The return of the Epstein scandal and the criminality of the US ruling class

Patrick Martin

Commuters walk past a bus stop near Nine Elms Station as activists put up a poster showing President Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein near the US Embassy in London, Thursday, July 17, 2025. [AP Photo/Thomas Krych]

The scandal over billionaire sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his ties to a wide range of figures in the American ruling class, including Donald Trump, has erupted into a major political crisis. 

Nearly six years after Epstein’s dubious “suicide” in a Manhattan jail cell, the White House is being assailed by demands to release investigative files which could implicate hundreds of top political and business figures, Republicans and Democrats, bankers and CEOs. Even though more than a thousand victims have been identified, the US government has refused to name even a single one of the wealthy and well-connected men who availed themselves of Epstein’s services as a procurer of underage girls for sexual exploitation.

Attorney General Pam Bondi touched off a political explosion last week by releasing a two-page report declaring that no “client list” had been found in Epstein’s files, that there was no suspicion of foul play in his death, and that there would be no further information released about Epstein’s crimes. This statement was issued only three months after Bondi appeared on Fox News, just after her confirmation by the Senate, boasting that the list of Epstein’s clients was “on my desk” and would soon be made public.

Fascist supporters of Trump—including former White House aide Steve Bannon, Representative Lauren Boebert and social media pundits Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Laura Loomer—all denounced Bondi. They cited Trump’s claims during last year’s election campaign that the Democrats were covering up the Epstein case because so many prominent Democrats were implicated in it, particularly former president Bill Clinton, who reportedly rode on Epstein’s private plane, dubbed the “Lolita Express,” on 27 occasions. Epstein was a financial supporter of Clinton’s election campaigns and visited the White House at least four times during his presidency.

Trump, however, fired back in defense of Bondi, and declared that the Epstein files had actually been created by the Democrats, including Presidents Obama and Biden, to attack him. As is well known, Trump had a 15-year association with Epstein, a Palm Beach neighbor, fellow billionaire and frequent guest at Mar-a-Lago. He wrote on Truth Social Wednesday morning that his former supporters had fallen for a Democratic Party plot: “Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this “bullshit,” hook, line, and sinker…”

Trump’s bizarre somersault caught some of his most slavish supporters by surprise. House Speaker Mike Johnson called for full disclosure of the Epstein files only hours before Trump’s Truth Social post, then tried to downplay the conflict. The next day, he moved to block consideration of legislation, introduced by the Democrats, to require the Justice Department to release the files.

The political crisis exploded to a new level Thursday evening with the publication by the Wall Street Journal of a lengthy front-page article detailing Trump’s relationship with Epstein, which included Trump sending Epstein a letter for his 50th birthday (January 20, 2003), described as follows:

The letter bearing Trump’s name, which was reviewed by the Journal, is bawdy—like others in the album. It contains several lines of typewritten text framed by the outline of a naked woman, which appears to be hand-drawn with a heavy marker. A pair of small arcs denotes the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a squiggly “Donald” below her waist, mimicking pubic hair. 

The letter concludes: “Happy Birthday—and may every day be another wonderful secret.”

Trump claimed Tuesday in an interview with the Journal that the letter was a fake and said he would sue if the article was published. It nevertheless appeared on the Journal’s website early Thursday evening, with a large photo of Epstein and Trump standing together looking like the best of friends.

The article also reproduced portions of a profile of the Trump-Epstein relationship published by New York magazine in 2002, in which Trump indicates familiarity with Epstein’s sexual practices. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy.” Trump told the magazine, “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.”

The intervention of the Journal indicates that the very real criminality involved in the Epstein scandal, involving significant sections of the political and financial establishment, is intersecting with divisions within the ruling class itself. The newspaper is owned by media mogul Rupert Murdoch, who has long backed Trump as a spearhead for imposing reactionary pro-corporate policies, and which has fully supported his attacks on democratic rights and social programs.

The Journal has been highly critical, however, of Trump’s economic policies, particularly the tariff war he began in April, and his threats to remove Federal Reserve Board chairman Jerome Powell. Last week Trump set an August 1 deadline for the imposition of massive tariffs on dozens of US trading partners, which would raise prices dramatically and slash global trade.

