Two Epstein stories landed in the same news cycle.
Wednesday afternoon, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick sat for four hours in front of the House Oversight Committee — not under oath, no cameras — and admitted he had been lying about Jeffrey Epstein for twenty years. Wednesday evening, a federal judge in White Plains released a yellow legal-pad note that has been sitting in a courthouse since 2021, that the Justice Department admits it never had, that a federal prisoner has been carrying around in his belongings for nearly six years.
Ellie Leonard came on the show today to walk through what both stories actually mean. She has been on the Epstein file for six years. She has read the emails, the chats, and the things the DOJ has not handed over. The conversation does what an interview is supposed to do — names the things the headlines are leaving on the table.
The note doesn’t read like Epstein
Ellie made one observation about the note that should not be possible to unsee.
The triple exclamation points. The Bugsy-Moogs cadence. FOUND NOTHING!!! NOT WORTH IT!! The dramatic flourish. None of it matches the Epstein who emailed his Brooklyn childhood friends, none of it matches the Epstein who corresponded with James Watson and Noam Chomsky, and none of it matches the Epstein who wrote about academia in long, dense paragraphs.
It is, Ellie said, the writing of a 1930s movie gangster impression. And then she put the actual point on the table: “this style is what we see coming from Donald Trump.” She is not claiming Trump wrote the note. She is flagging that the cadence — triple punctuation, all caps, dramatic compressions — is the cadence of Trump and Steve Bannon, not the cadence of Jeffrey Epstein.
Either Epstein wrote this in extreme duress, in a register he otherwise never used. Or somebody else wrote it. There is no third option that lets the document carry the weight the DOJ would need it to carry.
The cellmate, the bomber, and the man running the prison
Epstein’s cellmate Nicholas Tartaglione is a former NYPD cop convicted of murdering four people. After the July 2019 incident, the Bureau of Prisons next wanted to put Cesar Sayoc into the cell — the MAGA pipe-bomber who mailed incendiary devices to thirteen Democratic leaders.
Ellie made the chain explicit. Bill Barr was the Attorney General. Bill Barr was the head of the Bureau of Prisons. Every cell-assignment decision for the highest-profile federal prisoner in the country either crossed his desk or someone close to it. The choice of Tartaglione and the choice of Sayoc were not accidents. They were a message.
Epstein, multiple sources told Ellie at the time, was terrified. He was not suicidal. He had started talking to prosecutors in part to get out of the cell. The “suicide watch” was lifted after twenty-four hours, his roommate was rotated, and his psychologist cleared him for general housing. None of that is what happens around a real suicide attempt.
The note never reached the DOJ
The note was found, Tartaglione says, in a graphic novel after the July 2019 incident. He kept it. He kept it through his trial and his conviction. He kept it through the entire Trump-Barr DOJ, the Garland DOJ, and into the second Trump term. The Justice Department’s three-million-page Epstein Files Transparency Act release does not contain it. The DOJ has confirmed to The New York Times that it has never seen the document.
It came out on Wednesday because The New York Times petitioned Judge Kenneth Karas to unseal it. Without that petition, it would still be in a court file in White Plains.
The “complete” Epstein record is not complete. A document the U.S. government should have collected six years ago was sitting in a federal courthouse the entire time, and nobody in the Justice Department asked for it.
The 15-minute call that has no record
Epstein’s last phone call was to his girlfriend Karina Shuliak the night before he died. Fifteen minutes. We have always been told there is no recording, no transcript, because the call was made off-system.
Ellie has been through the documents. The call was made on a prison phone. A guard helped Epstein log in because Epstein did not have his own PIN. The call was logged under the guard’s correctional-officer ID. There is, by the prison’s own paperwork, a record. We have been told for six years that there is not.
That call would tell us what Epstein was saying the night before he died. It would tell us whether he sounded suicidal. It would tell us whether he sounded like a man preparing for something else entirely. The Justice Department has the means to find it. The Justice Department has not.
Lutnick’s not-oath afternoon
Howard Lutnick did not testify Wednesday. He gave a transcribed interview, off-camera, not under oath, in front of the House Oversight Committee.
Ellie laid the through-line out. Lutnick bought 11 East 71st Street in 1998. He shared a wall with Jeffrey Epstein until 2019. Twenty-one years. The first version of his story was that he visited his neighbor once, saw the massage table, found it gross, and never spoke to him again. We now know that version was false.
He did Adfin with Epstein in 2012. His firm Cantor Fitzgerald’s venture arm corresponded on the deal through 2014. He brought his wife, four children, and a full deployment of nannies to Little St. James in December 2012. He took a $50,000 contribution from Epstein for a 2017 dinner honoring Lutnick. He emailed Epstein about a museum expansion through 2018. The email chain between Lutnick’s wife and Lesley Groff — Epstein’s longtime assistant — laid out the arrival times, the dock arrangements, and the lunch logistics like it was any other family vacation.
And now: an email surfaced through Lord Peter Mandelson’s traffic in which one of Epstein’s lawyers forwards Lutnick’s nanny’s resume to Epstein himself. Epstein had no children. Why does Epstein need a nanny’s resume?
Ellie said Wednesday’s testimony also produced a contradiction Lutnick will not be able to clean up easily. He told a podcast that Epstein was one of the greatest blackmailers of all time. Wednesday, behind closed doors, he denied saying it. The podcast exists. The audio exists.
Mar-a-Lago
Marjorie Taylor Greene has now publicly described Trump telling Pam Bondi that the Epstein files would hurt his Mar-a-Lago friends. Ellie put that line where it belongs in the context — the reason none of the men in this network can break is that breaking takes the network with them.
It is not the moral cost. It is the financial cost, the social cost, the protection cost. Lutnick will not flip on Trump. Trump will not flip on Lutnick. Wolff will not flip on either of them. Mandelson is gone from his ambassadorship and is still not breaking. The men in this story keep each other’s secrets because keeping the secrets is the only thing that keeps them in the room.
The piles outside the DOJ
Ellie has spent six months going through Michael Wolff’s email and chat record with Epstein. Wolff, she said, is sitting on what is likely the second-largest private archive of Epstein material outside the DOJ — the rest is held by the Epstein estate. He is dripping it out into books and articles. He is also, in Ellie’s read of the chats, in a much closer long-term relationship with Epstein than the public record has acknowledged.
The point lands in two directions. There is real evidence outside the DOJ. The DOJ is not the only institution that needs to be pressed.
The Citadel stays standing
Ellie’s frame for what New York actually is: a small town. Everyone goes to the same five parties a night. Everyone keeps each other’s secrets. The mainstream press does not break these stories because the mainstream press is in the room at the same parties. The Met Gala this week — the ten-million-dollar Bezos-Sanchez endorsement — is the picture of it.
The stories that have moved this case in the last twelve months have come from independent reporters working from documents and timestamps. Ellie’s reporting on Wolff is one of those. Narativ’s six years on the espionage angle is another. The DOJ’s three-million-page release is a fourth.
The Justice Department under Bill Barr and the Justice Department under his successors have not closed this case. The Oversight Committee will not close it either. It will be closed, if it is closed, by the people willing to read the documents and name what is in them.
Thank you Education is a lamp, Lalisa, Skutt Hope, Yolanda D., Jennifer Wells, and many others for tuning into my live video with Ellie Leonard! Join me for my next live video in the app.
