The Jeffrey Epstein case continues to raise disturbing questions about power, justice, and accountability in America. While the financier’s crimes against underage girls are documented, our guest on this week’s WhoWhatWhy podcast, investigative journalist Nick Bryant, believes the full story involves a far more extensive network and government coverup.

Bryant has been investigating this case far longer than most reporters. In 2015, he obtained and published Epstein’s “black book” and flight logs, four years before Epstein’s final arrest.

His theory connects the case to patterns he uncovered in his earlier investigation of the Franklin child abuse allegations — concerning what he describes as a nationwide child trafficking network with US intelligence connections.

According to Bryant’s research, a 2007 Florida grand jury had evidence of 23 underage victims, but failed to indict Epstein on charges involving children. He points to the fact that when federal prosecutors took over, US Attorney Alexander Acosta was told Epstein “was intelligence” and he was ordered to back down. Bryant sees this as evidence of protection for Epstein’s circle from the highest levels of government.

Bryant’s allegations extend to some of the most powerful figures in American politics, including former presidents, Senate leaders, and current House leadership. 

He contends that blackmail operations may be integral to how American political power functions, with compromise reaching depths that few investigators dare to explore.

The conversation covers Bryant’s interpretation of the 2019 federal case, Epstein’s jail cell death, and hundreds of gigabytes of evidence that remain largely unused for prosecutions.

Despite years of investigations and named co-conspirators in legal documents, Bryant argues no one else has been ultimately held accountable.

Whether you find Bryant’s claims compelling or controversial, you may be surprised by the extensive documentation on which he bases his conclusions.

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Full Text Transcript:

(As a service to our readers, we provide transcripts with our podcasts. We try to ensure that these transcripts do not include errors. However, due to a constraint of resources, we are not always able to proofread them as closely as we would like and hope that you will excuse any errors that slipped through.)

[00:00:00] Jeff Schechtman: Welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m your host, Jeff Schechtman. In the annals of American crime and scandal, few cases have captured the public imagination quite like that of Jeffrey Epstein. It’s a story that seems ripped from the pages of a thriller, a mysterious financier with a private island, a black book full of powerful names, private jets ferrying young women across state lines, and connections that reached into the highest echelons of government, business, and society. But this isn’t fiction. This is the very real story of how Jeffrey Epstein operated for decades, allegedly trafficking and abusing underage girls while maintaining relationships with presidents, princes, Nobel laureates, and billionaires. It’s a story of how he received what many consider a sweetheart plea deal in 2008, serving just 13 months in county jail with work release privileges for crimes that could have put him away for life. It’s about how he was finally arrested again in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges, only to be found dead in his jail cell weeks later under circumstances that continue to fuel debate and speculation. His death was ruled a suicide, but questions persist about malfunctioning cameras, sleeping guards, and a series of irregularities that night at the Metropolitan Correction Center. The case has become a Rorschach test for how we view power, accountability, and justice in America. For some, it’s evidence of a vast conspiracy involving intelligence agencies and deliberate cover-up. For others, it’s a more familiar story of how wealth and connections can corrupt the justice system. But everyone agrees on one thing. The victims, many of whom were vulnerable teenagers from disadvantaged backgrounds, were failed catastrophically by the very institutions meant to protect them. My guest today, Nick Bryant, has been investigating this case longer than almost anyone. An author and child advocate for over 30 years, Bryant has made uncovering child trafficking networks his life’s work. He’s been published in numerous national journals on the plight of disadvantaged children in America, and his investigative work includes not just the Epstein case, but also the Franklin scandal and the D.C. Madam case. Bryant was the one who obtained and released Epstein’s infamous black book onto the internet in 2015, four years before Epstein’s final arrest. For Bryant, this isn’t just another story. It’s deeply personal. He spent years tracking what he believes is a systemic cover-up that reaches the highest levels of government and intelligence agencies. Whether you find his conclusions compelling or controversial, his dedication to the Epstein story is undeniable. Nick Bryant, welcome to the WhoWhatWhy podcast.

[00:03:02] Nick Bryant: Glad to be with you.

[00:03:04] Jeff Schechtman: Well, it is good to have you here. First of all, how did you come to this story? I mentioned in the introduction how long you have been working on this, certainly a lot longer than the rest of us have been paying attention to it. Talk about how you got involved in it originally.

[00:03:18] Nick Bryant: I had started researching the Franklin scandal, a story of power brokers, child abuse and betrayal in 2002, and I spent seven years on that book. And it’s about a nationwide child trafficking network that’s hooked up to intelligence and blackmail. In many ways, Epstein is a carbon copy of the Franklin scandal. And that book got published in 2009, 2010. And I felt pretty spent after that book got published. I spent a lot of time in the dark with that book. But then I started reading about Epstein, and there were accounts of multiple girls being molested by Jeffrey Epstein. And there was a grand jury that found that he hadn’t indicted a single child. And that’s what happened with the Franklin network. There were two grand juries, a state and a federal grand jury, that declared that there were no perpetrators in the Franklin scandal. They hadn’t molested a single child when scores of children had been molested. So I went down to Florida in 2012 and just started knocking on doors, doing the things that journalists do. And then I got his black book. And the black book had the names of at least 100 victims. And I just started to call the victims. Most of them didn’t want to talk to me, but some of them did. And they talked about being flown around. They talked about being flown to an island. Because up until that point, Jeffrey Epstein was a lone pedophile. But as soon as I started calling victims and they started telling me about flights, I realized that I was dealing with a network that was similar to the Franklin network. And I came back to New York City, which is the mecca of publishing. And I tried to get magazines to publish the black book. And of course, I wanted to write some articles on the black book. And no one wanted to touch it. And finally, Gawker said that they would publish the black book. And by that time, I had flight logs, too. So in 2015, Gawker and I published both the black book and also the flight log. So I was the first guy to publish the flight logs, too. And I wrote a couple of articles about it since then. It kind of amazes me. So no one wanted to touch the black book. And then the black book was published. And then tons of ink have been dumped on articles about the black book since then. And no one’s asked me other than Gawker to write anything about it, which kind of cracks me up, and also kind of makes me a little, I’m a little, I guess, angry would be the word. I was about to say disillusioned, but I think I’d go with angry instead.

