Cliff’s Note:
Ellie found the 37 missing pages because she reads the files nobody else reads. No advertiser paid for that — you did. Back-to-school sale is on through August 31: $36 for the year, three bucks a month, and you get all of it.
—Cliff
In July of 2019, days after Jeffrey Epstein was arrested, a woman sat down with the FBI and told them she had a photograph.
There were two men in it. She asked the agents to crop one of them out.
Focus on Epstein, she told them. Do not worry about the other guy.
The other guy, it later became clear, was Donald Trump.
She is Jane Doe 4. She has now given the FBI four full interviews about what she says happened to her in 1983, in South Carolina, when Epstein was about thirty years old and nowhere near rich yet. Thirty-seven pages of notes from those interviews are missing from the Epstein files. Last Wednesday, a federal judge in Washington told the Justice Department he is finished waiting for them.
Ellie Leonard got onto that call—the line crashed under the volume, and most people never got in. Then she went to Washington and spent the weekend with Katie Phang, whose lawsuit against Todd Blanche is the reason the hearing happened at all. On this week’s Epstein Update, she walked us through every piece of it: what Judge Sullivan actually said from the bench, why he pointedly did not hold anyone in contempt, and the story he told about the one time in his career that he did.
Kait Justice opened the show with something that sounds unrelated and is not. Trump’s World Liberty Financial was approved for a bank charter three days before we recorded. Reuters then reported that an AI marketplace is going to accept its stablecoin as payment. Every time that coin gets used, the president’s family earns. And this administration is pushing AI into everything while stripping the states of the power to regulate it.
Her point, and it is the reason she keeps coming back to this: the architecture is not new. She has been finding the blueprints for it inside the Epstein files.
