the utter contempt the aristocracy had for a starving French populace on the brink of revolution, crying for justice.
And it's why I can't stop thinking about that quotation. When I think about Jeffrey Epstein and the large network of the global ultra elite who remained his friends, his benefactors, his contacts, who partied with him, appointed him to their boards, enjoyed his largess, and even participated in his criminal sexual abuse and human trafficking crimes.
It's a class of people indifferent to immorality. Indifferent to the ruined lives of young women and girls. But the horror of the Epstein case isn't just that, it's that this class of people did more than simply orbit Epstein. They facilitated him. Investigative journalist, Vicky Ward has been reporting on Jeffrey Epstein for decades, and in 2003 she wrote one of the first exposes about Epstein.
Her Vanity Fair article was titled The Talented Mr. Epstein, and she interviewed some of his victims as well. She went inside his New York townhouse, and I just want to read a moment from her 2003 article, because here's how she describes that townhouse.
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"Guests are invited to lunch or dinner at the townhouse. Epstein usually refers to the former tea, since he likes to eat bite-sized morsels and drink copious quantities of Earl Grey. It's served in the leather room, because the cordovan-colored fabric on the walls.
The chairs are covered in a leopard print. And on the wall hangs a huge oriental fantasy of a woman holding an opium pipe and caressing a snarling lion's skin. Under her gaze, plates of finger sandwiches are delivered to Epstein and guests by the men's servants in white gloves."
CHAKRABARTI: Vicky Ward was on our show last week and she had this stunning observation about the complicity of the Epstein class.
WARD: If he hadn't been so entwined with so many powerful, wealthy people in a really transactional way, and we see all that in these emails, he couldn't have committed the sex crimes. There's no evidence that I've ever found that Jeffrey Epstein abused minors in the 1980s. It was only when he got into the 1990s when he suddenly acquired a vast amount of wealth.
He acquired his island. He acquired his massive townhouse in New York, a ranch in New Mexico, the plane, and so on. Only then did he become this mysterious reclusive figure. And he sent Ghislaine Maxwell out to find all these girls for him, and he created this pyramid scheme, within his private castles.
And all of this was sanctioned and paid for, if you will, by this global network.
CHAKRABARTI: The symbiosis of the Epstein class and Epstein himself. It does make me wonder if we've come that far at all from 1793. So that's what we're going to talk about and joining us today is Anand Giridharadas. He has been long following the global ultra elite.
He's the publisher of a newsletter called The Ink. He has a series out now called the Epstein Class. This is not about naming names; it's about understanding an operating system. And Anand is also the author of several books over the past many years, again, about the global ultra elite, including “Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World.”
And he has a forthcoming book coming out in September called “Man in the Mirror: Hope, Struggle, and Belonging in an American City.” Anand, welcome to On Point.
ANAND GIRIDHARADAS: Meghna, I'm so glad to be back with the show and with you.
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CHAKRABARTI: So tell me what you think about Vicky Ward's observation that without the money, this horrible decades-long story of abuse and trafficking simply could not have happened.
GIRIDHARADAS: It's absolutely right. We are getting a glimpse into how our world works, how our country works, of a kind that you get maybe once or twice a generation, and it's going to be up to us, what we choose to do with that glimpse.
There are, sadly, many sexual predators who live in our society. There's many people who are victims of sexual assault. Most of them do not know every single powerful and rich person on the planet. Most of them, their connections and relationships don't get you into every major bank, every major university, the royal family in the United Kingdom, various people of influence in the Middle East, and so on and so forth.
What you had here is very much a story of a, at the burning heart, a pedophile. A convicted pedophile in Jeffrey Epstein. But what you have outside of that core of one man committing crimes, are several concentric circles of enablement. You had outside of the man and his crimes, other people who committed those crimes with him.
Outside of that core of one man committing crimes, are several concentric circles of enablement.
He trafficked women to some of these other men. And we have heard those testimonies, but then you go one rung outside of that rung and there were people who maybe didn't commit those crimes with him. But who were witnesses to those crimes. Who knew, who actually saw the crimes being committed or enough evidence that, you know, that let's say they would never have left their own child or wife alone with him in a room.