[00:06:23] Jeff Schechtman: When you got to Florida and started knocking on doors and started talking to victims, what did you know about the 2008 case in Palm Beach?

[00:06:32] Nick Bryant: I knew that that grand jury found that Jeffrey Epstein hadn’t molested a single child. That’s what I knew. I didn’t know the backstory. And the backstory is a 14 year old girl told her stepmother that she’d been molested by Jeffrey Epstein. And her stepmother brought her to the Palm Beach Police Department. And the girl who is from a lower socioeconomic background described the interior of Jeffrey Epstein’s home and also described his anatomy. And the Palm Beach Police Department thought that she had the ring of authenticity. So they started an investigation and they ultimately found 23 underage victims of Jeffrey Epstein. They got the statements of five. And then they also acquired 17 corroborating statements of those five victims. And they built out an arrest warrant for Jeffrey Epstein. They were going to charge him with four counts of unlawful sexual activity with a minor. And then one count of lewd and lascivious molestation, which would have put Jeffrey Epstein away for a very long time. And they were ready to just arrest him. They had the arrest warrant filled out. And they were going to also arrest one of his henchwomen, Sarah Kellen. And that case was taken from them and given to a grand jury. And generally, we knew the fix was in because, the Palm Beach Police Department suspected it was because generally grand juries in Florida are only used for capital cases, murder cases. And the woman who oversaw was the special prosecutor of that grand jury was, her marching orders were to cover that the Epstein scandal up.

[00:08:31] Jeff Schechtman: How do we know that?

[00:08:32] Nick Bryant: Because she had access to 23 victims and she only called two. And she called a girl that was 14 when she was molested by Epstein. She was now 16. And she called a girl that that had been molested by Jeffrey Epstein multiple times when she was 16. And now she was 18.

[00:08:52] Jeff Schechtman: To what extent was there the desire on the part of prosecutors to not drag all of these girls back through this, that they had enough evidence to convict Epstein and didn’t want to drag all the girls through what would be involved?

[00:09:07] Nick Bryant: Well, they didn’t convict Epstein on anything except for adult pandering. And the thing that, if you read the transcripts, actually, I made a podcast about that grand jury. That special prosecutor is calling those girls prostitutes, and she’s doing everything she possibly can to deconstruct their credibility. And this is how skewed that grand jury was. The only two witnesses that were victims that testified, they were both under age when they were molested by Jeffrey Epstein. But yet, that grand jury indicted Jeffrey Epstein on one count of adult pandering. No one mentions adult pandering throughout that entire grand jury. And she really was, she did a number on both those victims. I mean, it was about deconstructing their stories and skewering them, if you read the transcripts.

[00:10:04] Jeff Schechtman: How much of that was part of some kind of plea deal that Epstein had made?

[00:10:08] Nick Bryant: Well, there really wasn’t a plea deal at that point. What happened was, after that grand jury said that Jeffrey Epstein hadn’t molested a single kid, the Palm Beach police chief, Michael Rider, went to the Department of Justice and he called this the most egregious miscarriage of justice in modern times. And he went to the Department of Justice and he said, you have to do something about this. This grand jury was very corrupt. And Jeffrey Epstein molested all these girls. And at this point, the feds had a list of 34 girls. I’ve got that list. But they ultimately knew of at least 40 underage girls that were molested by Jeffrey Epstein. Alexander Acosta was the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida, and he initially acted like he was going to impound a grand jury and exact justice. But then all of a sudden, the Department of Justice just went radio silent. And what was going on was, an assistant U.S. attorney, Emery Villafana, was negotiating with Epstein’s attorneys. A very dirty deal. And actually, I’ve got emails between the assistant U.S. attorney and one of Jeffrey Epstein’s lawyers, Jay Lefkowitz, where they put together this really dirty deal, and they need a magistrate or a judge to sign off on it. And the assistant U.S. attorney says, there is one magistrate that will sign off on this, and he’ll be at his office on Monday, and we can get him to sign this. So the deal at that point, it was called the non-prosecution agreement. The non-prosecution agreement at that point was sealed by the Department of Justice. And the Department of Justice completely contravened the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, which mandates that, in the federal system, that victims of crimes are apprised of the adjudication of their perpetrators, and they also get to confront their perpetrators. But the Department of Justice completely trampled on that when they sealed the deal. And they really wanted that non-prosecution agreement sealed. And a couple of attorneys representing some of the victims in the Palm Beach Post appealed the Department of Justice sealing of that non-prosecution agreement. And Judge Kenneth Marra in Palm Beach agreed with them, and he was going to unseal it. And then the feds appealed his deciding to unseal it. And then it was ultimately decided in the 11th Circuit, and the 11th Circuit said, unseal it. So that deal was unsealed. It was a dogfight, but the deal was ultimately unsealed. And it gave blanket immunity to all of Jeffrey Epstein’s co-conspirators. Blanket immunity. And it also showed that the feds had made this dirty deal without apprising Epstein’s victims that they were making any kind of deal whatsoever. And then to sidestep the contravening of the Crime Victims’ Rights Act, the Department of Justice had the state sentence Jeffrey Epstein to 18 months. And then he did 13 months, and he was able to go out during the day; he had to come back at night. He had his little wing fixed up like the Taj Mahal. And actually, he was molesting girls when he was ostensibly incarcerated.