The basic outline of the Epstein scandal is well-established. From humble beginnings in Brooklyn, Epstein found wealthy patrons, first the CEO of Bear Stearns, Andrew Greenberg, and then the founder-owner of The Limited, Leslie Wexner, who valued his combination of skill, moral depravity and ruthlessness in the early years of the financialization of the US economy. Epstein became known as a man who could make money from cleverly crafted swindling, first as a securities trader, then as the personal financial manager for Wexner’s billion-dollar fortune.

Epstein built his own fortune in the process, ultimately buying the largest mansion in Manhattan—sold to him by Wexner—as well as a Palm Beach estate, a huge ranch in New Mexico, and a private island in the US Virgin Islands. He hosted parties that attracted billionaires, bankers, CEOs, former presidents, senators and governors. His connections extended through both capitalist parties, Republicans as well as Democrats.

In gaining access to these layers, he also learned their sordid proclivities, particularly those which coincided with his own: the sexual abuse of underage girls. His (literal) partner in crime Ghislaine Maxwell, daughter of British media billionaire Robert Maxwell, served as his chief recruiting officer, luring young girls, particularly from the poorest sections of the working class, with promises of money, clothes, shoes and perfume.

One victim told the Miami Herald, “Jeffrey preyed on girls who were in a bad way, girls who were basically homeless. He went after girls who he thought no one would listen to and he was right.” The newspaper, which published the first major exposure of Epstein, added, “Most of the girls came from disadvantaged families, single-parent homes or foster care. Some had experienced troubles that belied their ages: They had parents and friends who committed suicide; mothers abused by husbands and boyfriends; fathers who molested and beat them.”

Epstein’s sex-trafficking enterprise served the psycho-sexual demands of wealthy and powerful men, who in turn protected his operations and blocked any serious criminal investigation. Even in 2007, when Epstein pled guilty to soliciting the prostitution of a minor—a serious felony for which anyone else would have been locked up for years—the US attorney for South Florida, Alexander Acosta, made a backroom deal that allowed him to freely manage his business ventures from a luxury jail wing that Epstein paid for himself. The plea agreement assured that none of Epstein’s clients, who were not named, would be prosecuted for their use of his sex-trafficking services.

Ten years later, Donald Trump would appoint Acosta to head the Department of Labor in his first term, a position from which he was forced to resign when Epstein was again arrested in July 2019 on sex-trafficking charges. FBI reports identified more than 1,000 young women and girls as victims of Epstein. Yet not a single American client of Epstein has been named, let alone prosecuted. Only one foreign client, Britain’s Prince Andrew, was compelled to sign a civil settlement with Virginia Giuffre, whom Epstein procured for him at age 17 (while she was working at Mar-a-Lago). Giuffre, who named other men as abusers who were never prosecuted, committed suicide in April of this year.

When Epstein was found dead in his prison cell in Manhattan in August 2019, supposedly having hanged himself while prison guards failed to check on him for hours, it was not just Donald Trump who could breathe a sigh of relief. There were hundreds of powerful figures in the US ruling class who felt the same way. There was a universal desire to cover up both Epstein’s sordid enterprise and the circumstances of his death. 

This sentiment found expression in the pages of the New York Times. The leading US newspaper assiduously promoted uncorroborated and generally baseless charges of sexual abuse in the #MeToo campaign, which became a means of witch-hunting actors, musicians and other cultural figures. But in the case of Epstein, the Times now denounced “conspiracy theories” about his murder and showed no interest in tracing his clientele in the ruling class.

Sordid scandal erupts in the UK over cover-up of military leak of Afghan names

Thomas Scripps

The Starmer Labour government and the Conservative opposition are rolling around in the mud over revelations of a military data leak potentially endangering thousands of Afghans, and a close to two-year-long superinjunction preventing the media from reporting the story in any way.

In February 2022, six months after the imperialist withdrawal from Afghanistan, a British soldier was asked to pass on 150 names of Afghans applying for asylum in the UK after the Taliban’s takeover to several contacts for verification. He mistakenly sent the entire database of 18,000 names. The list subsequently made its way to people in Afghanistan.

