On February 9, 2026, Jamie Raskin walked out of a Justice Department satellite office where members of Congress can read the unredacted Epstein files under conditions that sound invented: no phones, no laptops, twenty-four hours' notice, four computers, handwritten notes only. He told reporters what he had just read.
"Epstein's lawyers synopsized and quoted Trump as saying that Jeffrey Epstein was not a member of his club at Mar-a-Lago, but he was a guest at Mar-a-Lago, and he had never been asked to leave, and that was redacted for some indeterminate, inscrutable reason."
Nothing in federal law would require that redaction, he said, and it was one of what he called tons of mysterious redactions. Five weeks later, on March 18, Dan Goldman stood on the House floor and displayed the passage unredacted.
The document is an October 2009 email from Jack Goldberger, one of Epstein's attorneys, summarizing a twenty-minute phone conference. On the call were Donald Trump, Trump's attorney Alan Garten, and a person understood to be victims' lawyer Brad Edwards. Epstein forwarded the email to Ghislaine Maxwell. Garten was asked whether Epstein had ever been expelled from Mar-a-Lago, and the email records his answer: "No he was not a member. May have been his guest. Never asked to leave." A Mar-a-Lago manager separately confirmed that Epstein was never asked to leave.
The email carries the Bates number EFTA00740636, and it sat in the public release with that passage blacked out.
Someone bothered to redact it because the public account has been the opposite, repeated from the podium. White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, in remarks reported by the Wall Street Journal on December 31, 2025: "President Trump did nothing wrong and he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of Mar a Lago for being a creep." Meanwhile, club membership records cited in *The Grifter's Club*, the 2020 book by Miami Herald journalists, reportedly show Epstein remained a member until October 2007, more than a year after his indictment.
The Justice Department performed the redaction. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche oversaw the production, and Attorney General Pam Bondi has said the redactions were completed in July 2025. The stated rationale was protecting victims' names and personally identifiable information. Nobody has identified who ordered this particular one.
What Bill Gates actually said
On June 10, 2026, Bill Gates sat for a voluntary transcribed interview with the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee that ran nearly six hours. The committee released the 138-page transcript on June 23.
The version circulating online says Gates admitted under oath that he knew Epstein had a past and there were crimes involved. That is close, and the distance matters. It was a transcribed congressional interview rather than courtroom testimony; witnesses are legally obligated to be truthful, but that is not the same as being sworn.
What he said verbatim was this: "I was aware that he had a criminal conviction. I knew that it was of a sexual nature, but, no, I don't think I knew, dug into the specifics, although I probably should have." In his opening statement he put it differently: "I recall being aware that Epstein had faced prior legal issues, but I did not fully understand the extent of the crimes he committed." He acknowledged Epstein's bad reputation stemming from that conviction.
So the widely circulated line that Gates claimed no knowledge of Epstein's crimes holds up only in a narrow sense. He denied knowledge of ongoing criminal conduct, saying he never witnessed nor had any indication of it and grasped the full extent only after the 2018 Miami Herald reporting. But he never claimed ignorance of the conviction itself. He admits he knew. The two men first met at a January 2011 New York dinner arranged by Gates's former science adviser, Boris Nikolic.
The blackmail question
Stephen Lynch, speaking to the Washington Times on June 10: "There were a couple of extramarital affairs that Epstein found out about from close associates of Mr. Gates... and it was a pressuring method. I think that Epstein saw a vulnerability and tried to use that as leverage. You can call it blackmail or anything else, but that was definitely a tactic, [and] we have found he uses that over and over again."
That is a lawmaker characterizing evidence rather than a documented finding, and in a story where documents are the only currency, the difference is the whole ballgame.
Gates's own account partially corroborates him. Epstein "was working to use information about my infidelities... to pressure me to re-engage with him," he said, and the emails "raise[] a serious probability that he contemplated blackmailing me." Then he said flatly: "I was not blackmailed." Meanwhile the DOJ–FBI memo of July 7, 2025 concluded that it found no credible evidence Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals.
Three accounts, then: a congressman's characterization, a witness's careful hedge, and a government finding that cuts against both. All three are real, and anyone telling you the record is settled is selling something. Gates has not been accused of a crime.
The story I had to cut
A fourth item is making the rounds. A 2019 FBI victim interview, supposedly, with a woman who met Epstein in 2003 at sixteen, recruited by a friend with a single line — give a nice guy a back massage, get $200, who didn't understand what was happening and defended him to the agents. I went looking for that document, and it doesn't exist as a single record. What exists is two different women.
The "conditioned to protect Epstein" element comes from CBS News reporting on April 6, 2026, about a former Slovak model brought to New York by Epstein associate Jean-Luc Brunel. She met Epstein at Brunel's birthday party at Cipriani in 2003. Victims' attorney Adam Horowitz said of her FBI interviews: "These interviews really show how grooming works. You're hearing the voice of someone who was conditioned to protect Epstein, even while describing the system he used to exploit young women." That is a lawyer's characterization of a transcript, and she was a foreign model recruited for modeling work rather than a sixteen-year-old offered cash for a massage.
The sixteen-year-old is Haley Robson, a Florida victim who has spoken publicly under her own name. She met Epstein around 2002 as a high schooler in West Palm Beach, recruited by a classmate who told her she could earn $200 giving a man a massage, and she has said she did not understand that she was being sexually abused.
Two women, two decades of documented harm between them, and a viral post that welded them into one person who never existed. The recruitment line itself appears verbatim in no released document; it is a paraphrase of language that recurs across dozens of Florida victim statements. I'm including this because it is the entire problem, not to score a point.
Why the sloppiness is the story
The Justice Department says it has released nearly 3.5 million pages of the more than six million Epstein-related documents it collected. It is withholding nearly three million, plus roughly 200,000 claimed as privileged, and Blanche says the Department is hiding nothing.
Investigators at CNN, NBC and ABC documented that FBI FD-302 interview summaries listed in DOJ's own internal indices were missing from the public release, including three of four 2019 interviews with a South Carolina woman who had also made an allegation against Trump. On approximately March 5, 2026, after news organizations flagged the gap, DOJ released three of the withheld 302s and explained that they had been held back as duplicative. Oversight Democrats have since threatened to hold Bondi in civil contempt.
That is the actual scandal, and it is a documentary one. It survives entirely on precision, on Bates numbers, on dates, on the difference between a redaction and a deletion, between what a witness said and what a congressman said a witness said.
Every conflated victim story, every "under oath" that was really a transcribed interview, every characterization laundered into a finding hands the people withholding three million pages the only argument they need. They don't have to prove the files are clean. They just have to point at you and say you can't read.
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https://www.newsweek.com/trumps-epstein-mar-a-lago-statements-contradicted-by-files-raskin-says-11494395
https://www.nbcnews.com/politics/congress/members-congress-view-unredacted-epstein-files-monday-rcna257836
https://edition.cnn.com/politics/live-news/epstein-files-release-doj-01-30-26
https://abcnews.com/US/bill-gates-told-house-panel-epstein-plotting-blackmail/story?id=134098296
https://abcnews.com/US/bill-gates-told-house-panel-epstein-plotting-blackmail/story?id=134098296
https://oversight.house.gov/wp-content/uploads/2026/06/Final-Bondi-Transcript.pdf
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