[00:13:55] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about how the case moved from the federal system to the state system. How were they able to do that?

[00:14:03] Nick Bryant: Because that, we don’t, I mean, by that grand jury, we know that the state was very corrupted in this case. So it was Barry Kirshner, who was the Florida attorney. So there was communication between the feds and the Florida attorneys to give Jeffrey Epstein this cush deal. And ultimately, as I said, he did 13 months in a county jail and he was able to go out during the day and molest young girls.

[00:14:39] Jeff Schechtman: What do we know about who was driving this alleged cush deal that he got, this dirty deal, as you referred to it? Who was driving that train?

[00:14:49] Nick Bryant: Alexander Acosta was nominated to be Trump’s secretary of labor in the first Trump administration. And when he was being vetted by the Trump administration, he was asked, why did you go so light on Jeffrey Epstein? And Acosta said, I was told that Jeffrey Epstein was intelligence and that it was above my pay grade and to stand down.

[00:15:14] Jeff Schechtman: But beyond that statement from Acosta.

[00:15:17] Nick Bryant: I will tell you.

[00:15:18] Jeff Schechtman: There has been no other evidence to support that.

[00:15:20] Nick Bryant: That that Jeffrey Epstein was intelligence?

[00:15:22] Jeff Schechtman: Yes.

[00:15:23] Nick Bryant: Actually, there has been. But I want to get into Acosta just for a second.

[00:15:28] Jeff Schechtman: Sure.

[00:15:29] Nick Bryant: Acosta was told to stand down. And there are only two people – and I talked to various legal scholars about this – there are only two people in the government that can tell a U.S. attorney to stand down. And one is the attorney general and one is the president. And at that point, you’ve got the attorney general was Alberto Gonzalez and the president was George Bush, the second. So. Those orders emanated from the high, the loftiest part of the Bush administration and with…

[00:16:14] Jeff Schechtman: How do we do it? How do we know that?

[00:16:16] Nick Bryant: Because legal scholars will tell you that there’s only two people in the government that can tell a U.S. attorney to stand down.

[00:16:25] Jeff Schechtman: Right. Is it possible that Acosta had his own personal reasons for standing down and was simply saying that it was due to intelligence?

[00:16:34] Nick Bryant: Why would ,Alexander Acosta wanted to get to the bottom of this, and he assured Michael Reiter, who was the police chief of the Palm Beach Police Department, that he would get to the bottom of it. And all of a sudden, and like I said. very early on, the Department of Justice had 34 victims, underage victims, and they knew of 40. And Alexander Acosta was going to prosecute that case unless he was told to stand down. And why do you think a U.S. attorney would cover up a nationwide pedophile network without getting some kind of thumbs up from his superiors? I mean that he’s going to that he’s just going to do that preemptively by himself?

[00:17:27] Jeff Schechtman: Was he in any danger? Could he have been blackmailed in some way?

[00:17:31] Nick Bryant: I do not know. But a U.S. attorney isn’t going to cover up a nationwide pedophile network unless he’s told to. That’s what I believe. And what we see with the government, how the government has worked very, very hard to keep it covered up, both under Republican administrations and Democratic administrations, I think that’s a very good indication that Alexander Acosta wasn’t acting alone.

[00:17:57] Jeff Schechtman: Talk a little bit about the federal case, the 2019 case and what happened.

[00:18:02] Nick Bryant: That was kind of interesting because Epstein was mandated to spend 18 months in the county jail and he spent 13. And according to the, if you look at the non-prosecution agreement from the Southern District of Florida, he is basically untouchable, and everybody else is untouchable because they were given blanket immunity. And then the Southern District for New York decided to arrest him in July of 2019, which is very strange because usually if you make a deal with one part of the Department of Justice, like with the witness protection program, one U.S. attorney will give someone in the witness protection immunity and then they’ll be immunized throughout the entire country. That’s what’s interesting about that. And so Jeffrey Epstein, the government kind of contravened what it had decided to do, which was to give him and these other perpetrators immunity and plucked him out of Teterboro Airport and put him at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, the federal prison in Manhattan. And there was a grand jury and it charged him with one count of child trafficking and it charged no one else. And Jeffrey Epstein obviously had lots of co-conspirators. And I’ve talked about how easy it is to corrupt a grand jury. So I’m very skeptical of that grand jury. My thinking in it, now I’m going to extrapolate something. I think that the feds wanted Jeffrey Epstein in jail at that point. That’s what I’m extrapolating.

[00:20:03] Jeff Schechtman: What was different? What was different, Nick? I’m trying to understand what was different in the feds attitude between the Acosta case and the 2019 case. The feds were willing to give him a sweetheart deal in Florida, but if several years later they weren’t, what changed?

[00:20:22] Nick Bryant: I think Jeffrey Epstein, this is my take on it. And I believe that Jeffrey Epstein was getting too big for his britches. That’s what I believe. He was getting a little too arrogant. And that’s the only reason that I can think of why they would take him down at that point. And they wanted him off the street. I mean, the Southern District wanted him off the street and in jail. And the FBI sawed open his safe the next day. And according to the New York Times, there were all kinds of disks taken out. And the disks had images, hundreds, if not thousands of images of child abuse material. And according to Business Insider, hard drives were also taken out. And I’m going to jump to Bondi and what’s going on now.

