The journalist who helped put Jeffrey Epstein behind bars is appalled at the revelations coming out in the government’s drip-feed release of the Epstein files.
Award-winning investigative reporter Julie K. Brown, whose 2017 probe into Epstein’s sex trafficking led to his arrest in 2019, told host Tim Miller on The Bulwark Podcast that the new information she has been seeing about the Epstein enterprise has been “worse” than even she thought.
“I would say most of the stuff that I’m getting is just more like, ‘Oh my God, this is worse than I thought,’” Brown told Miller. “That’s really what I think every day.”
“This is like—wow, there are big people involved,” she continued. “Look, I’ve been absorbed in this for eight years, and I’ve seen a lot. So when you see something like that, I think it’s just human nature to think, ‘What is this now?’”
The latest dump of files included photos of boldfaced names such as Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Michael Jackson, and Mick Jagger, among many others.
None of the photographs suggest any wrongdoing by the famous people featured in them, as the administration released troves of documents from the DOJ, FBI, and U.S. attorneys’ offices as they investigated the disgraced financier.
Brown shared that since the Justice Department began releasing files related to the Epstein case—many of which are heavily redacted—on its congressionally mandated deadline of Dec. 19, she has seen a wealth of new information about the scope of Epstein’s victim network.
“You have no idea the number of calls I’m getting on a daily basis now,” she said. “It’s incredible.”
“I mean, tips that I would have jumped at and written before all this happened because they are good stories… I’m like, trying to prioritize. It’s completely overwhelming,” she added.
“This is a story that’s big enough for a lot of reporters,” said Brown.
Later in the conversation, the veteran reporter also commented on the administration’s suspicious flip-flopping over the validity of the investigation, noting Trump’s “browbeating” of Congress members over the file release and his comment to Marjorie Taylor Greene about it “hurting a lot of his friends.”
“That should be investigated,” Brown said. “All this should be investigated, and I don’t think it should be a partisan thing. I think the Republicans should want to investigate it, too.”
“Why did they release a couple of binders full of stuff when Pam Bondi said they were going to release everything, and it was on her desk? There are some serious questions that I think need to be answered,” she added.
“Why did they say that there wasn’t anything here? There definitely is stuff there.”
The administration’s handling of the file release has been a disaster, with the DOJ failing to meet its law-mandated deadline, releasing overly redacted documents that protect the names of people who aren’t victims, and deleting records from the publicly accessible site—including a photograph of the president—in a clandestine manner.
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