Opinion
Ezra Klein
What Ro
Khanna Learned From the Epstein Files
Feb. 15,
2026
Ezra
Klein
By Ezra
Klein
Opinion
Columnist
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/15/opinion/jeffrey-epstein-ro-khanna.html
Ro
Khanna’s congressional career has been an ongoing attempt to reconcile what
others might see as irreconcilable. He represents a swath of Silicon Valley
that includes the headquarters of Nvidia and Intel. He won his seat in 2016
with endorsements from tech titans like Sundar Pichai, Eric Schmidt and Marc
Andreessen. He is, himself, one of the richest members of the House. But he is
also a stalwart of the House Progressive Caucus, was the co-chair of the 2020
presidential campaign of Bernie Sanders and is backing a proposed wealth tax in
California.
To
Khanna, there was no contradiction here, just a single polity that had to be
reminded of its common interests. “We have to make sure every American has a
stake in the success of Silicon Valley, and that Silicon Valley doesn’t become
an island unto itself,” he told me in 2019. “Or we’re going to see a rebellion
against some of the forces that I think are good for society.” Now Khanna may
have reached the end of what can be reconciled.
Back in
July, Khanna, along with Representative Thomas Massie, a Kentucky Republican,
introduced the Epstein Files Transparency Act. He and Massie were eventually
joined by MAGA luminaries like Lauren Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Nancy
Mace and together they defied President Trump and Speaker Mike Johnson and used
a discharge petition to force the bill to the House floor, where it passed
overwhelmingly.
With
millions of files now released, Khanna sounds shaken by what he’s learned — and
what he hasn’t. About 3.5 million pages of emails, text messages and court
records have been released, but the government has announced that in total more
than six million pages exist. What the public has seen was first reviewed and
redacted by lawyers from Pam Bondi’s Department of Justice. Todd Blanche, the
deputy attorney general overseeing the process, was previously one of Trump’s
personal lawyers. “We still don’t have the most potent thing, which is the
survivors’ statements to the F.B.I. over who raped them and who committed these
acts,” Khanna told me on Tuesday.
The
result is we know much more about Epstein’s network than we did before, but not
much more about the crimes he committed — or who he may have committed them
with. The Department of Justice and the F.B.I. say Epstein “harmed over one
thousand victims.” Did he really do all of that alone, with just the help of
Ghislaine Maxwell? Much of what we want to know would not have been put in
emails by Epstein or his friends. “Send me a number to call I dont like records
of these conversations,” Epstein wrote to Steve Tisch, the billionaire co-owner
of the New York Giants. (Tisch says the women he discussed with Epstein were
all adults.)
There are
constant references, even in the documents we have seen, to secrets and
experiences that cannot be shared. I keep thinking of the 50th birthday note to
Epstein that appears to be signed by Trump: “May every day be another wonderful
secret.” What were those secrets, exactly? (Trump denies writing the note.)
But there
is much that the Epstein files do reveal. Epstein’s network crossed the
categories we’re used to using to divvy up American life. He was chummy with
Noam Chomsky and Peter Thiel; with Steve Bannon and Kathryn Ruemmler, Barack
Obama’s White House counsel; with Deepak Chopra and Howard Lutnick. This is not
a network bounded by politics or industry or place.
I have
long been mystified by how Epstein kept so many different kinds of people
close, and how he did so long after he became a risk to those around him. The
files, from that perspective, are clarifying. Epstein emerges as a broker of
money, introductions, information — and human beings. He has a talent for
sniffing out what his correspondents want most. The rich want to be taken
seriously, the not-so-rich want the trappings of wealth, many of the men wanted
sex and everyone wanted connections.
To read
the files is to watch Epstein calibrating his correspondents’ desires in real
time. In September 2013, he writes Elon Musk to say that “the opening of the
genereal assembly has many interesting people coming to the house.” Musk is
unimpressed. “Flying to NY to see UN diplomats do nothing would be an unwise
use of time,” he responds. Epstein changes tack. “Do you think I am retarded,”
he shoots back. “No one over 25 and all very cute.” (Musk appears to have
ignored Epstein’s invitation.)
What
Epstein is always offering, in all directions, is connections to the rest of
his network. A 2014 email exchange with Ruemmler is particularly baldfaced.
“Most girls do not have to worry about this crap,” she writes, in a
conversation in which she appears to be weighing whether to accept being
nominated for attorney general. What follows is a note that appears to combine
Epstein joking about their shared knowledge of his abuses — he was by then a
convicted sex offender — and then dangling a dazzling array of contacts.
“girls?”
responds Epstein. “careful i will renew an old habit, . this week, thiel,
summers, bill burns, gordon brown, jagland, ( council of europe and nobel
chairman ). mongolia pres , hardeep puree ( india), boris ( gates). jabor (
qatar ). sultan ( dubai, ), kosslyn ( harvard), leon black, woody. you are a
welcome guest at any.” (Ruemmler’s dry response: “Doesn’t look like you are
prioritizing your schedule very effectively.")
Epstein
is constantly tossing out offers. Would Peter Thiel like to have dinner with
Noam Chomsky? Would Steve Bannon like to meet Sebastian Kurz, then the
chancellor of Austria? Would Ariane de Rothschild like to have dinner with Bill
Gates? Would Larry Summers like to have dinner with Ehud Barak? Would Steve
Tisch like to meet a woman whose name I’ll leave out, but who Epstein describes
as “tahitian speaks mostly french, exotic”?