[00:21:15] Jeff Schechtman: But before you do that, I want to stay where the story is at the moment. All the material that was taken immediately after Epstein’s death, what happened to all of that material?

[00:21:29] Nick Bryant: Well, I want to answer that question. But I got to answer it via Pam Bondi.

[00:21:34] Jeff Schechtman: Ok.

[00:21:35] Nick Bryant: So on February 26, Pam Bondi said that she was releasing the Epstein files, or the Epstein list. It was synonymous. I don’t think there was ever a list. I don’t think it was like the Jeffrey Epstein Travel Agency, and he had a list of his patrons and he put them on his refrigerator with a magnet. I don’t think it was that way. But there are lots of Jeffrey Epstein files. So on February 26, she made this proclamation on Fox News. And then what she released was essentially a nothing sandwich. I knew it was going to be when I saw the black book that we released had the names of the adults, but we redacted the numbers and we redacted the last names of the victims and also their numbers. But the rendition of the black book that I put on the net, she had that, but she redacted everybody’s name, or the Department of Justice redacted everybody’s name. And I actually put more in crim-

[00:22:37] Jeff Schechtman: The black book included victims, and obviously those needed to be redacted, correct?

[00:22:42] Nick Bryant: Yes, yes. But it included a lot of other people too. So everybody’s name was redacted in the black book. And what I’m getting at is I released more incriminating information about Jeffrey Epstein in 2015 than Pam Bondi did in 2025. So Pam Bondi serves us this nothing sandwich, and then she says she’s been bamboozled by the FBI’s New York field office. So that’s one of two things. Either Pam Bondi was lying or she was inept and didn’t look at the documents that she was releasing. And I’m a charitable person, so I’m going to say, I’m just going to go with inept at this point. But then she said that she had a truckload of evidence and only matters related to national security would be redacted from the documents. So now she has to tell us what a bunch of child molesters have to do with national security. But here’s her crescendo of mendacity. On May 7th, she assured us that the FBI and Department of Justice were combing through Epstein’s huge cache of child abuse material. This is an exact quote. There are tens of thousands of videos of Epstein with children or child porn, and there are hundreds of victims. So she’s trying to tell us that this is the first time that the Department of Justice or FBI have looked at the material that Jeffrey Epstein had that was seized in 2019. All of the material that they had was seized in 2019.

[00:24:20] Jeff Schechtman: Right. And for six years, that material sat around and nobody looked at it? Nobody in the Biden administration looked at it? Nobody in the Biden administration thought it might be politically useful?

[00:24:31] Nick Bryant: No, of course not. I’m willing to bet that they were, I mean, as soon as Epstein, I mean, the very next morning, they drilled open that safe. The FBI, when I say they, I mean, the FBI. They were looking at that material. I bet that night, I mean, they’re just going to take all this material out of Jeffrey Epstein’s safe and they’re not going to look at it in 2019, when that was like the first thing they did as soon as Jeffrey Epstein was incarcerated was open his safe? There’s no way that they’re just going to put it in some corner of the Department of Justice or FBI and come out and look at it six years later. That’s ludicrous.

[00:25:11] Jeff Schechtman: So they took all this and they took material from the island, from his New York penthouse, from his other houses. Talk about that material and that it was in the Justice Department even during the Biden administration.

[00:25:24] Nick Bryant: It was in the Justice Department during the Obama administration. It was in the Justice Department during the Biden administration. It was in the Justice Department during the Trump administration, the first Trump administration. The Democrats are malfeasant in this because they did not prosecute Jeffrey Epstein, and they easily could have prosecuted the perpetrators and the pimps in the Jeffrey Epstein network. I’ll give you an example.

[00:25:52] Jeff Schechtman: But the material, but the material after Epstein’s death came during the Trump, the first Trump administration.

[00:26:00] Nick Bryant: No, they got it in 2019. I mean, that’s when the safe was opened in July of 2019. So yes, it would have been the first Trump administration.

[00:26:13] Jeff Schechtman: And there was no curiosity or nothing happened at that point. You say they looked at it. What is your sense of what was done with it?

[00:26:21] Nick Bryant: Well, it was covered up, obviously. I mean, it was an obvious cover up at that point. And the document that the Department of Justice, that very strange document that was released this last July 6th, said that there were 300 gigabytes of material that were impounded from Jeffrey Epstein. I agree with that. Over a thousand victims. I agree with that. But then it said that Jeffrey Epstein never pandered anyone or that Jeffrey Epstein never blackmailed anyone. He wasn’t part of a network. So why is Ghislaine Maxwell in jail if Jeffrey Epstein acted alone? The whole thing is very, very absurd.

[00:27:10] Jeff Schechtman: Who had control of all of this material after the 2019 death and collection of the material? Was it the FBI? Was it Chris Wray? Was it Bill Barr and the Trump administration, the first Trump administration? Who had control over this?

[00:27:25] Nick Bryant: We do not know that. We do not know that. Who was the individual custodian of it? I mean, Bill Barr was head of the Department of Justice at that point. But we don’t really know exactly. We know that the FBI took the took all that material out, but we don’t know who looked at it. I mean, it’s been, it’s been a cover up since then.

[00:27:50] Jeff Schechtman: When you say cover up, what is your sense of who’s behind that cover up? What do we know about that?

[00:27:56] Nick Bryant: Why would George Bush and Alberto Gonzalez tell Jeffrey Epstein to or tell Alexander Acosta to stand down? Why do you think that would be?

[00:28:09] Jeff Schechtman: That’s going back to the original case. I guess we’re talking about-

[00:28:12] Nick Bryant: No, no. But why do you think that that would be?

