They Said They Weren't Close to Epstein. New Documents Show Otherwise.

[applegrove]

They Said They Weren’t Close to Epstein. New Documents Show Otherwise.

Materials released by the Justice Department revealed that leading business and political figures had enduring relationships with the disgraced financier.

By Nicholas Confessore
Jan. 31, 2026

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/01/31/us/epstein-powerful-men.html

They said they didn’t really know Jeffrey Epstein that well. They were disgusted by him right off the bat. They were just drawn to his intellect or love of science or business acumen. They didn’t know about his abuse of women and girls. They deeply regretted associating with him.

In the years since Mr. Epstein’s 2019 arrest and death by suicide in a Manhattan jail, some of the world’s wealthiest and most powerful people have hastened to distance themselves from the disgraced man with whom they once did business, dined in lavish settings or flew on private jets.

But a slow drip of document releases and other revelations over the last several months — culminating in Friday’s release of nearly three million pages of Epstein-related records — has underscored the depth, intensity and persistence of his connections to the global elite, contradicting or undermining years of careful denials.

............

Early last year, the billionaire venture capitalist Peter Thiel wrote an essay for the Financial Times arguing that Mr. Trump’s re-election meant that closely guarded government secrets — including about Mr. Epstein’s death — would finally come to light. In the months since, the scrutiny around Mr. Epstein instead revealed that an investment firm co-founded by Mr. Thiel accepted $40 million from Mr. Epstein and that Mr. Epstein and Mr. Thiel corresponded for at least five years before Mr. Epstein’s death.

[usonian]

1. Old documents say that!

I posted some "open source" intelligence that America2 News did, (July 2025) adding to the Epstein family emails and the Epstein Document Archive.

https://www.democraticunderground.com/100220810679

Here's what America2 News mapped out.


https://america2.news/we-mapped-jeffrey-epsteins-social-network-heres-what-we-found/
We mapped Jeffrey Epstein's social network. Here's what we found.

Using custom tools developed by America 2.0, we performed such an analysis, focusing on five characters central to the current controversy: Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislaine Maxwell, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, and Rupert Murdoch.

We included Epstein's entire, unredacted “black book,” as well as the flight logs for his private jet, the Lolita Express. We also examined several other ancillary networks known to have at least some overlap, including figures adjacent to Iran-Contra, September 11, and Ghislaine Maxwell's father, Robert Maxwell. Drawing from a range of sources, we considered 908 potentially related people and organizations, with 2,194 connections between them. After reviewing for accuracy and relevance, we focused on 209 entities (with 642 relationships) as most pertinent.

Importantly, inclusion in our study does not imply guilt — indeed we have included people relevant to the current power struggle ranging from tech executives with no ties to Epstein, to victims. We aimed to reveal the networks currently in conflict, while also tempering speculation about the scope and nature of Epstein's activities. Here's what we learned.

The Epstein and Trump Networks Overlap Significantly
As expected, Epstein's long association with Donald Trump resulted in significant social and business overlap between their networks, a fact which is fast becoming an existential threat to Trump's presidency. Interestingly, Trump appears to have more confirmed affiliations with Israeli-connected interests than Epstein (Netanyahu, Boteach, Kushner family), though Epstein had a well-documented relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.

More at the site.
The intent is to show how wide his network was, how it (ahem) intersects and also the methodology used to create the graph.

Download the image to expand it if your browser doesn't help.