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Nothing to see here.

That’s now the U.S. government’s line on the sex-trafficking of minors by the late financier Jeffrey Epstein and his now-imprisoned accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.

This week, the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation released a memo closing the case. The agencies had concluded, notwithstanding widespread suspicions, that Epstein hadn’t blackmailed any prominent people. Additionally, they had determined that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted,” the memo said. 

MAGA influencers weren’t having it. “Assuming this leaked Epstein Files memo is true, then we all know this is a shameful coverup to protect the most heinous elites,” wrote Rogan O’Handley—aka “DC Draino”—on X.

I’m not familiar with Mr. Draino’s oeuvre, but I share his general suspicion that a cover-up is afoot. So does Justin Amash, a former U.S. representative from Michigan. “The official account from the DOJ and FBI on Jeffrey Epstein does not come across as credible,” Amash wrote on X, adding that “it seems highly likely something is being covered up here.”

Amash didn’t elaborate on why he found the memo to lack credibility, but much in it raises eyebrows. 

Explaining why further disclosures would be inappropriate, the memo declares the agencies “will not permit the release of child pornography.” FBI Director Kash Patel made a similar point on a recent episode of The Joe Rogan Experience, saying the bureau would not release videos of sexual crimes, since doing so would re-injure the victims.

But no reasonable person wants or expects such videos to be publicized. Rather, concerned citizens want to know whether any perpetrators, other than Epstein and Maxwell, are depicted in those videos or mentioned in evidentiary files. The main excuse for not releasing additional materials is an obvious red herring.

In fairness, maybe the government found no evidence that other perpetrators were involved. Indeed, the memo says that a “systematic review” of available evidence “revealed no incriminating ‘client list.’” 

This claim should meet extreme skepticism, and for multiple reasons. 

First, Attorney General Pam Bondi has not only acknowledged that Epstein had a client list but said in February that it was in her possession. After Fox News host John Roberts asked if the DOJ would be “releasing a list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients,” Bondi answered, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.”

Second, “client list” in this case functions as shorthand for the names of Epstein’s criminal associates. Whether or not Epstein kept an actual list of such associates, investigators should find out if they exist and, if so, who they are—and they should tell us, the American people, what they find.

Third, Epstein and Maxwell probably did not act alone. The latter was convicted of sex-trafficking, while the former was indicted for it (and died before he could stand trial). Yet the memo claims, “We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.” Whom, then, did they traffic their victims to?

One implication of the memo’s implausible claim is that the Trump administration can’t publicize all the evidence without wrongly implicating innocent people. Donald Trump himself made this point on Fox News in 2024, when he expressed hesitancy about releasing the Epstein files on grounds that “you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there.”

To be sure, the administration should avoid casting a dark cloud over every person with whom Epstein ever associated—a cloud that would be immense, overshadowing heads of state, members of royal families, intelligence chiefs, eminent academics, and business tycoons.

But a dark cloud already hangs over the heads of Epstein’s known associates—including the billionaire Bill Gates, Britain’s Prince Andrew, and Trump himself—and the best way for the government to clear their names would be to conduct a full and transparent investigation.

That’s assuming, of course, that their names would be cleared. In the cases of Gates and Andrew, the assumption is dubious. The latter beclowned himself in a disastrous BBC interview in 2019, when he denied ever having met Virginia Giuffre, who had accused him of sleeping with her when she was a teenage “sex slave” of Epstein and Maxwell. A photograph of Andrew with his arm around a young-looking Giuffre didn’t stop the prince from denying any recollection of the relationship.

Gates, for his part, “got to know” Jeffrey Epstein “beginning in 2011, three years after Mr. Epstein, who faced accusations of sex trafficking of girls, pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor,” the New York Times reported in 2021. A Wall Street Journal report from 2023 may shed light on why Gates maintained the relationship despite reputational risks. “Jeffrey Epstein discovered that Bill Gates had an affair with a Russian bridge player and later appeared to use his knowledge to threaten one of the world’s richest men,” the Journal wrote.

Apparently, Epstein really did blackmail powerful people—yet the DOJ/FBI memo asserts there was “no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions.”

More important than the question of who Epstein blackmailed is whether he blackmailed them on behalf of a third party. Many suspect that he worked for one or more intelligence agencies—a suspicion not without evidence, though the memo doesn't address the matter. Indeed, Epstein himself reportedly boasted that he worked for Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency.

Epstein’s connections to foreign governments, including foreign intelligence agencies, are legion. Robert Maxwell, the father of Ghislaine, was almost certainly an Israeli spy. Epstein met dozens of times with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak, who headed the Military Intelligence Directorate and the Israel Defense Forces before rising to the premiership.

Epstein also had ties to U.S. intelligence, some suspicious and others simply bizarre. The journalist Vicky Ward reported in 2019 that Alexander Acosta—the U.S. prosecutor who cut a sweetheart plea deal with Epstein in 2007—told Trump officials that unnamed authorities had pushed him to back off the sex-trafficking case because Epstein, in their words, “belonged to intelligence.”

As for the bizarre: Despite being a college dropout, a 21-year-old Epstein landed a job at the prestigious Dalton School, headed at the time by Donald Barr, a former officer of the Office of Strategic Services, the predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency. Decades later, when Epstein died in prison, Donald’s son Bill Barr, a former CIA analyst, was head of the Department of Justice.

The DOJ/FBI memo waves away suspicions that Epstein was murdered, asserting that he “committed suicide in his cell.” And the agencies released hours of prison footage to prove that no suspicious individuals entered that cell (although one minute appears missing, the footage doesn’t actually show Epstein’s cell, and the public initially had been told that prison cameras malfunctioned the night he died). Even if Epstein did kill himself, his death is a major scandal: Wittingly or not, the government allowed perhaps its most high-value prisoner—one who held, within his own skull, incriminating information on the world’s most powerful people—to die in federal custody.

You don’t have to be a chronic conspiracist to conclude this whole thing stinks. Senior Trump officials—including Bondi, Patel, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino—have promised total transparency on Epstein. Instead, we got insults to our intelligence and a memo that smells, to this columnist, like a cover-up.