[00:28:15] Jeff Schechtman: We don’t know for a fact that they did. There’s the supposition that they were the ones that did, that told Acosta. But we don’t know that for a fact.

[00:28:23] Nick Bryant: Don’t you think that there was a cover up in 2007?

[00:28:27] Jeff Schechtman: The cover up of 2007 in some ways makes more sense than what happened, the lack of clarity about what happened in 2019.

[00:28:36] Nick Bryant: In 2019, I believe that they wanted to get Jeffrey Epstein off the streets and deposit him in that prison in Manhattan. That’s what ultimately happened because the Southern District decided not to play by the rules. The Southern District of New York decided to play not play by the rules of the Southern District of Florida, which is very, very, very rare if it ever happens at all. Actually, that was one of the appeals that Ghislaine Maxwell had, is that she was given blanket immunity with anything to do with Jeffrey Epstein in 2007 under the Bush administration. But all that material that was collected from Epstein, and we’re talking 300 gigabytes, and according to Pam Bondi, thousands of hours of child abuse material, hundreds of victims. Why didn’t the Obama administration? I mean, the Obama administration had that material, and the Biden administration had that material. Why did they not go after the perpetrators in the Jeffrey Epstein case and the pimps?

[00:30:01] Jeff Schechtman: First of all, they were two very different sets of material. The material that came out as a result of the 2008 case was very different than what was taken after Epstein was put in jail in 2019. Very different levels of information, very different levels of evidence.

[00:30:18] Nick Bryant: So here’s the thing with that. We know from 2007, the non-prosecution agreement names Sarah Kellen, Leslie Groff, Adriana Ross, and Nadia Marcinkova as co-conspirators, and they were the pimps. Not all the pimps, but they were the pimps that basically helped run the machine to get Jeffrey Epstein little girls. And actually, the New York Times wrote an article on them in 2019 –they called them procurers, I’m calling them pimps. But we knew about them in 2007. If our government, our Department of Justice had the will, it could have indicted Sarah Kellen, Leslie Groff, Adriana Ross, and Nadia Marcinkova on multiple counts of child trafficking because they were guilty of that. They were really integral to that machine. And that’s a heavy sentence in the federal system. That’s 15 to life. If those women had been indicted on five or 10 counts of child trafficking, or basically as who knows how many you could have, but you could have reasonably indicted them on a number of them, then they would have rolled over on the perps. This whole thing could have been prosecuted under Obama. Well, it could have been prosecuted under Bush. It could have been prosecuted under Obama. It could have been prosecuted under Biden, and it could have been prosecuted under the first Trump administration.

[00:31:56] Jeff Schechtman: How much of this, the other side of the argument, how much of this was simply because of the money, and lawyers, and relationships that Jeffrey Epstein had? That it was simply a wealthy, well-connected guy using his power to stop a prosecution?

[00:32:14] Nick Bryant: Well, that’s a lot of power. And why is Mike Johnson adjourning Congress early so it can’t vote on Representative Massey’s bill to investigate Jeffrey Epstein? That coverup is still going. Pam Bondi and the FBI came out with that strange document that said Jeffrey Epstein never pandered a girl to anyone, that there was no blackmail involved. So that coverup has been going on since 2007. And in 2007, those pimps were named in that non-prosecution agreement. We could have prosecuted that much. Our government could have prosecuted Jeffrey Epstein at any time after the Department of Justice got involved in 2007.

[00:33:03] Jeff Schechtman: Another side of this is the degree to which Jeffrey Epstein had kompromat, essentially, on a lot of very well-connected people.

[00:33:11] Nick Bryant: Well, all of his homes were wired for audiovisual blackmail. And Epstein was, and that’s the other thing, when you want to get into Epstein as far as a blackmailer, the Palm Beach Police Department found, when they executed a search warrant on him, they found hidden cameras. Although Epstein was told that they were coming, he was made aware that they were going to execute a search warrant because there were all kinds of jacks that were sticking out of the wall. All the computers were gone. They didn’t get a couple of cameras. And then Maria Farmer was giving an interview to CBS this morning on November 18th of 2019. And this is an excerpt. She said, the main thing we did when I walked in and I thought was interesting is he showed me where the cameras, the men monitoring everything were, and I looked on the cameras and I saw toilet, toilet, bed, bed, toilet, bed. So Maria, Epstein has shown Maria Farmer this secret room in his New York mansion that has, when she says men, we’re talking about plurals, so that’s obviously a conspiracy, monitoring all these cameras. And Epstein victim Virginia Gufri also said that Epstein showed her that room. And then a Vanity Fair article interviewed a former girlfriend of Jeffrey Epstein’s, and he said to her, I collect people, I own people, I can damage people. And in that Vanity Fair article, it interviewed a friend of Maxwell’s, and this is what the friend said. Maxwell also said the island had been completely wired for video. The friend thought that she and Epstein were videotaping everyone on the island as an insurance policy, as blackmail. And then there was a New York Times reporter that was hanging out with Epstein a little bit. And the New York Times on August 12th, 2019, this is an excerpt from that article. Mr. Epstein knew an astonishing number of rich, famous, powerful people, and he had photos to prove it. He also claimed to know a great deal about these people, some of it potentially damaging or embarrassing, including details about their supposed sexual proclivities and recreational drug use. And about a year and a half ago, Tim Burchette, he’s the federal legislator in the House from Tennessee, he gave an interview to the Tennessee Journal in which he said, why in the world would good conservatives vote for crazy stuff like we’ve seen out of Congress? You know, the old honeypot, the Russians do that. I’m sure members of Congress have been caught up. And I went down to D.C. and I had dinner with him. And he definitely believes that his colleagues are being compromised in honey traps. And that really does show, I think it gives a profound indication of why Mike Johnson would suspend a vote on Representative Massey’s bill and make sure that there wasn’t an investigation into Jeffrey Epstein. So all these years later, it’s still being covered up.