Then you go out one circle after that, and you had a lot of people who heard things secondhand or went to the house and saw photos of underage girls on his walls as Virginia Giuffre. One of the survivors has described in her book Nobody's Girl, which I recommend to everybody. That starts to get you to hundreds of people.
Maybe thousands of people. I think at some point you start to go further out from that people who heard, who knew things. You read the birthday book that a bunch of these prominent people made for Jeffrey Epstein, where every single person is basically talking in a wink, wink language about girls and secrets and mysteries and a wild life.
Former treasury secretary, Larry Summers saying to him when he is having legal trouble and media trouble because of being a convicted pedophile. Hey, you're in the news again. Hey, you're in the news again. And then by the way, Larry Summers would go to Jeffrey Epstein for advice about having an affair.
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Cheating on his wife because I guess in Larry Summers' feeble mind Jeffrey Epstein was someone who knew a lot about sex. He's now resigned from Harvard yesterday. You had Prince Andrew in the United Kingdom, the brother of the current King of England implicated in this.
You had these banks, J.P. Morgan Chase and New York Times, an extraordinary piece about a long relationship where those at J.P. Morgan Chase who thought maybe we should not be giving money to a man who withdrew, by their calculation, I think a billion dollars in suspicious transactions. Because he was having to give so many people cash for different things. Maybe we shouldn't be giving him money. And those people were overruled by people like Jes Staley at J.P. Morgan Chase, who it turns out was also, in on some of the sexual activity that Epstein enabled.
And so just to close this point. This was a criminal enterprise, a kind of mafia of sex, but also of favor trading, connection trading, money trading, information barter. And Maya Angelou has that line that we all know. When people show you who they are, believe them. When the power structure that is actually these same people.
This was a criminal enterprise, a kind of mafia of sex, but also of favor trading, connection trading, money trading, information barter.
I want to make this really clear to everybody listening to this. These are not just the people who hung out with Jeffrey Epstein. These are the people who shape what your kids' education is like. These are the people who decide what your health care is like. These are the people who decide what kind of pension you have. These are the people who decide what kind of mortgage you have and whether it's protected by the government or not. These are the kind of people who decide who gets bailed out when there's a COVID or a financial meltdown. These people are governing your life, whether you like it or not.
Normally, they are very secretive and don't show a lot about how they think, how they operate, what they think of you. This is a rare glimpse. It's not pretty, and maybe it's an opportunity for all of us to get our act together and take power back from people who don't deserve it.
CHAKRABARTI: So throughout this hour, Anand, we're going to talk about what makes up this class of people, who they are.
And this operating system, as you've so aptly described it, in terms of the global elite. So we will do that in detail. But what you just said, I'll admit, it makes the hair stand up on the back of my neck. Because it's getting awfully close to, and forgive me for saying this too, global conspiracy, illuminati territory.
Tell me why what you're saying is different than conspiracy theorists for a long time who've said, quote-unquote, these people, secretive people, basically run the world.
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GIRIDHARADAS: What's Illuminati about what I said?
CHAKRABARTI: When you said that, I'm not actually disagreeing with you, but I'm just trying to make it, I'm trying to tease apart the thought that like all that, all these people, they are rich, they are wealthy.
They are, they're very well connected. But when you say these people, like, decide what health care you're going to get, or they decide what your children are going to learn, it sounds like that fact alone, just that fact alone makes this much more insidious than it already even is.
GIRIDHARADAS: Unfortunately, I've been a reporter for 20 years, and unfortunately, I have seen firsthand the things that I'm talking about. So when you think about the institutions that thread through the Epstein files, all the people who knew him, dealt with him, for whom his conduct was not a deal breaker.
Some of them, in the emails that we have now, it's very clear that they knew about him, because they're trading advice. They're giving him advice about how to deal with his PR problems, legal problems. As someone who says in the files, maybe you can argue that it wasn't prostitution with the minor, because a minor actually can't legally consent to engage in a business transaction of prostitution.
Maybe you can use the underage thing to get out of the prostitution thing. These are the kind of emails we had. So this is not a conspiracy theory, unfortunately. These are people at Harvard and MIT and big law firms. And big banks. They lobby. They shape policy, they influence presidents, and it turns out when you were not looking and I was not looking, they were also in cahoots with a convicted pedophile.
