Hey Everyone,
As promised, I went back to Nina Burleigh (like me currently deep in book reporting and writing) to talk about three fabulous pieces of reporting on the Epstein Files she and Katie Chenoweth have done for their Substack American Freakshow.
The topics include:
Leon Black. (After storming out of his last session, Leon Black is expected back before the House Oversight Committee, supposedly on July 16.
Steve Bannon, somehow, has managed to stay almost entirely out of the conversation despite showing up in the Epstein files roughly two thousand times.
A small club of white-shoe lawyers — not the marquee names from Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, but a second tier of possibly far more important fixers, who have spent two decades quietly managing the money, NDAs, and much else that has contributed to keeping this story from fully surfacing.
The Bannon Mystery
We started with Bannon because Nina and Katie’s piece about him dropped yesterday afternoon and arguably should be getting attention on Capitol Hill.
Bannon and Epstein got to know each other well in Epstein’s last years.
The relationship timeline Nina and Katie have pieced together from the files is as follows: in the summer of 2017, Bannon was pushed out of the Trump White House. He and Trump were feuding, but Bannon was still the outside figurehead of the MAGA movement. Then, in January 2018, Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury was published, in which Bannon is quoted describing Donald Trump Jr.’s Trump Tower meeting with the Russians as treasonous. Bannon became radioactive. His patron, Rebekah Mercer, was furious and stopped funding Bannon. He was, in Nina’s words, bottoming out.
And that is precisely the moment Jeffrey Epstein appeared
Wolff connected the two men. What followed was a few months of what Nina calls “footsie playing,” before an invitation to one of Epstein’s birthday parties, before an actual friendship. Within a short window, the man who built his political brand on smashing the administrative state and warning about a shadowy global elite was on Epstein’s plane, in Epstein’s orbit, cozying up to exactly the network he’d spent years telling his audience to fear.
The emails Nina and Katie highlight in the files show the two men engaged in a lot of shit-talk. They are proverbial “boys with toys”, full of empty braggadocio. My personal favorite is when Epstein offers his house to Bannon to make confidential calls because it’s like a “SKIF”. Right. They are discussing turning Mongolia into a crypto capital. They trash Trump, who Bannon says is “like an instrument”. In December 2018—roughly six months before Epstein’s arrest - their exchanges included mocking the #MeToo movement, with Epstein writing, “so many guys caught in the me too . reaching out to me [sic],” and the pair joking about staging a “million man march” on Washington in which participants would wear “pink dick hats.” In August 2018, Epstein and Bannon went back and forth, teasing each other about how Bannon looked on TV. Epstein wrote that he’d changed his plans just to watch Bannon on TV and told him he “looked so clean cut” that Epstein thought he’d “turned on the figure skating channel by accident.”
I told Nina that in the summer of 2017, not long after Bannon left the White House, I’d heard through people close to Michael Wolff that Epstein had reportedly offered to fly Bannon to the Middle East to meet Mohammed bin Zayed, the ruler of Abu Dhabi. I raised it directly with Bannon at the time and told him, in no uncertain terms, to stay away from Epstein. He didn’t confirm or deny anything. He just smiled and said nothing — a moment I’ve thought about often since.
So what did Bannon actually need from Epstein? Bannon already had a lot of contacts in the global populist movement. He didn’t need Epstein to meet MBZ - he already knew him. BUT what he didn’t have, after burning his bridge with Mercer, was financial backing — and leading the MAGA army from the outside requires funding. I have never understood why on earth Bannon, of all people, came up with the completely cockamamie scheme to “coach” Epstein for a supposed 60 Minutes sit-down that never had a chance of happening - except, of course, if he was being paid.
And apparently, he was supposed to be paid. According to Nina’s reporting, in the final month of Epstein’s life, the files show that Bannon was pressing Epstein for payment on a contract. That alone, Nina argues, is reason enough for Bannon to be called before the Oversight Committee.
What makes Bannon’s situation fascinating in my view is how successfully he has distanced himself from a scandal he is drowning in on paper. Unlike Trump. One doesn’t hear the base baying for Bannon to divulge what he knows.
Now, that, I’d argue, is a sign of power.
Leon Black, The Recruiters, And The NDAs
The Bannon story bleeds directly into the Leon Black story, which is where the Oversight Committee’s attention is now turning.
Black stormed out of his own committee hearing once already after he refused to discuss NDAs he may have with women in Epstein’s orbit.
