What Ro Khanna Learned From the Epstein Files

 

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.”