Some of them, a small number of them, presumably, engaged in illegal activity with him, but a much larger number simply thinking this was okay, this was fine.
Part II
CHAKRABARTI: I should say, Anand has actually read the entire Epstein Files that have been released thus far, but --
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GIRIDHARADAS: That's not true. That's not true. No. I read, there was a big tranche in November that was released, if you remember. That was about 10,000 emails.
CHAKRABARTI: Got it. I was looking back at the article that you wrote just after that.
GIRIDHARADAS: Was focused on emails and so I read all of those. Which is a manageable number of things to read. All of it took me like six days. And then wrote this piece in the New York Times about those. And then 3 million files came out more recently. So I have not. I have not read those.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay. No, I appreciate that that correction.
Because I was actually looking at your Times article where it says that you had ... read what was then released. So I appreciate the correction here. But let me ask you. As you listed in the previous segment, this Epstein class is not exclusively just the world's wealthiest people.
There's quite a few of them, but it also includes academic elites, for example. It includes sort of social elites. Is that a little bit different than the typical sort of global elite that we have thought about in generations or even centuries past.
GIRIDHARADAS: Yeah. I think it's important to put a little bit of specificity on this group of people.
And part of what we're doing with this new Epstein class series in The.Ink is trying to flesh out what this class is. I think a couple observations about it. The first is that it is ... obviously, money's at the center, it is an elite group and there's a lot of rich people in it, and it is their wealth that allows for all the going to the islands and going to this conference and going to that conference.
I think without that kind of money core, a lot of the rest of it would not happen. But there are a bunch of kind of accessory people, I would say, who are maybe not as wealthy. So, you know, one of those is like academics and there's a bunch of academics in it.
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Often academics who are obviously not in that kind of wealth league, but who are highly well connected and, people like former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers you have unfortunately Noam Chomsky was drafted into that group. Lawrence Krauss, others. You have some former government people or current government people. There was a moment where, you know, one of Epstein's closest correspondences was a woman named Kathy Ruemmler, who was once Barack Obama's White House counsel and then became the chief lawyer for Goldman Sachs.
She also recently resigned. But this is a woman who was a lawyer for the American presidency at one point, presidency of George Washington who was coming to Jeffrey Epstein for advice about whether she should accept Obama's suggestion to become Attorney General. And she went to a convicted pedophile for advice on that. Because he knows a lot about legal matters, having faced some. There were, others, a lot of folks in the Middle East. There's a kind of common thread of these people, even though they have these different kinds of occupations. One is, I think this is a distinctly modern elite.
That is not tethered to place. I think this is really important to understand. This is a very important characteristic, right? Because you and I could have this conversation, you brought up 1793 very appropriately, like there are always people with more stuff and people with less stuff.
This is not a generic elite that we're talking about. This is not a generic ruling elite. This is an elite that is highly specific to this time. So one quality that is specific to the age of globalization is that this is a group of people whose loyalty is more horizontally to other people in the network than vertically to any place.
If you think about an English aristocrat from 200 years ago, or even a guy who owned like a pencil factory in Illinois 70 years ago, those people would've been much more tightly rooted in place, right? The factory of the pencil owner guy would've probably been in the same area of the country as where that owner lived, wouldn't have been in China or something.
If you think about the British aristocrat, land, heritage, there would've been a kind of linear tradition of that land, those people, that place, that name. This global elite is really different. They always just got back from Dubai yesterday. They're always on a flight to London tomorrow. They fly at 40,000 feet, which is the kind of typical private jet height. They're always on the move and this loyalty to their own global class becomes very important because they don't really care what happens to us and to the societies we live in. I think --
CHAKRABARTI: Can I just ask you something about that? Because I'm looking at one of the articles in The.Ink that you wrote recently at the beginning of this month actually, and it's now publicly available. It's not paywalled. By the way, everyone subscribed to The.Ink as well.
GIRIDHARADAS: No, but I'll say if you sign up, I'm going to go in, I'll go in there after this and I'm going to give away a bunch of free subscriptions to On Point listeners.