Epstein
had money — much of it scammed off others — but connections were his most
universal currency. And their breadth was self-reinforcing. Plenty of people
saw Epstein for what he was and stayed far away. But for others, his proximity
to the rich and the powerful were evidence that whatever he had done, it
couldn’t be that bad. After all, look who he was dining with! The network made
Epstein both legitimate and valuable. It enabled his abuses and, for a time,
insulated him from their consequences.
The
Times’s investigation into Epstein’s relationship with JPMorgan Chase paints a
particularly clear picture of how Epstein used his network to protect himself
from potential consequences. Epstein’s pattern of cash withdrawals and
transfers raised internal suspicions at the bank about sex trafficking. His
conviction for soliciting a minor would seem to confirm those fears. But
Epstein proved himself so valuable to JPMorgan — connecting the bank to Sultan
Ahmed bin Sulayem and Sergey Brin, and helping it find its way into the
hedge-fund business — that the institution overrode its own doubts to keep him
as a client for years. The bank eventually cuts ties with him, but right up
until the end, his internal allies were arguing that he was “still clearly well
respected and trusted by some of the richest people in the world.” How could
they be wrong?
“These
billionaires, these superelites, these superlawyers are working on a whole
different kind of system,” Anand Giridharadas, author of “Winners Take All: The
Elite Charade of Changing the World,” told me. “Their system has to do with how
loaded with connections you are in this network, how high your stock is on a
given day in this network. What Epstein figured out was how to game this. He
figured out the vulnerability of this entire network, which is that these
people are actually not that serious about character. In fact, character may be
a liability for some of them, may be an unnecessary source of friction.”
Khanna
has begun speaking of an “Epstein class,” his term for “the rich and powerful
people who act and think like they’re above the law and, and perhaps above
morality.” At first, I struggled a bit with Khanna’s coinage. What makes
Epstein specifically loathsome is his pedophilia, and how many in his network
really knew of that side of his life?
But the
more I read the files, the harder I found it to deny the class solidarity
evident within them. Epstein’s predilections were no secret. “It is even said
that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the
younger side,” Trump told New York magazine — in 2002. The choice was made, by
many, to overlook or disbelieve them.
In 2008,
Epstein was convicted of soliciting sex from a minor. “I think the world of you
and I feel hopeless and furious about what has happened,” wrote Peter
Mandelson, then the European commissioner for trade. Jes Staley, then head of
J.P. Morgan’s private bank, wrote to Epstein to say, “I hope you keep the
island. We all may need to live there.” This was during the financial crisis.
“Its ok, there is always room for all of you,” Epstein replied. (In 2023,
JPMorgan sued Staley over what it claimed was his potential failure to alert
the company to Epstein’s wrongdoing. The case was settled out of court for an
undisclosed sum.)
In 2018,
The Miami Herald published a stunning investigation that “identified about 80
women who say they were molested or otherwise sexually abused by Epstein from
2001 to 2006.” Larry Summers, the former Treasury secretary, emailed Epstein
the next day: “U have returned to the press,” he wrote. They moved onto
discussing other matters.
In 2019,
Steve Bannon texted Epstein a link to a Daily Beast story, “Court Orders
Release of Sealed Docs About Jeffrey Epstein’s Alleged Sex Ring.” Epstein
doesn’t respond, at least not by text, and Bannon follows up with, “My guy is
in Israel — can we connect him to erhud ???”
Epstein’s
network may not have known everything, but many of them knew enough. Whether
they believed his denials or didn’t care about the crimes, there was a
solidarity, or at least a transactionalism, that protected Epstein and enabled
his abuses.
Toward
the end of our conversation, Giridharadas made a point I keep thinking about.
Power and prestige were once conferred by land or title or family. But power,
today, “consists of your position and your number of connections and the
density and quality and lucrativeness of those connections in the network.”
How does
that change the behavior of today’s elites? “I just wonder if courage is a
value that has suffered in a network age, because to be courageous is to break
ties,” Giridharadas continued. “And the more valuable ties become — the more
exponentially valuable more ties become — the more exponentially expensive it
is to cut off that tie, to burn that bridge.”
It is
worth emphasizing that Epstein’s network, as broad as it was, remained narrow
in the scheme of both American and global life. We have been offered a window
into a particular slice of the global elite — the slice that chose to deeply
associate itself with Jeffrey Epstein. We are not seeing the way the many, many
people who stayed far away from Epstein comported themselves, precisely because
they are not in these files.
Still,
even for those who thought themselves familiar with the workings and mores of
the wealthy and powerful, the files have come as a shock. For Khanna, they have
forced a confrontation with the possible limits of his own project, as he
understood it.
“I
certainly don’t want pitchforks,” he told me. “I don’t want
pitchforks even against people who are billionaires.” But, he said, “I used to think, ‘Let’s just have a positive vision of
Medicare for All and child care and a Marshall Plan for America.’ I am more in the camp now that there
has to be some accountability. You need people’s faith in a democratic project. And
what I’m realizing is that accountability
for the elite, having some sense of justice, is essential to build trust for
the broader vision.”
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