British soldiers storm a building in Afghanistan, 2007 [Photo by Defence Imagery / Flickr / CC BY-NC 4.0]

It was only over a year later in August 2023—when an Afghan with access to the list who had their asylum claim refused threatened to post the database online—that the British government even discovered the leak. The individual was contacted by the security services, had their asylum refusal reversed and is now in the UK.

The Taliban have said they secured the list in 2022, with a senior official telling the Telegraph, “We got the list from the internet during the very first days when it was leaked,” meaning the horse had already bolted as far as preventing any possible retribution.

But the then Conservative government nonetheless applied for an injunction to prevent press reporting of the story, claiming an ongoing threat of harm to those named in the list as an excuse for covering up the leak. Judge Robin Knowles granted a superinjunction, meaning even the existence of the injunction could not be reported—the first such gagging order secured, or at least known to have been secured, by a UK government.

Breaching an injunction is contempt of court and carries a maximum sentence of two years or an unlimited fine.

Labour’s then Shadow Defence Secretary John Healey was informed of the situation in December 2023, with Keir Starmer apparently informed only upon taking office as prime minister in July last year.

Defence Secretary John Healey speaking at the Heads of Mission Conference at Lancaster House, July 1, 2025 [Photo by Rosie Hallam / MOD / CC BY-NC-ND 4.0]

From April 2024, the Conservative government began relocating some Afghans from the list to the UK under a top-secret Afghanistan Response Route. Nearly 4,500 people were brought to the UK this way by July 2025. They are still to be joined by another 2,500, with an expected cost of around £800 million in total.

Roughly 16,000 others affected by the leak have been resettled via publicly known schemes, which have brought just over 35,000 Afghans to the UK so far—at a cost of roughly £7 billion.

The superinjunction was repeatedly extended by Mr. Justice Chamberlain on application from both the Tory and then the Labour government.

In January 2025, the Labour government commissioned a review into the secret asylum scheme. The report was filed in June, finding that the risks of the data leak were likely overstated and that the existence of the gagging order had possibly made matters worse by raising the cache of the named individuals in the eyes of the Taliban.

Chamberlain lifted the superinjunction, meant to last three months, on July 15 after 683 days. As late as July 7, the Starmer government was seeking to secure continuing restrictions on detailed reporting.

Both sides of the House of Commons launched into solemn disquisitions on “mistakes made” and attacks on the other side’s incompetence, hypocrisy, lack of patriotism, etc. Meanwhile the media has lamented variously—depending on political persuasion—the betrayal of the UK’s Afghan allies, or of the British taxpayers lumbered with the cost of housing more asylum seekers.

Unacknowledged by all concerned is the fact that any harm resulting from the leak would have been only the latest blood spilled in a war jointly pursued by Labour and Tory governments, at the cost of up to 250,000 lives lost directly as result of the fighting, and countless more indirectly.

Labour are making the most of the fact that the leak happened on the Tory government’s watch, but it was Tony Blair’s Labour government which in 2001 launched the war together with US President George W. Bush and their NATO allies—justified with the lie that dismantling al-Qaeda and its host, the Taliban, would advance the cause of “democracy” and “human rights”.

Two decades and trillions of dollars later, the “War on Terror” left Afghanistan as one of the poorest countries in the world. It was handed back to the Taliban as the corrupt and reviled puppet government of Ashraf Ghani collapsed.

The occupation was such a debacle for the imperialist powers that the agreement to withdraw US and allied forces—initially proposed by Donald Trump but initiated by President Biden in May 2021—left thousands of their former allies to their fate.

In his response to the latest revelations, Healey plumbed new depths of hypocrisy by simultaneously touting promises kept while pledging to put a stop the secret resettlement scheme: “From today, there will be no new ARR [Afghanistan Response Route] offers of relocation to Britain. From today, the route is closed.”

Thanks to Labour’s “policy decisions that we have taken compared with simply continuing the policy and schemes that we inherited, the taxpayer will pay £1.2 billion less over the period, about 9,500 fewer Afghans will come to this country”.

This is the savagery of the imperialist ruling class at its most brazen; even their military collaborators fall foul of the government’s vicious anti-migrant and cost-cutting campaigns.