I love the show. One of the first shows I did a long time ago. Just sign up. It's a free email list to sign up. We're going to keep this series open to everybody and I'll give a bunch of free subscriptions away after this.
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CHAKRABARTI: Thank you. By the way, folks --
GIRIDHARADAS: Just go to The.Ink.
CHAKRABARTI: Yes. I was gonna say The.Ink. I was just gonna say that. ... So here is what you wrote, which I think is so insightful, you wrote:
This is a tale about a powerful social network in which some, depending on what they knew, were perhaps able to look away because they had learned to look away from so much other abuse and suffering, the financial meltdowns that some in the network helped trigger, misbegotten wars that some in the network push, overdose crisis that some of them enabled, monopolies they defended, inequality they turbocharged.
Housing crisis they milked and the technology they failed to protect people against.
I think this is exactly the thing that's knitting the Epstein class story to all the other injustices that people have deeply experienced over the past year. You talk about the sort of almost habitual indifference.
GIRIDHARADAS: Yeah. I think when I was writing this and we were going through the edits and was thinking about this piece, I wanted to be very careful because the absolutely barbaric sex crimes at the heart of this story are in many ways their own thing. And their own phenomenon and their own kind of horror, and in many ways can't be compared to anything.
But I was guided by survivors like Virginia Giuffre, who writes so clearly and said so clearly that this story cannot be understood as a ring-fenced narrative of sex crimes. She says what she saw when she was trafficked to all these powerful and rich people was a world or an order that was, as she put it, corrupt to the core.
Okay. So if she is talking about a system that's corrupt to the core. She's not talking about a sex crime that happens on a massage table in isolation. And so I was guided by that, and it got me thinking about the way in which indifference compounds the way in which, and this, by the way, this can happen to all of us, right?
You look away from one thing, every time you look away from a homeless person on the street, it makes it easier to look away from the next homeless person. Every time you avoid the sense that your city is not, or your town, there's a bunch of people are very hard lives there, and every time you block it out, every time you ignore, when I travel to India, you ignore the beggars banging on the door.
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You grow calloused. I think this is a group of very powerful people who had practice to be ready for their indifference to Epstein's victims. Because they were able to work up their calluses, they were able to work it up ignoring the pain, the subtler, but more chronic pain of inequality.
Often their institutions were involved in abetting. They were able to work up to ignoring those sex crimes because of all their indifference to the pain of, let's say, Hurricane Katrina, and failing to take care of people.
The pain many in those networks caused by pushing the fraudulent war in Iraq. And we have to introduce one more word into this conversation, which is impunity. One of the defining qualities of people in this class, as you say, that sometimes as rich people, sometimes as academics, sometimes as people of a different flavor, one of the common threads is impunity.
When these people fail, let me say it this way. When folks listening to this in your life, when you fail, what happens? You get fired from your job, you don't get that promotion. You're not able to bring home what you need to for your family. Let me tell you, in this Epstein class, when people fail, I'll tell you what happens to them.
We bail them out, they get better.
CHAKRABARTI: We bail them out.
GIRIDHARADAS: They get better jobs. They get book deals. The more they fail, the better they get. When they sell a bogus war in Iraq, it is after that they become TV show anchors. When they, in the case of Larry Summers, take this, right, Clinton, he serves as an economist in the Clinton administration.
He pushes for a lot of the banking deregulation that happens in the nineties. So then what happens, the banks have a giant global meltdown in 2008 caused in part by that slackening of regulation, who was then brought in 2009 to be part of the Obama team. Fixing the wreckage, Larry Summers.
So this, I would imagine if you're listening, this is not how your life goes. When you mess up like that, your life does not reward you with a greater opportunity to operate on a greater scale with greater impact. But in this group of people, because of these loyalties they have to each other. And this is where we really have to think beyond the crimes at the core and look at the corrupt to the core order that Virginia Giuffre is talking about.
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This impunity becomes something these people expect of them for themselves and grant to others. And I think then you start to understand why and how so much of this was allowed to go on.
And so many people, uncoordinatedly coordinated, to say nothing.