Nina and Katie’s reporting focuses on two young Russian and Central Asian women who, according to the files, were actively recruiting for Epstein — steering women from their countries into his network. One of those women, according to Nina, was paid hundreds of thousands of dollars directly by Black. Both women appear in email exchanges asking Epstein when Black is going to pay them, discussing what they call, without apparent irony, a “business.” One is looking for a “goodbye” gift - that she later references and says it enabled her to be a stay-at-home mom for a few years.
Whether these women were exploiters or exploited by Epstein is unresolved. It’s the uncomfortable gray zone this entire case keeps landing in: who is a survivor, who is a recruiter, and how often those categories collapse into the same person.
The paper trail alone does not prove that Black had any knowledge of Epstein’s sex trafficking (and he has said he did not know about it). But it raises exactly the question the Oversight Committee should be putting to him: what did Leon Black understand about the operation that supplied him with women; why did he pay them - and why was Epstein apparently in the middle of some of these financial discussions?
Which gets us to the real bottleneck in this entire story: the NDAs.
Nina and I both keep landing on the same frustration. Survivors’ lawyers routinely stand in front of cameras demanding “justice for victims” while declining to name the men who paid for their clients’ silence. Why? Because, as Nina says bluntly, these were largely unsophisticated young women being guided by plaintiffs’ lawyers who negotiate settlements, take a substantial cut, and then present signed NDAs as the price of the payout. The lawyers get rich. The names stay sealed. And the NDA machine — which Epstein himself pioneered, using it even to try to silence the original Palm Beach victims before his 2008 non-prosecution deal — becomes the single biggest reason the FBI and DOJ went nowhere on this case for two decades. Without a named victim willing to testify, prosecutors don’t have a case. Without broken NDAs, there is no named victim.
The Other Epstein Lawyers
Nina and Katie’s other recent piece looks at a different kind of lawyer entirely — not the Epstein defense “dream team” from the 2008 plea deal, but four men Nina and Katie call the Epstein Lawyers Association: Reid Weingarten, Jay Clayton, Andrew Levander, and Brad Karp.
Karp is the most well-known and publicly damaged of the four. He had to step down as chairman of Paul Weiss, after the files showed personal emails between him and Epstein, discussing not only Black’s business and private life, but a woman Epstein wanted deported.
Weingarten, whom I know, was Epstein’s personal lawyer going back to the Palm Beach era. He is a Washington fixture who once served on the Senate committee that investigated the “October Surprise” allegations in the 1990s.
Levander is arguably the most unusual of the four: a white-shoe lawyer with a decades-old Epstein connection dating back to the 1980s, when — according to reporting by James Patterson — he hired Epstein to help recover money lost in the Drysdale Securities collapse, one of Wall Street’s forgotten mid-80s crises. That chapter includes an almost cinematic detail: Epstein allegedly taking a private plane out of the Cayman Islands with a briefcase of bearer bonds belonging to a wealthy Spanish family, which he then deposited into a Swiss account the family could never access — while Epstein himself apparently could. Decades later, after Black was forced out of Apollo, it was Levander who produced the internal “independent report” — interviewing twenty people, including Black himself — that concluded Black paid Epstein $170 million for tax advice and would never have paid it had he known about Epstein’s sex crimes. Black was not, in that report, held responsible for anything worse than poor judgment.
And then there’s Clayton — the Trump-appointed former SEC chairman who became Apollo’s “non-executive chairman” after Black’s ouster, sat out the Biden years drawing an Apollo paycheck, and was installed by Trump in 2025 as the top federal prosecutor for the Southern District of New York — the very office that held the Epstein case files before they were moved to Washington. The man who knows, as Nina puts it, “where the bodies are buried at Apollo” is now the man in charge of the prosecutor’s office that would decide whether to dig them up.
All of these stories highlight the network and machinery that enabled Epstein to thrive and avoid justice. All of these men know pieces of the Epstein story - pieces that still need to be put together.
It would be helpful for us to know what they know.
We’re watching Leon Black’s return to Congress closely. We’ll be back on Bannon the moment there’s more.
Nina Burleigh and Katie Chenoweth’s Bannon and Epstein-lawyers reporting is available now on their Substack, The American Freak Show.
Thank you Story Carrier, Maureen Drews, Shirley Figueroa, Lee Mitchell, Kelly, and many others for tuning into my live video with Nina Burleigh! Join me for my next live video in the app.
