Jeffrey Epstein and the ‘crisis of elite impunity’
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By Brad Reed
Common Dreams
Although Democrats in the US House of Representatives have used newly unearthed emails from the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein as a cudgel against President Donald Trump, many observers have noted that the full trove of messages also implicates multiple members of the American ruling class as complicit in a criminal conspiracy.
In particular, the emails reveal that Epstein maintained friendly ties with several people with enormous influence in US politics even after he served a prison sentence for soliciting a minor.
Among the prominent elites who maintained contact with Epstein were Larry Summers, former president of Harvard University and director of the National Economic Council under President Barack Obama; right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel, whose financing helped launch Vice President JD Vance’s political career; right-wing podcaster and former Trump administration official Steve Bannon; and Kathryn Ruemmler, former Obama White House counsel and current attorney for investment banking giant Goldman Sachs.
Writing on Bluesky, political scientist Ed Burmila argued that the true scandal surrounding Epstein isn’t just about one person, but a “crisis of elite impunity” in which the rich and powerful will brush off the crimes committed by their peers, even if they involve the serial sexual abuse of underage girls.
“The crisis of elite impunity that is ruining our society cannot be more clearly or convincingly demonstrated than with the fact that all of these people wrote all this stuff into an email and hit send,” he said. “Some of these people are lawyers; the rest are intimately (phrasing) familiar with courtrooms and lawyers in their professional lives. They didn’t put this stuff in writing because they’re naive or ignorant; they did it because they have no fear of consequences. None at all.”
Burmila’s argument was echoed by commentator David Kurtz, who wrote at Talking Points Memo that reading the Epstein emails left him “astonished not so much by the chumminess he enjoyed with elites even after he’d served time for soliciting prostitution with a minor but by their flagrantness, their casual disregard, and their indifference to consequence.”
Kurtz argued that this level of ruling-class impunity symptomatic of the deep rot inside American political, legal, and academic institutions.
“It is the same impunity that got us Trump,” he wrote. “Like Epstein, Trump built a career on a transactional chumminess, mutual self-indulgence, and an alarmingly high tolerance level for misbehavior by the layers of political, business, media, and cultural elites surrounding him.”
Leah Greenberg, co-director of Indivisible, shared Kurtz’s essay on her Bluesky account and declared the Epstein scandal “a story about total elite impunity, how the wealthy and powerful operate with a set of rules totally unrecognizable to the rest of us.”
MSNBC host Chris Hayes also thought the Epstein emails showed American elites in an unflattering light, and he observed on Bluesky that many of Epstein’s correspondents showered him with “fawning and flattery,” even though he comes across as “a pompous, sub-literate lech.”
“Lots of people say: that’s because he’s blackmailing them, but I don’t think he’s blackmailing Kathy Ruemmler!” Hayes wrote. “I don’t think that’s what explains it. I think the banal answer is: he’s very rich and powerful and good at networking and this is how people act around very rich and powerful people.”
Although Epstein was only ever criminally convicted on one charge of soliciting a minor in 2008, he was subsequently indicted in 2019 on charges of engaging in a broad sex-trafficking conspiracy involving dozens of teenage girls. Epstein would die in prison before he could face trial for these charges, and law enforcement officials would subsequently claim that he took his own life.
Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime accomplice, is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for her role in helping Epstein groom and abuse underage victims.
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