CHAKRABARTI: So I think that the other just chilling aspect of what we're seeing and understanding better now is that Jeffrey Epstein himself, this may be obvious to say, but in the context of what you're outlining for us, it carries bigger weight.
He was a perfect reflection of that sense of impunity in himself, of that sense of impunity that you say this Epstein class has overall. Now you mentioned the 2008 financial crisis, Anand, if you allow me, I spent some time with the video content. There's 14 hours of video that have been released by the DOJ.
GIRIDHARADAS: Oh God, I'm sorry.
CHAKRABARTI: There's one that, there's so many moments we could talk about, but regarding the Epstein class, there's one in particular that stuck out, really jumped out at me. Okay. So this is from a 2019 interview that Steve Bannon did at Jeffrey Epstein's New York mansion. They talked about a lot. It's a lot of sort of two intellectual or pseudo intellectual men peacocking around each other.
But the point that stuck out at me was they discussed at length the 2008 financial crisis. Now, for folks who don't remember, Jeffrey Epstein was actually in jail at that time in Florida. It was part of that sweetheart deal that he got from the federal government where he pleaded guilty to charges of soliciting prostitution and seeking prostitution from a minor.
He was basically on work release most of the time during his jail time there. And it just so happened that on the day the financial markets collapsed in 2008. Lehman Brothers folded. Well that day, Jeffrey Epstein tells Bannon this story that every day as a jail cell inmate, he got two collect calls.
Every day. So one of the collect calls he made was to James Cayne, the CEO of Bear Stearns. And so it's about two minutes long, but it's worth listening to. Here's what Bannon asks after Epstein says, I called my friend, colleague James Cayne, CEO of Bear Stearns, while I was in jail.
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Did it strike you at the time how all the threads of your life had come together and put you in a position or you had put yourself in that position?
No.
You're telling me here truthfully that it never hit you at all of how you'd ended up in a place where you had to make a collect phone call from a jail cell that was six by nine with a steel bed and your food being passed into a slot.
The question you want to ask is, who was the other call to.
Okay. Who was the other call to?
The other call was to my friend, to J.P. Morgan, who was then, I didn't know at the time, trying to buy Bear Stearns. So at one point I had two phones. It was difficult because they're afraid people are going to hang themselves with the phone cord, so they don't actually come together and they're pretty short. So I was actually going between two phones talking to Bear Stears and J.P. Morgan at the same time. So I found it amusing.
And it never struck you about how did I end up in a situation like this?
No. That would be probably means I would be too self-aware.
You can't possibly expect me to believe this. You never had a moment.You sat there and go. What the have I done with my life? That I'm in a six by nine jail cell when I should be in my $250 million townhouse in New York City, taking calls from the king of Saudi Arabia, the president of China, the head of Russia, the president of the United States, to save the world's population from a financial debacle.
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You're suggesting I was somewhat depressed, and how could this happen to me?
I'm not saying depressed. I'm saying a moment of awareness of how could I get myself into this situation?
No, I was just saying how strange that this happens. Just it's strange.
CHAKRABARTI: Anand, what do you think?
GIRIDHARADAS: Can we extend this show for three hours so we can analyze that clip properly?
Look, I'm so glad you played that, look, so I just want to, it speaks for itself, right? But let's assume it doesn't. There you have, let's slow it down. You have Steve Bannon who. He worked before he became a populist nationalist, anti-globalist, anti, weirdly anti-capitalist rightwing whisperer to Trump and helped put the United States of America in authoritarian direction.
He worked at Goldman Sachs; he worked in banking and helped broker in Hollywood and helped broker a deal involving Seinfeld. He worked in Hong Kong. In the video game industry. This is as much of a global, capitalist, globalist elite as anybody. Sitting there on the phone with Jeffrey Epstein, a convicted pedophile who had this ring not only of trafficking women but of bringing together all of these corrupt global and indifferent global elites.
And in Steve Bannon's mental model, even though this is after Steve Bannon has run these campaigns to try to convince people of the problem with these elites, Steve Bannon saying you should have been on the phone with the kingdom of Saudi Arabia and the President doing organizing bailouts. Why? We have democracy. Why is it the mental model?
