Jeffrey Epstein was Davos on Steroids

He hung out with the CIA director, Obama's WH counsel, the chairman of LinkedIn and more...but where are the foreign players?

So, the Wall Street Journal has produced two more brilliant Epstein scoops (here and here) that shed further light on my story last week about Epstein’s role as an elite global concierge.

I don’t think it’s much of a stretch to speculate that someone with access to the discovery in the civil suits filed by the US Virgin Islands and Jane Doe against JP Morgan and Deutsche Bank is sharing documents with the paper. That would explain why the Journal has cited the content of previously unseen emails and snippets of Epstein’s calendar in years post his 2008 conviction as a sex offender.

Turns out that in Epstein’s “pretend penitent era” for want of a better description (he told everyone that the 17-year-old he “solicited” had not told him her true age) his home was like a sort of Davos on steroids.

The list of US VIPs he held meetings with gets longer by the minute. Venture capitalist Reid Hoffman flew with him to his Island. The CIA director William “Bill” Burns met with Epstein when he was the deputy secretary of state in 2014 and, reportedly, he thought Epstein was just a rich guy.

Reid Hoffman

“The director did not know anything about him, other than that he was introduced as an expert in the financial services sector and offered general advice on transition to the private sector,” a CIA spokesperson said. (I cannot be the only person marveling at the apparent porousness of our State Department, and the lack of basic background information supplied to the guy now in charge of the CIA).

William “Bill” Burns

Epstein also had dozens of meetings with Obama’s White House counsel Kathryn “Kathy” Ruemmler, 52, currently chief legal officer and general counsel for Goldman Sachs. At the time, she’d left the White House and was in private practice. 

Kathryn “Kathy” Ruemmler

A spokesman for Goldman Sachs told the Journal that Epstein reached out to Ruemmler in 2014, soon after she’d left the White House, to ask if she would be interested in representing Bill Gates and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. She did not wind up representing either. (Bill Gates has said Epstein has misrepresented their relationship). But Ruemmler did have multiple dozens of meetings with Epstein per the Journal. A spokesman has said they were to introduce her to “potential legal clients.” One of them was the French banker Ariane de Rothschild. Ruemmler said she never flew on his plane or went to his island. “I regret ever knowing Jeffrey Epstein,” she said.

Jeffrey Epstein and Bill Gates

There are all sorts of other prominent people in Epstein’s diary named by the Journal—academics, lawyers, politicians, philanthropists, diplomats, artists (the one that I find most intriguing is Helen Fisher, the love guru). They are, without exception, all people you’d invite for a weekend if you were curating, say the Aspen Institute’s Ideas Festival. They are all people who, a few years ago, you’d expect to have seen on TV being interviewed by Charlie Rose. The mix speaks to Epstein’s sophisticated understanding of how the circle of life turns for the 0.01 percent. He understood that the world of the plutocracy is completely transactional. Bigwigs allot time to lesser bigwigs in proportion to their usefulness. So, most people don’t even get in the room. And if you do get in the room, you need to show what you can do.

But I’m still waiting for the other shoe to drop in the Journal. There were other people in rotation in Epstein’s orbit who were an even more critical part of his elite concierge service.

Epstein’s trump card wasn’t Bill Gates or Leon Black. There were people who were richer and even harder to get to. Foreign potentates. Particularly of places where the US doesn’t always have the best relations.