[00:36:48] Jeff Schechtman: Given all the cameras, all the alleged tapes that were made and all the documentation that exists, what is your sense as to why none of this has leaked out at this point? None of it.

[00:37:01] Nick Bryant: Because it was taken by the FBI the next day and they have kept it very, very, I mean, I’m sure very few people have seen all this, all this footage that came out of Jeffrey Epstein’s safe. And it’s, I think, been kept under. I think that someone would have multiple, have to have multiple security clearances to be able to look at what was in Jeffrey Epstein’s safe.

[00:37:35] Jeff Schechtman: If, in fact, there are all these videos and there was all this blackmail that was going on, where does the intelligence component that Acosta talked about and made reference to, which nothing specific has come out to prove since, but how does that fit into the equation in your view of it?

[00:37:54] Nick Bryant: Well, we’ve got someone who had become the CIA director, Burns, actually visiting Epstein a couple of times. And there’s so much, I mean, there’s so much malfeasance here. And there’s also blackmail. And the thing about it is Jeffrey Epstein is a college dropout from Coney Island. Would Jeffrey Epstein by himself have the power to blackmail these people? I don’t think so. I think that he could be taken care of very quickly. There was obviously some type of organization behind him that said to the people that Jeffrey Epstein blackmailed, if you touch Jeffrey Epstein, there’s going to be retribution. That’s the only way that Jeffrey Epstein could have blackmailed some of the most powerful men in the world.

[00:38:54] Jeff Schechtman: How was he able to get away with it for so long? Obviously, powerful people in the world talk to each other. They know what’s going on. They talk to each other privately, secretly, in all sorts of forms and in all sorts of ways. If this was going on, why was it allowed to go on so long?

[00:39:13] Nick Bryant: Because that’s government as usual. I wrote a book called The Franklin Scandal, and the Epstein scandal is almost a carbon copy of the Franklin scandal. There was a party house in Washington, D.C. that was wired for audiovisual blackmail. Blackmail is something that has been with us forever. Actually, at the beginning of our republic, Alexander Hamilton was getting blackmailed because he was having an affair with a 23-year-old, and her husband was blackmailing him. A muckraking journalist came along and outed Alexander Hamilton. Jefferson and Hamilton had a lot of antipathy towards each other. This muckraker thought that Jefferson would give him an appointment in his administration, and Jefferson didn’t. Then the muckraker outed Jefferson for having sex with one of his slaves, Sally Hemings, which actually his DNA has confirmed that. I’ll give you a couple of recent examples. Dennis Hastert was the Speaker of the House from 1999 to 2006. His career was meteoric. He had molested a number of underage boys going back 30 or 40 years. Actually, according to whistleblower Sabel Edmonds, FBI whistleblower Sabel Edmonds, the FBI was aware of his shadow life, that he was satiating his need for young boys while he was Speaker of the House. Only after he was Speaker of the House was it revealed that he’d been a pederast going back 30 or 40 years. The FBI, according to Sabel Edmonds, who has, I think, been pretty pristine. I don’t know if anybody’s ever said that she’s ever lied. According to her, the FBI was aware of Hastert and what Hastert was up to when he was Speaker of the House. I look at Mike Johnson now, and I think to myself, is he compromised? It’s come out that he has software on his phone, and his son has the same software where they can monitor each other’s pornography usage. How strange is that? Now, given the capabilities-

[00:41:48] Jeff Schechtman: Do we know that? How do we know that’s true?

[00:41:52] Nick Bryant: Because all you got to do is look at a number of articles that have been written about it, and look into it. Google Mike Johnson Covenant Eyes, and it’s well-documented. So is Mike Johnson compromised? What kind of pornography was he looking at that his son, he and his son were monitoring? That whole thing is very bizarre. I’ve never heard of a father-son team keeping track of each other’s pornography. So that is our Speaker of the House right now, and he is stalling investigation into the Epstein case. Is he compromised? Why would he do this? Why would he hurt his political career this way? According to a CBS poll, 89% of Americans want all the Epstein information to be released.

[00:42:48] Jeff Schechtman: Which raises another question, and this is a speculative one, but I’m interested in your take on it. Why this story has gotten the traction that it has right now?

[00:43:00] Nick Bryant: The thing that a lot of people don’t understand is child molestation. Child molestation is a horrible thing, and that’s why there’s MAGA is fleeing from Trump right now, because they think that he’s covering up child molestation. A lot of people just don’t get that, that this is the most heinous of crimes, child sexual abuse. According to the Centers for Disease Control, 25% of underage girls and 5% of underage boys have been molested. Now, people in the field think, and I’ve been an anti-child trafficking activist for a number of years, and the National Center on Sexual Exploitation holds a World Summit every year, and I’ve spoken at three of those. I’ve spoken at the International Conference for the Society of the Study of Trauma and Dissociation, and I’ve spoken at a number of other conferences. So, the CDC is saying that 25% of girls and 5% of underage boys have been molested in the United States. If you just take that number, which I believe is conservative, especially for boys, there’s over 50 million Americans that have been molested when they were underage. The Department of Health and Human Services commissioned a study that found that between 240,000 and 325,000 women and children are sexually trafficked in the United States every year. That is a huge number. There are millions of Americans that have been molested or have been trafficked, and our government is so inept at responding to this. I think it’s a pandemic. The government puts out the Federal Human Trafficking Report every year, and the last one is from 2023. According to that report, only 664 individuals nationwide were charged with child sex trafficking. So, if we go with the smallest number provided by the Department of Health and Human Services, which is 240,000, only 664 individuals nationwide have been charged. There are millions of hours of child abuse material on the internet. If you don’t believe me, look it up.