Of a Steve Bannon, but also frankly, all the Democrats, like Larry Summers who hung out with this guy. Why was it everybody's mental model? That a person like this should be at the center of things. Why can't people be at the center of things?
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Part III
CHAKRABARTI: Anand, I wanted you to talk a little bit, just a little bit more about what you heard in that clip with Epstein and Bannon. Because the other thing, I mean there's 50 things that stood out to me and you I'm sure, but one of them is that you hear these two men talking quite lightly, even though Bannon's seemingly trying to get some sense of accountability from Epstein.
But the more important thing is that he's still talking to him. And you have written about how Jeffrey Epstein's understanding of this global elite, this Epstein class, was also enhanced by the fact that he knew how to pull these people close to him. He understood what drives them.
Can you elaborate a little bit on that?
GIRIDHARADAS: There's this test that cardiologists use called the angiography where you get some dye put in your blood and then they take x-rays as your blood circulates around the body. And they can, because of the dye, they can see where the blood's getting slowed down, where there's some blockages, some clots that you maybe otherwise couldn't see.
I think Jeffrey Epstein and this whole story became a kind of American angiography. He was the dye that was put in the blood of our body politic. And this, these revelations are the x-rays, and we are now seeing not just one man, not just one criminal, but we're seeing all the clots and blockages of our system.
We are seeing, for example, that a populist, nationalist, supposedly anti-globalization guy like Steve Bannon, doesn't mean it. Maybe the fact that he worked at Goldman Sachs and in Hong Kong and video gaming. It should have been a clue that he didn't mean it, but now we can see quite clearly. He doesn't mean it, he's part of the same world as Epstein.
And we also, there was reporting in the New York Times, the Clintons are testifying this week. There's also reporting in the New York Times about how important and instrumental Ghislaine Maxwell was in setting up the Clinton Global Initiative. Now, you're a regular person listening to this at home, you think, how are Steve Bannon and the Clintons connected to anything the same.
CHAKRABARTI: Noam Chomsky and Elon Musk, like you can name these odd pairs.
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GIRIDHARADAS: And I think what's really important to understand at home is two things. One, the appearance of diversity in this group, ideological diversity, vocational diversity, masks a deeper solidarity.
The way these people actually operate when the cameras are off is that they're all on the same team. They have each other's backs. They are able to stomach their ideological differences. In many of these photos, they are men in a room who we know have ideological differences, but they're able to somehow swallow them in order to advocate for their own kind of interests in this network.
The way these people actually operate when the cameras are off is that they're all on the same team. They have each other's backs.
And so the second point is that for the rest of us out there in the country, we are somehow, I think, being tricked into fighting with each other and getting into this polarized tribal conflict as a country. Lots of people with no power are fighting with each other. As if we are each other's principle problem.
And what these files show is that this powerful group of people, they work together, they stick together, they hang together, in spite of their differences. And maybe there's a wakeup call here, because this story has broken through and broken across the left-right divide in a way that no other story has in recent years.
Maybe we can start realizing that our guy, the neighbor two doors down is not our biggest problem. Maybe we can learn something actually from their warped concept of solidarity.
CHAKRABARTI: So let me ask you this also, it's the other thing that the files reveal. And again, I'm going to obviously defer to the fact that you read the emails in that first tranche from the DOJ. Is that these folks weren't just like casual, one-off acquaintances of Epstein. Many of them were in almost constant contact with him trying to check in. Hey, I'm going to be here, I'm going to be in Aspen, I'm going to be in Davos. Do you know, are you around?
Or will so and so be around, their actual tight connectivity is really an important part of this, and you distill it down to this profound insight. You write:
What the Epstein class understands is that the more accessible information becomes, the more precious, non-public information is, which is one of the things that made this network so tight.
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GIRIDHARADAS: Yeah so there's a couple things there. One is what I tried to do when I read that first tranche of emails was understand the social dynamics in order to understand the structure behind it. So one thing is so many of these emails. You gotta understand, like as someone who immerses himself in text, it's often quite boring.
Most of those emails are boring. You have to really extract the meaning and patterns from it. And so one thing is, so many of these emails are about whereabouts just landed from here. Just landed from there, heading there tomorrow. Where are you? Where are you? And it seems random, right?