The decision follows the exposure of repeated interventions by the UK’s special forces to deny thousands of asylum applications from members of the Afghan special forces, for fear of what they could reveal about British war crimes committed in Afghanistan.

Similar concerns also motivated the superinjunction, which prevented even the Afghans on the list from being informed of the leak. Also named were more than 100 British citizens, including MI6 agents and members of the UK special forces—among them, according to the Telegraph, a major-general and a brigadier.

To protect these assets, and spare the government’s blushes, the public were kept in the dark utilising draconian legal restrictions. The anti-democratic precedent is obvious. No one knows whether other superinjunctions are presently in force, nor will they know whether another is implemented in future. And once again the courts were the enforcers of this blanket censorship, not guardians against it.

When he finally lifted the injunction, Chamberlain said it was “fundamentally objectionable for decisions that affect the lives and safety of thousands of human beings, and involve the commitment of billions of pounds of public money, to be taken in circumstances where they are completely insulated from public debate.”

But that was just as true nearly two years ago as it was this Tuesday.

Trump, Republicans maneuver to defuse Epstein crisis

Barry Grey

Jeffrey Epstein, March 28, 2017 [AP Photo/New York State Sex Offender Registry via AP]

In the aftermath of a politically explosive article posted Thursday evening by the Wall Street Journal detailing Donald Trump’s extensive relationship with the billionaire sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, the Trump administration and congressional Republicans have scrambled to defuse the crisis triggered by the Justice Department’s refusal to release FBI investigative files on the Epstein case.

Release of the files could implicate hundreds of leading political and corporate figures, Democrats and Republicans, documenting the corruption and depravity of the entire ruling class. Six years after Epstein’s death, supposedly by suicide while awaiting trial in a Manhattan jail cell, over a thousand victims have been identified, but not a single perpetrator who availed himself of Epstein’s services as a procurer of teenage girls has been named by the government.

Trump and his MAGA allies promoted claims of a “deep state” conspiracy to cover up the scandal in order to protect leading Democrats, such as ex-president Bill Clinton, and pledged to release the Epstein file. But earlier this month, Attorney General Pam Bondi issued a two-page report declaring that no “client list” had been found, that there was no suspicion of foul play in his death, and that no further information would be released about Epstein’s criminal activities.

This triggered an uproar from sections of Trump’s fascistic base, including former White House aide Steve Bannon, Elon Musk, and social media pundits Tucker Carlson, Alex Jones and Laura Loomer, who demanded the release of the documents and called for Bondi’s resignation. Even House Speaker Mike Johnson called for the release of the files.

Trump denounced his MAGA critics as “stupid” and “weak” and claimed they had fallen for a Democratic provocation. But following the Wall Street Journal article, he announced that he had instructed Bondi to go to court to seek the release of grand jury testimony in the federal case against Epstein. Bondi promptly reversed course and on Friday filed in court for the release of the testimony.

This move, however, falls far short of the demand to release the FBI’s Epstein file, which includes, among other things, reams of video recordings taken from Epstein’s homes. Moreover, it is very difficult to secure the release of grand jury testimony, which is highly protected by the courts, and in any event would take many months of legal wrangling to obtain. The move has more the character of a diversion than a concession to Trump’s enraged base.

Before Trump issued his call for the grand jury testimony, he posted on Truth Social a denunciation of the Wall Street Journal. He accused the newspaper of publishing a “false, malicious and defamatory” report and said he would sue the Journal, NewsCorp and Rupert Murdoch. He added, “President Trump has already beaten George Stephanopoulos/ABC, 60 Minutes/CBS, and others, and looks forward to suing and holding accountable the once great Wall Street Journal.”

Also Thursday evening, House Republicans, in a bid to appease the Republican base and preempt Democratic attempts to pass a resolution demanding the release of the Epstein file, obtained passage by the Rules Committee of a non-binding resolution concerning the controversy. The measure calls on the Justice Department to make available within 30 days “documents, records and communications” surrounding the investigation into Epstein, his death, and his associate, Ghislaine Maxwell. The resolution has not been scheduled for a vote and it is not clear if it ever will be.

The Rules Committee resolution was also meant to deflect a procedural maneuver by Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky, a Trump critic, to force a floor vote on the matter, a move that had drawn the support of at least eight other Republicans.