[00:45:36] Jeff Schechtman: But why is the passion about this coming almost exclusively from the MAGA right now?

[00:45:44] Nick Bryant: Well, actually, a lot of people on the left, I think, are starting to be a little miffed too, because there are a lot of people on the left that have been molested. And people on the right are much more concerned about child welfare and child safety than people on the left. Unfortunately, that is the case. When I …

[00:46:08] Jeff Schechtman: Why is that the case?

[00:46:11] Nick Bryant: I do not know. But when I was writing The Franklin Scandal, most of my help came from people on the right. No one on the left really helped me with that book. And I’m not a Republican. I’m not a Democrat. I’m not partisan at all. And I haven’t voted for a Republican or a Democrat for a number of years. So I’m not saying this out of some kind of partisanship. I’m just telling you what my experience is when I’ve been looking into child trafficking cases. And actually, the person that gave me Epstein’s black book is very much a conservative. So in my experience, it’s been conservatives that have really helped me out. And I think that this issue is much bigger for conservatives than it is for progressives. I don’t know why that it is. But right now, according to that CBS poll, 89% of the country wants all the Epstein documentation released. So that shows that the left and the right are coming together on this issue big time.

[00:47:19] Jeff Schechtman: If there’s so much information there, and if let’s just take put it in this political context for the moment, if the Biden administration had access to it for four years, why wasn’t some of it used in the 2024 campaign against Trump?

[00:47:36] Nick Bryant: Because both Democrats and Republicans are involved in this. So I think that this is an endemic part of our political system. I got to a blackmail photographer when I was writing the Franklin scandal, a rather unctuous individual, but I do believe he was telling me the truth a lot of the time. But I asked him, you know, there isn’t a book about this. I mean, now there is, the Franklin scandal, but I was trying to get my mind around it all, that a nationwide child trafficking network covered up by federal and state authorities, much like what we see with Epstein. But it just, it was so counterintuitive to me that something like that could happen. And I asked the blackmail photographer, you know, how does this work? I’m just trying to get my mind around it. And he said something very interesting to me. He said, once you’re compromised, it’s like you’re on a yacht, and it’s a beautiful yacht, and it’s a beautiful day, and you can have anything you want on that yacht. But if you decide to get off the yacht, the people on the yacht are going to make sure that you drown. And that’s how kompromat works. And we saw with Dennis Hastert. I mean, I believe that him being, he had a meteoric rise in the House. And I believe that it was because he was compromised.

[00:49:08] Jeff Schechtman: How much of the material do you think still exists? Has some of it been destroyed, perhaps?

[00:49:14] Nick Bryant: I would probably wager that a lot of it has been destroyed. I mean, the CIA had a bunch of MKUltra documentation and other documentation destroyed, which was, that’s how the CIA protects itself. So I wouldn’t be surprised if a lot of that information hasn’t been destroyed at this point. But we don’t need that for prosecutions. We do not need, we don’t even need any of those tapes or documents for prosecutions. We’ve got Sarah Kellen, Leslie Groff, Adriana Ross, Nadia Marcinkova, and they can tell us who the perpetrators are. There’s well over a thousand victims. They can tell us who their perpetrators are. This could be taken care of very quickly. If the Department of Justice used the RICO law, like it’s done in the Mafia, where you would take these pimps, and there’s a lot more pimps than just these, and then indict them on multiple counts of child trafficking, and they’re looking at multiple lifetimes, they’re going to roll over on the perps for sure. And you’ve got well over a thousand victims who have been molested by a bunch of guys. If we could promise them some kind of safety, they would tell their truths to not only the Department of Justice, but to a jury. But our government has just been extremely dedicated to keeping Jeffrey Epstein covered up since Bush II made that dirty deal with Epstein and his attorneys.

[00:49:48] Jeff Schechtman: Talk about Ghislaine Maxwell at this point.

[00:49:50] Nick Bryant: Well, Ghislaine Maxwell, I mean, according to that very strange, strange document, Jeffrey Epstein acted alone. But anyway, Maxwell was indicted on conspiracy to entice minors to travel to engage in illegal sex acts, conspiracy to transport minors to participate in illegal sex acts, transporting a minor to participate in illegal sex acts, sex trafficking conspiracy, and sex trafficking of a minor. And as I’ve said before, in the federal system, that’s a heavy sentence. That’s 15 to life. And she only got 20 years. And they put her, when I say they, I’m talking about the Bureau of Prisons, put her in dormitory style living pretty quickly. Generally, only inmates that have been exemplary that are getting near the end of their sentence are put into dormitory type environments. But she was shuffled into one very quickly. But the thing about Maxwell, those indictments that I just read, there’s three of them are conspiracies. And no one has been indicted other than Maxwell. And Epstein acted alone. So why is Maxwell getting indicted? And then why is Maxwell getting indicted on conspiracies? I mean, and I think that that’s what makes Americans so upset. We’re talking about the worst kind of crimes imaginable. And some of these pedophiles were, I think, rather vicious to some of these little girls. And we, as Americans, want to get to the bottom of this. And it’s obviously heavily corrupted our government, or else it wouldn’t be coming until now. And we’re still, we watch the Speaker of the House, I mean, trying to keep it covered up. So this is a heavy crime that people resonate with. I mean, there were crimes, there were lies that were told during COVID. There were lies that were told during the meltdown. There were lies that were told to get us into the Iraq War. And nobody’s head rolled. I mean, nobody’s head rolled for those. But with this, this is different. This is about American children getting molested. This is something that a lot of people can identify with, because there’s so many people in this country that have been molested. And there’s a lot of people that just care for the welfare of children. That’s why this isn’t going away.