And it took me time to understand that whereabouts inquiries were the kind of pheromones of this particular elite, because of that fact that they're not really connected to places. They're not really loyal to places. They're constantly on the move and they're always trying to think about, oh, you're in Dubai.
I know this person in Dubai. Let's have that connection happen in Dubai. It's all about these kind of global connections. Theresa May, British Prime Minister in 2016 said, if you're a citizen of the world, you're a citizen of nowhere. I don't agree with her on a lot of things, but I think there was an insight there that captures something about these people.
The second thing you mentioned is this kind of information barter; this is a group that in many ways was held together by this sometimes high stakes, sometimes low stakes, sometimes medium stakes information sharing, but it's what they're all doing all the time. Sometimes it's as banal as like sharing a link the way any uncle would, but sometimes it's often, it is, as you say, proprietary information that it is, Hey, did you hear that about this person maybe being nominated for FBI Director?
Hey, what have you heard about this? Larry Summers will say, I'm at this conference in the Middle East. And then Epstein would say, and that's like a baiting, right? Yeah. It's like what couples' therapists call a bid for attention, and then Epstein would write back, anyone stand out?
Now that's when you've done great. That's when in this network you've offered a little bit of a travel tidbit that then results in an escalation to anyone stand out. What Epstein is asking you for is some proprietary insight, what financiers call edge, some information that other people don't have.
Ooh, this person in the Saudi Sovereign Wealth Fund is a person on the rise who you should get to know, these kinds of things. And even outside of the sex crimes and the trafficking and the enabling of all that, what held the larger network together was this kind of solidarity and favor trading that allowed these people to be of continued use to each other, and I guess made it too expensive for them to consult their own moralities.
CHAKRABARTI: And it binds the network even tighter and tighter together as time goes by. Now, bear with me for a little bit here. Because as you mentioned, the Epstein class and what's being revealed by all these files, again, beyond just the sufficient horror of the abuse and trafficking is it's the clearest picture we've had so far of the totality of this global ultra elite, but it's not the first one that we've had.
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So I want to spend a few minutes with another instant in the near past that had to do with revealing sort of the financial ties of the global ultra elite and the fact that the Epstein files are revealing that it doesn't actually surprise, and you're about to hear from him.
Journalist Fergus Shiel.
FERGUS SHIEL: I wish it did. It didn't inspire me in the least. It's much worse than the most people know.
CHAKRABARTI: So Fergus is the managing editor at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists, and they have dug deep on the financial picture of the global elite, specifically on work in terms of what became known as the Pandora Papers.
[NEWS BRIEF] Breaking news over the weekend.
The Pandora Papers, a massive investigation of millions of leaked documents from offshore bank accounts detailing us some of the world's wealthy, from world leader to celebrities, hide their assets from authorities and tax collectors.
CHAKRABARTI: Okay, so the Pandora Papers, for folks who don't know it, were published in October of 2021, 600 journalists were involved in reporting on this, spanning 117 countries and territories, 12 million leaked files.
That's what they were looking at, showing the shadow economy of the ultra-wealthy, global network of shell companies, offshore holdings where very wealthy people hide their money and evade taxes. People like:
SHIEL: Bankers. Big political donors, arms dealers, international criminals, pop stars, spy chiefs and sporting giants.
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CHAKRABARTI: And hundreds of lawmakers.
The files included more than 330 politicians and public figures in 91 countries. Among them, the King of Jordan, presidents of Ukraine, Kenya, Ecuador, the Prime Minister of the Czech Republic, former British Prime Minister Tony Blair, Russian President Vladimir Putin.
SHIEL: When we did the Pandora Papers, we visited waterfront mansions owned by the king of Jordan, whose country was accepting billions of dollars in international aid.
We visited a medieval chateau in the south of France that was bought secretly by the then Prime Minister of Czech Republic, who's now a Prime Minister, again, visited luxury apartments in Monaco that was owned by one of Vladimir Putin's lovers.
CHAKRABARTI: Fergus says the Pandora Papers don't just list names. It shows like we're talking about with Anand, a whole coordinated system built to really benefit the ultra-wealthy.
