by Craig Unger
The anomalies in the events leading up to Epstein’s death have been widely reported, but it is worth recalling that two weeks earlier, on July 23, Epstein had been found half-conscious in his cell. He claimed he had been assaulted by his cellmate, a muscle-bound ex-cop named Nicholas Tartaglione, who had been charged with four murders. Nonetheless, prison officials concluded it was a suicide attempt and put him on suicide watch.
Six days later, however, after a session with a prison psychiatrist, Epstein was taken off suicide watch and returned to his cell. On the day before his death, his cellmate was released from jail, leaving Epstein there as the sole prisoner in his cell, with two officers on watch who had been instructed to check on him every thirty minutes. However, the two guards allegedly falsified records and didn’t check on him for eight hours—thereby violating the most basic operational aspect of their jobs. They were charged with conspiracy and record falsification.
When Epstein was found dead at about 6:30 a.m., they immediately rushed him to New York–Presbyterian Lower Manhattan Hospital, in the process once again violating protocol that dictates suicides should be treated with the “same level of protection as any crime scene in which a death has occurred.”40 To make matters worse, prison personnel failed to photograph Epstein’s body as it was found.
All of which leaves many unanswered questions. Why on earth would they put the high-profile, high-value prisoner they had in the same cell with a man accused of a quadruple murder? Why had Epstein been taken off suicide watch? Why had he been left alone without a cellmate, especially given such overcrowded conditions at the prison? Given those circumstances, and the fact that Epstein was one of the most notorious inmates in the nation, how is that the two guards just happened to leave him unattended? Why were so many bedsheets in his cell—another violation of protocol? And what about surveillance? Was it just another coincidence that the two surveillance cameras looking into Epstein’s cell happened to malfunction during this period?
One surveillance camera outside his cell was working, but, according to federal prosecutors, the video was permanently deleted, apparently because MCC officials mistakenly saved video from a different floor.
Attorney General William Barr described the events leading up to Epstein’s death as “a perfect storm of screw-ups.”
But others raised the question of murder. Epstein’s lawyer David Schoen, who met with Epstein just a few days before his death, said he believed his client did not die by suicide. “The reason I say I don’t believe it was suicide is for my interaction with him that day,” Schoen told Fox News.41 Epstein was described as “upbeat and excited.”
The mystery of Epstein’s death became presidential fodder nearly a year later, in July 2020, just after Ghislaine Maxwell was finally arrested and President Trump wished her well, making good use of the tough guy syntax of a mob boss making a not-so-veiled threat. During an interview with news program Axios on HBO, Trump was reminded that Maxwell had been arrested on charges of child sex trafficking and was asked why he wished her well.
The unspoken context, of course, was that many people wondered if Epstein would “flip” and tell who he had kompromat on—heads of state, Wall Street billionaires, or even Donald Trump, but he had ended up dead under mysterious circumstances.
“Her friend or boyfriend [Epstein] was either killed or committed suicide,” he replied. “She’s now in jail. Yeah, I wish her well. I’d wish you well. I’d wish a lot of people well. Good luck. Let them prove somebody was guilty.”
Trump repeated that Epstein was killed three times in the interview.
As for the facts behind Epstein’s death, former New York chief medical examiner Michael Baden, who was retained by Mark Epstein, Jeffrey’s brother, to attend the autopsy and give a report, found other anomalies—most notably three fractured bones in his neck that were more consistent with “homicidal strangulation” than with suicide.
“Going over a thousand jail hangings, suicides in the New York City state prisons over the past forty to fifty years, no one had three fractures,” Baden told 60 Minutes.42
Other experts disagreed with that analysis. And although he felt homicide was the more likely cause of death, even Baden stopped short of being conclusive. For that, he awaited more evidence, but that was being withheld pending an ongoing Justice Department investigation against the two guards who had left their posts.
All of which left the Epstein matter—or what remained of it—in the hands of William Barr, who promptly dismissed it as a suicide and “some irregularities at the [Metropolitan Correctional Center].”
But that wasn’t the end. On the morning of Epstein’s death, thousands of previously sealed documents from a lawsuit filed by Virginia Giuffre against Ghislaine Maxwell were released online, including depositions, police reports, flight logs, photos, and other materials.
However, that was only the tip of the iceberg. Far more damaging material was hidden away. Who knew what secrets were still concealed? Epstein had been silenced. Others may have had kompromat—the pimps, the girls who scheduled Epstein’s “massages,” Ghislaine, John Mark Dougan, and others—but most of them were lying low.
And there was always the age-old question, Cui bono? Who benefits? Certainly, Epstein’s high-profile friends—those who had indulged in sexual activities that he handed out like party favors—could breathe easier. And one had to wonder whether that included Donald Trump. After all, in an indiscreet moment, Epstein had shown photos of Trump with young girls to a friend.
