No one knows more about Jeffrey Epstein’s victims than attorney Brad Edwards who has represented them for two decades. He says that Epstein abused thousands of girls, but there are very few examples of him sharing girls with other men. We’ve all heard about Prince Andrew, Ehud Barak and Alan Dershowitz, and there have obviously been allegations against others that have been withdrawn but could still be true. On the whole, however, Edwards says that Epstein did this for his own gratification and he has seen no evidence that Donald Trump’s former best buddy considered it a business or that it was some kind of blackmail operation to ensnare and compromise powerful men.

He doesn’t think Epstein kept a list of clients in part because the list of people involved is small enough that he could have kept it in his head. This would also mean that there isn’t some trove of video evidence of clients raping underage girls. Basically, Edwards is throwing cold water on some of the more familiar conspiracy theories related to Epstein. But that’s not the end of the story.

Edwards acknowledges that that there is much to learn about how Epstein obtained his money and why he was so influential:

“It’s very strange to me that somebody who rarely leaves his house is somehow able to get meetings with people. And they will travel from literally all over the world to meet with him on his time, at his place, under his circumstances.

He also states the obvious, that the way Epstein was protected demands some kind of explanation and one possible answer is that he had links to an intelligence agency:

Edwards notes that the government’s files could also shed light on those who assisted or enabled Epstein to abuse so many women, and could finally answer speculation that Epstein was an intelligence asset of the U.S. or a foreign nation.

“[The government] should know whether or not he was an intelligence asset, whether he’s ever done work with the government, whether he’s ever had a deal with the government before,” Edwards said. “I would assume that that is also within the Epstein files. I don’t know that information. I would like to know.”

This isn’t idle speculation. According to a 2019 Daily Beast report sourced to “a White House official,” when former U.S. attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alex Acosta was being vetted by the Trump administration to serve as Secretary of Labor, he explained the lenient deal he gave Epstein this way: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”

Assuming this report is true, it’s possible that Epstein was serving some valuable intelligence purpose. It’s also possible that Acosta was told a lie made up to protect Epstein from more severe prosecution. Either possibility raises a key question. If he wasn’t actually an intelligence resource, why was someone powerful willing to say he was?  And if he was an intelligence resource, was it in any way related to his pedophilia network?

When it comes to that network, that’s a very complicated thing. One of the more diabolical things that Epstein did was to turn many of his victims into recruiters to find more underage girls. Other than Ghislaine Maxwell, none of these women were prosecuted. Some of them have become vocal members of the victim groups seeking justice. It’s not an easy decision to let all these women off the hook but at least in some cases it seems defensible. Still, the network was enormous and the number of people who were employed by Epstein and witting enablers of his crimes is quite large.

There’s a natural assumption that Epstein was protected by a powerful cabal of pedophiles who used his services. This is also fuel for speculation that he was murdered to keep him quiet and did not commit suicide in prison. The suspicion is justifiable, but the evidence is lacking.

But, of course, people are concerned about the president’s relationship with Epstein. And here there is a lot of smoke. Before I get to that, though, I wan’t to be clear about what we know Trump is guilty of with respect to Epstein. This is from the deposition of Virginia Giuffre, the most well-known of Epstein’s victims who committed suicide earlier this year. She accused Epstein of pimping her out to Prince Andrew and Alan Dershowitz. Here is what she had to say about Trump:

“I don’t think Donald Trump participated in anything,” she said. “That would have to be another assumption. I never saw or witnessed Donald Trump participate in those acts, but was he in the house of Jeffrey Epstein.”

She said that anyone who visited Epstein’s house would have seen his many nude photos of women displayed on the walls. “These are salacious acts of girls, young girls doing things to each other that would be considered child pornography,” Giuffre testified. “If you walked a foot into Jeffrey Epstein’s house and you went in there and you continued to be an acquaintance of his then you would have to know what was going on there.”

You’re probably already familiar with the statement Trump made in 2002 to New York magazine when he said he’d been friends with Epstein for 15 years and that he considered him a “Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it – Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

In the past two days, we’ve learned about a 2003 sexually-themed card Trump created for Epstein’s 50th birthday that says they share a secret, and an incident in 1989 when Trump and Epstein brought three underage girls, including tennis star Gabriella Sabatini (who Trump was dating at the time) onto the floor of one of his Atlantic City casinos. Incidentally, Epstein later brought Giuffre to a Trump casino in Atlantic City along with Maxwell and Prince Andrew but because she was underage, she was not allowed on the casino floor.

There is just a lot of circumstantial evidence that Trump knew about Epstein’s proclivity for pedophilia, and perhaps shared it. We don’t know if there’s more of this type of evidence in the files, but Trump certainly is acting as if there is. Why else would he say the evidence in the files was made up or concocted by Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and Joe Biden, and therefore should not be believed?

To summarize, it’s quite possible that there is no client list and no evidence of blackmail in the files. It’s possible that there are no incriminating photos or videos of anyone other than Epstein and perhaps Maxwell committing rapes and sexual assaults. But there is something that Trump doesn’t want us to see. And that’s all the reason we need to ask for the release of the files.