SHIEL: Why it was so important was it revealed that the same international leaders who could tackle this offshore tax avoidance, who could deal with this wealth disparity caused by tax savings, who could address global poverty, were themselves secretly moving money and assets beyond the reach of tax and law enforcement authorities, as their citizens struggled. And including really poignant stories about people in Venezuela who had no electricity.
They needed candles to light their homes while chavistas were moving money out of the country through offshore accounts.
CHAKRABARTI: And this is why Fergus wanted to stress something, that while this may feel wrong and distasteful, it's not actually illegal.
SHIEL: I think what the takeaway essentially is that power congregates and that secrecy protects power.
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And when secrecy protects power, an array of illicit and damaging things can occur, things that are fundamentally at odds with democracy. It is a driver of poverty, and it is behind a myriad of apparent crimes, not least human trafficking, terrorism and worker exploitation.
CHAKRABARTI: Now the Pandora Papers did result in dozens of investigations, seizures of assets, legislative reform, some, although Fergus stresses, there are so much more reform that could happen.
Here's the thing. Unlike the Pandora Papers, Fergus told us that he does not expect that much will come from the Epstein Files.
SHIEL: I hope this isn't the case. I really do. I really genuinely hope that it produces significant reform, but I fear that the scramble will produce prolonged cultural distrust, when the focus is not on moral outrage alone, but it's on structural design.
You have a way forward, so the way forward is not simply spectacle, the way forward is true accountability.
CHAKRABARTI: That's Fergus Shiel, managing editor at the International Consortium of Investigative Journalists. Now, we just got a couple of minutes left. So first I'd love to hear your response to Fergus and then I have a question to help us wrap up here, but go ahead.
GIRIDHARADAS: I think that's exactly right. Let me put it this way. There's the outrage, now that he's talking about, the question is where does the outrage go? And outrage can be a release valve. Outrage can become entertainment, outrage can be monetized, or if handle it right, outrage can galvanize a political movement.
So many of the movements in our country grew out of outrage at the way things were, but it does not happen on its own. And what I would say to people is this could be a turning point. But we have to choose to make it a turning point. And there's a few things it has that other moments don't, it's a global moment.
Everybody is talking about this in countries around the world, that's big. It's an organizing boon. It is cross partisan. There has been maybe nothing quite like that, certainly in the Trump era. It is structural and it explains structures to people. To disagree with Fergus slightly. I think there's a reason that this one maybe is easier for people to digest, because we are still biological beings.
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And I think at some deep level, the predation on children hits people. Like we still have that left. I'm so happy that we still have that left in us, in spite of all the partisanship and the this and the that. I think all people ache for children being hurt even if they're willing to tolerate adults being hurt in all kinds of ways.
So there's a way in which this story creates an opportunity to say, we could be ruled by different people. We could have different structures; we could have different tax policies. And I'll say one more thing that I think is really important to understand. These are very specific networks, but most people are not in them.
Many leaders are not in them. I'll tell you a story. When I first met Congresswoman. Just as an example, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in 2019, shortly after she was elected, we had messaged online but had not met in person. And I happened to be at the SXSW conference in Austin, Texas with a lot of tech people and entrepreneurs.
Lots of these kinds of general global elites are there. She spoke to a group, it's like thousands of people in this room, giant room. And I just happened to text her afterwards saying, I'm at this dinner, you want to come to this dinner? And I assumed she would've, I'm going to this, I'm going to that.
I assume she'd know millions of people there. Because she was this big star. And she texted me, I'm actually just walking around by myself eating a donut. Where's your dinner? And she came to the dinner. The point is she didn't know anybody at that conference. There are people like her. Who are people with power and a voice and position who are totally outside of these networks, totally outside of these communities.
And it was very, I remember being very struck by the fact that almost everybody in those kind of circles is all like on the same team. They all know each other, they all, like she was not. And it was a kind of glimpse of, wow. We could also choose to elect more people like that who are just not in these corrupt to the core as Virginia Giuffre calls them, systems.
The first draft of this transcript was created by Descript, an AI transcription tool. An On Point producer then thoroughly reviewed, corrected, and reformatted the transcript before publication. The use of this AI tool creates the capacity to provide these transcripts.
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