WASHINGTON ― A few weeks ago, New York Times columnist David Brooks urged people to move on from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal already.
“The Epstein Story? Count Me Out,” reads the title of his Nov. 21 op-ed. In it, he laments that America’s political class has spent months trying to get a clearer picture of the late convicted sex offender’s ties to President Donald Trump and other powerful people, and what they may have known about Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring.
There are much more pressing issues facing the country, Brooks argued, and the real reason people are so focused on the Epstein scandal is because “the QAnon mentality has taken over America,” a reference to a far-right political conspiracy theory centered on a deep-state cabal of elite liberal pedophiles.
It’s also not fair to lump all wealthy and well-connected people into the category of “the Epstein class,” he argued. Rep. Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) has been using this phrase, something he’s said he picked up from voters who have asked him if he’s on the side of “forgotten Americans” or “the Epstein class.”
“I know a thing or two about the American elite, ahem, and if you’ve read my work, you may be sick of my assaults on the educated elites for being insular, self-indulgent and smug,” Brooks wrote. “But the phrase ‘the Epstein class’ is inaccurate, unfair and irresponsible. Say what you will about our financial, educational, nonprofit and political elites, but they are not mass rapists.”
The longtime New York Times columnist may have wanted to turn away from the Epstein scandal, but it found him on Thursday, when Democrats on the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee released more photos provided by Epstein’s estate ― and Brooks was in them.
He appears in four of these photos, all of which seem to be from the same event. One shows Brooks smiling for the camera, and another shows him seated at a table near Google co-founder Sergey Brin. Two more images show Brooks in the background, apparently holding a glass of wine, and then again, talking to Brin.
Epstein doesn’t appear in any of the pictures with Brooks, but is in two separate photos that seem to be from the same event.
The pictures don’t show Brooks doing anything weird or wrong. He was just hanging out with a group of rich and famous powerful men, one of whom happened to be a registered sex offender who’d pleaded guilty three years earlier to state charges for procurement of minors to engage in prostitution.
Asked for comment about Brooks appearing in the latest Epstein photo dump, The New York Times responded almost immediately.
“As a journalist, David Brooks regularly attends events to speak with noted and important business leaders to inform his columns, which is exactly what happened at this 2011 event. Mr. Brooks had no contact with him before or after this single attendance at a widely-attended dinner,” Danielle Rhoades Ha, senior vice president of communications at The New York Times, told HuffPost in an emailed statement.
James Leynse via Getty Images
Khanna, for his part, said it’s important for people to distinguish between Epstein’s conspirators and people like Brooks who were photographed with him but had nothing to do with his crimes.
“I think that the people who are culpable are those who engage in the abuse of women or covered up for that,” Khanna told HuffPost on Thursday, after seeing the photos of Brooks. “There are many people, obviously, who just met him, and I don’t think that we can paint everyone with the same brush.”
Still, it seems like certain people in Epstein’s social circle knew what he was doing.
Several of those who submitted notes for Epstein’s 2003 “birthday book” seemed familiar with his predilection for underage girls. One crude drawing, for instance, shows Epstein giving balloons to little girls in one panel marked 1983, and then being massaged by topless women in a panel marked 2003.
Trump, who also contributed, said of Epstein in 2003 that he’s a terrific guy. “He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump told New York Magazine. “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.”
The president has claimed he cut ties with Epstein sometime around 2004, but emails released last month by the House committee suggest they were in touch as recently as 2017. Epstein died by suicide in prison in 2019.
The Trump administration earlier this year said it planned to investigate another Epstein friend, former President Bill Clinton, over his Epstein ties. But in July, after an exhaustive review of its files from the Epstein case, the Justice Department concluded no new material would be released and no charges were warranted against anyone in Epstein’s orbit.
“This systematic review revealed no incriminating ‘client list,’” the department said. “There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions. We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.”
The only Epstein accomplice serving time is Ghislaine Maxwell, whom the administration recently moved to a minimum security prison camp and whom Trump has suggested he might pardon.
House Democrats’ latest dump of Epstein photos comes a day before the Justice Department has to publicly release basically all of its files on Epstein, after Congress overwhelmingly passed a bill last month forcing it to do so. The Trump administration previously refused to release these documents, but lawmakers essentially forced Trump into signing their bill into law, which requires DOJ to place all of its materials into a public, searchable database by Friday.