[00:53:20] Jeff Schechtman: And Donald Trump, where does he fit into the story?

[00:53:23] Nick Bryant: Well, his name was circled in the Black Book. And Alfredo Rodriguez purling the Black Book from Epstein and tried to sell it to an attorney, and then the FBI did a sting on him. And there are people that are circled that he said were in cahoots with Jeffrey Epstein. And now Trump’s name is circled, but he hasn’t been named by any victims that I know of, except for a woman named Katie Johnson, who filed a lawsuit a number of years ago. And then she retracted the lawsuit. And I looked for her for three years, and I finally found her, but she won’t talk to me. So I don’t know what to make of Katie Johnson. But I do believe that, and it’s in documentation, that Epstein did pander at least one adult to Trump, and he was providing women to Clinton when Clinton was the president. I mean, that’s been corroborated. But when you get into circled names, and then you get into Virginia Giuffre and Maxwell, they sued each other for defamation of character. And Maxwell ultimately gave Virginia Giuffre millions of dollars, an undisclosed amount, but it’s in the millions. And if you look at the black book, Ghislaine Maxwell’s name is circled, and Jennifer [sic] Giuffre names her as a perpetrator. I mean, that’s kind of a slam dunk. Les Wexner’s name is circled, and Virginia Giuffre named him as a perpetrator. Ahud Barak, the former prime minister of Israel, his name is circled, and Virginia Giuffre named him as a perpetrator, and just a rather unsavory individual. Alan Dershowitz’s name is circled, and Virginia Giuffre named him, Bill Richardson, the former governor of New Mexico, and also Clinton’s energy czar, his name is circled. And Virginia Giuffre named him as a perpetrator. Now, there’s names that are circled that aren’t corroborated, and then there’s also other names that Virginia Giuffre has said molested her, like George Mitchell, the former Democratic Senate majority leader. I mean, that gives you a cross-section of how high this goes, and that’s why I think a lot of people are compromised. And I think that that rot, perfidious rot, is in our government. And I think now, I’m hoping now, that is the time where we can expose that perfidious rot.

[00:56:13] Jeff Schechtman: And why doesn’t the Trump administration just release all of this, extract his own name from it, and be done with it, and be a hero?

[00:56:21] Nick Bryant: I think that, I don’t, I can’t really answer that question in a cogent kind of way. But I think that there’s, there might be some leverage on Trump, or people that are close to Trump. I don’t know. I mean, so I really can’t answer that question in a cogent way. But other than that, there’s some kind of leverage going on.

[00:56:44] Jeff Schechtman: But isn’t that a key thing to know at this point, as Trump is stumbling around trying to figure out what’s next?

[00:56:50] Nick Bryant: Yeah, it shows you how endemic this is in our government. If there was just a couple of perpetrators, then I don’t think it would be any problem releasing the names. But I think that this is how our government works. I think kompromat is an integral part of our government and the various branches. Right now, we have the executive branch, and we have the congressional branch refusing to release or investigate child molestation. And that is causing, I think, perhaps a constitutional crisis. As I said earlier, 89% of Americans, according to CBS, want to see everything on Epstein just released and get to the bottom of it. We all want to get to the bottom of this. But the reason why it’s been covered up for so long is, I think it’s an integral part of our political system.

[00:57:45] Jeff Schechtman: This has been going on for a number of years. I mean, it’s certainly six years since all this material was taken after Epstein’s death. Some of those people aren’t even in positions of power anymore. Does that matter?

[00:57:58] Nick Bryant: I think that a lot of those people aren’t in positions, but it shows. I mean, like George Mitchell was having, according to Virginia Giuffre, George Mitchell, although he looks like a benign grandfather, molested her when she was her age. Is the current Senate majority leader? I mean, so that’s how high this went on the food chain. Clinton and Trump are implicated, as far as I know, not for pedophilic predation, but I just gave you a number of names that have been accused of pedophilic predation.

[00:58:37] Jeff Schechtman: And how do you think it plays out from here, Nick?

[00:58:39] Nick Bryant: I hope that we can, my hope is, I started an organization at 501(c)(3) called Epstein Justice. And what we’re lobbying for is an independent congressional commission. And we want to know two simple things, or we want two simple things, at least morally. We want to know why the government has covered up child trafficking. When you cover up a crime, you’re aiding and abetting that crime. So we want to know why the government is aiding and abetting child trafficking. And also, we want the perpetrators to be prosecuted. What we want is pretty simple, as far as it’s kind of a slam dunk, morally or ethically. But that’s what we’re vying for with Epstein Justice. And it’s going to be a hell of a battle, but our government has been aiding and abetting child trafficking for quite some time. And we would never trust any individuals that are aiding and abetting child trafficking. So how can we trust our government? This is something we have to take care of.

[00:59:51] Jeff Schechtman: Nick Bryant, I thank you so much for spending time with us today here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast.

[00:59:57] Nick Bryant: You’re welcome.

[00:59:58] Jeff Schechtman: And thank you for listening and joining us here on the WhoWhatWhy podcast. I hope you join us next week for another WhoWhatWhy podcast. I’m Jeff Schechtman. If you like this podcast, please feel free to share and help others find it by rating and reviewing it on iTunes. You can also support this podcast and all the work we do by going to whowhatwhy.org/donate.