In a social media post, Massie denounced the Rules Committee resolution as a toothless gesture that would not produce any new disclosures. “Congress thinks you’re stupid,” he wrote. “The rules committee passed a NON-BINDING resolution, hoping folks will accept it as real.”

Also on Thursday, the Wall Street Journal posted an editorial headlined “No Special Counsel for the Epstein Files.” The newspaper endorsed President Trump’s opposition to calls for the appointment of a special counsel to look into the Epstein case and the suppression of FBI documents. It noted that White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had said Thursday afternoon that Trump “would not recommend a special prosecutor,” and affirmed his support for this position.

The crisis within the political and media establishment over the Epstein case is bound up with the broader crisis of the Trump administration, facing mounting popular opposition to his assault on social conditions and democratic rights, and sharp divisions within the ruling class, particularly over economic policy. Murdoch has fully supported Trump’s unprecedented attack on social programs and his dictatorial moves, but he has been highly critical of Trump’s tariff war and his threats to fire Federal Reserve Board Chairman Jerome Powell. At the same time, he has no desire to expose the pervasive corruption and depravity at the highest levels of the corporate and political establishment.

Peru’s far right rams through amnesty for human rights violators

Armando Cruz

Troops of the Peruvian National Police [Photo: @presidenciaperu]

Peru’s far-right forces, through their representatives in the totally discredited Congress and their puppet President Dina Boluarte, are in the final stages of implementing a legal framework for granting total amnesty for human rights violators and breaking from the Inter-American Human Rights System (IAHRS).

The IAHRS is the legal body responsible for human rights within the Organization of American States (OAS), to which Peru and all South American countries belong. To date, only the governments of Trinidad and Tobago and Venezuela, the latter of which the Peruvian far right denounces as a dictatorship, have effectively separated from the IAHRS.

On July 9, congressmen from the right-wing parties Fuerza Popular, Avanza País, Alianza para el Progreso, among others, voted in a session of the Permanent Commission (a body that meets when Congress is out of session) for Law 32107, which establishes a new statute of limitations for crimes against humanity committed before July 1, 2002.

The law has provoked condemnation and outrage from lawyers, human rights organizations and representatives of victims, who rightly denounce the law as an open door to police state impunity. This was confirmed just days after the law came into effect when three members of the former paramilitary group Colina requested to invoke the new law to apply the new statute of limitations on their convictions.

Colina was created by the authoritarian regime of Alberto Fujimori (1990-2000) during the so-called Internal Conflict of the 1980s and early 1990s, in which the armed forces fought a dirty war against the Maoist guerrilla insurgency Shining Path and, to a lesser extent, the Castroite MRTA.

Members of the Colina group were convicted in various courts for two massacres of civilians that occurred at that time—Barrios Altos and La Cantuta. In 2009, Fujimori himself was found guilty of “direct responsibility” for these crimes and sentenced to 25 years in prison.

Fujimori was pardoned in 2017 as part of a corrupt agreement with then-right-wing President Pedro Pablo Kuczynski, but was sent to prison again in October 2018 when the judiciary overturned the pardon. Fujimori was finally released by the Constitutional Court in December 2023 with the support of President Boluarte. He died of cancer in September of last year.

Keiko Fujimori, his daughter and political heir, is the main ally and political supporter of Boluarte, who assumed the presidency after then-pseudo-leftist President Pedro Castillo was overthrown in a parliamentary coup in December 2022. She consolidated her power by ordering lethal repression, killing 50 unarmed protesters in the southern Andean regions, where Castillo had strong support.

Since then, Boluarte has been nothing more than a willing puppet of the right-wing forces led by Fujimori and her capitalist, anti-worker, and anti-human rights agenda. In exchange, Fujimori ensures that her party’s 24 congressmen and political allies support Boluarte, her ministers, and officials in the face of any crime, accusation or scandal that may arise.

Boluarte’s sympathy for the impunity laws enacted by Congress are no doubt driven by her own fears of facing prosecution once she leaves office for crimes against humanity for the bloody repression she oversaw as the regime sought to assure international capitalism that it had the nation under control.

Boluarte and the far-right factions with which she is aligned have implemented the most reactionary policies and laws since the fall of the Fujimori regime, of which the impunity laws are one of the most eagerly awaited and planned packages.

Currently, Boluarte, with a 3 percent approval rating, and Congress, with a 2 percent approval rating, are the most unpopular president and Congress in the world.

On March 13 of this year, the so-called APCI Law was passed, which strengthens the control, sanctioning and supervision of NGOs active in Peru. The law was criticized by Amnesty International because it states that everything NGOs do with international cooperation funds must be approved in advance by the state.

Two months later, in June, Congress voted 61 to 44, with three abstentions, in favor of Bill 7549, which was specifically created to grant direct amnesty to military and police personnel accused of or on trial for human rights violations during the internal conflict. The main promoters of this new law were Fernando Rospigliosi, a staunch Fujimori supporter and long-time agent of the US embassy—an accusation he has never attempted to deny—and Jorge Montoya of the Honor and Democracy caucus, a reactionary and racist retired Navy admiral who served as chief of the armed forces command and who is the direct voice of the most fascistic factions of the Armed Forces.

In an interview, Rospigliosi stated that there are “endless judicial proceedings that seek not justice but revenge,” referring to the trials against military and police personnel. Montoya, meanwhile, stressed that military and police personnel who fought against “terrorism” should not be prosecuted. “Endless trials have been opened. This is manipulation of justice,” he declared.

Montoya is also a former member of the far-right and ultra-conservative Popular Renewal party, whose leader, Rafael López Aliaga, is the current mayor of Lima and a candidate for the presidency in the upcoming elections. López, a businessman and member of the Catholic sect Opus Dei, is likely to become the leader of the entire right wing, as corporate elites are reportedly abandoning Keiko Fujimori in favor of his candidacy. He recently stated that he would “solve” the growing wave of crime by sending prisoners to the infamous CECOT prison in El Salvador.

As with Law 32107, this new legislation was criticized because it would effectively upend more than 600 ongoing judicial proceedings and 156 cases in which convictions have already been handed down for crimes such as forced disappearance, torture or extrajudicial execution, almost all of them committed during the Internal Conflict. Delia Espinoza, the nation’s prosecutor, stated that the new law would contradict the norms of the IACHR, to which Peru is a signatory: “The Inter-American Court of Human Rights has been clear. Amnesty laws for crimes against humanity are inadmissible.”

The day after the law was passed, Prime Minister Eduardo Arana announced in a speech to Congress that he would propose to Congress the creation of a high-level commission to evaluate Peru’s withdrawal from the Inter-American Court of Human Rights (IACHR). No further details have been provided, but withdrawal from the IACHR is a plan that has strong support from the Armed Forces, the government, the extractive companies and even the Catholic Church. Many victims of the internal conflict have turned to the IACHR as a last resort to sue the Peruvian state and the Armed Forces for their role in human rights crimes. The IACHR has also shown its support for environmentalists and indigenous peoples in conflicts with extractive corporations, as well as for LGBT rights.

Just one month before Arana’s proposal, a hearing was held at the IACHR in San José, Costa Rica in the case of Celia Ramos, a Peruvian working woman who died after being coerced into undergoing surgical sterilization under a “family planning” campaign imposed during Fujimori’s second term in office.

The case concerns “Forced Sterilizations.” It was presented by the Ministry of Health at the time as the “National Reproductive Health and Family Planning Program,” whose objective was to reduce the birth rate, but in reality it was a quasi-eugenic campaign in which women of poor, rural and indigenous origin were deliberately selected and coerced or deceived into being sterilized in order to reduce their population. An estimated 270,000 women (and a smaller number of men) were sterilized during this period.

According to documents released under the Freedom of Information Act, the recently closed USAID agency participated in or directed this program.

Celia’s daughter, Marisela Monzón Ramos, managed to bring this case to the IACHR after the Peruvian justice system shelved the sterilization prosecutions; and in 2021 the IACHR declared the Peruvian state responsible for Celia’s death and recommended comprehensive reparations.

However, this case, like thousands of others, would once again be shelved and forgotten under the new amnesty law, which seeks to protect the most heinous crimes committed by the Peruvian bourgeois state and thus pave the way for future crimes.