That left law enforcement authorities at the FBI, the Justice Department, and US attorneys offices in Florida and New York, who had been investigating Epstein for years. All of which led to one inescapable conclusion: William Barr was in charge.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
BARR JUSTICE
Among all the key figures in Trump’s Praetorian Guard, no one loomed larger than William Barr. No one was more effective in counteracting the complex web of checks and balances that reined in the powers of the presidency. No one was better at negating and eliminating oversight of the executive branch, not just by Congress but also by inspectors general in one bureaucracy after another. In short, no one played a bigger role in opening the floodgates to allow a narcissistic, sociopathic autocrat who was a Russian asset to bring US democracy to the brink.
Aside from a deep ideological commitment to the principle of the unitary executive, Barr’s motives puzzled many, but religion may have been a factor. As Peter Steinfels, a former New York Times religion columnist and codirector of the Fordham Center on Religion and Culture, explained in an email to me, the authoritarian theology of Opus Dei and other institutions on the Catholic right has a considerable amount in common with the ideology of Barr and his associates. One calls for blind obedience to the catechism, the other to the president.
“Opus Dei’s structure is definitely top-down, controlled by a clerical leadership, not conducive to internal debate, and hostile to secular modernity,” Steinfels wrote. He added that this suggests an affinity between Opus Dei, Barr’s interpretation of the doctrine of the unitary executive, and “his broader jeremiads on the dangers of secularism.”1
Colonel Lawrence Wilkerson, former chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell, addressed the question of Opus Dei’s role in the Trump administration on the Background Briefing with Ian Masters radio show, asserting that the “Opus Dei Catholics were there, first and foremost, to reverse Roe v. Wade. . . . They believe everyone should be Catholic by the way, that a kind of authoritarianism, a kind of tyranny, is what’s necessary to get this country back in order again. And what do they mean by ‘back in order again’? They mean white, male, with the wife following along behind as the Bible says she should, and basically rich elite. That’s what they mean.”2
In the end, Barr’s religious zealotry led him to go so far as to call for the end of secular democracy, to call for it to be replaced
by God’s law, and to develop his theory of the unitary executive as a blueprint for an autocratic presidency in which Donald Trump would have virtually dictatorial powers. In October 2019, Barr told students at Notre Dame Law School how he really felt about “militant secularists” and “so-called progressives” who were doing everything they possibly could to destroy American society and create crises as part of their war against religion. “This is not decay,” Barr said, in his assault on America’s popular culture. “This is organized destruction. Secularists and their allies among the ‘progressives’ have marshaled all the forces of mass communications, popular culture, the entertainment industry, and academia in an unremitting assault on religion and traditional values.3
“Virtually every measure of social pathology continues to gain ground,” he claimed. “Along with the wreckage of the family, we are seeing record levels of depression and mental illness, dispirited young people, soaring suicide rates, increasing numbers of alienated young males, an increase in senseless violence and the deadly drug epidemic.” He charged that the government was trying to keep parents from “passing on of the faith” to their children and added that “for the government to interfere in that process is a monstrous invasion of religious liberty.”
As Joan Walsh observed in the Nation, this was “scary shit.”4
The speech closely resembled one Barr gave twenty-seven years earlier, on October 6, 1992, to the Catholic League for Religious and Civil Rights, in which Barr went so far as to call for the imposition of “God’s law,” because “to the extent that a society’s moral culture is based on God’s law, it will guide men toward the best possible life.
“There is a battle going on that will decide who we are as a people,” he added, and he made clear the enemy in that battle were “modern secularists.”5
At the time, you may recall, one of Barr’s speechwriters was John Paul Wauck, more recently known as Father John, the Opus Dei priest who became a professor at the Pontifical University of the Holy Cross in the Vatican. In a series of emails, he first distanced himself from the speech, and then wrote to me again. “I didn’t mean to give the impression that I had nothing 1992 [sic] to do with them; I just don’t remember them.”
Then he suggested that Barr’s attack on secularists was not very Opus Dei–like. “Within Opus Dei—in the writings of St. Josemaría [the founder of Opus Dei], for instance—‘secularity’ is generally a positive thing.”
Wauck, however, neglected to mention that when St. Josemaría Escrivá spoke so warmly of “secularity,” he was speaking of Generalissimo Francisco Franco’s fascist Spain, in which Opus Dei had an enormously powerful role in overseeing the judiciary.
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When it came to Russia, however, Barr, too, had Russian ties. In his financial disclosure report, Barr noted that he received between $5,001 and $15,000 in dividends from the Vector Group, a company that had strong links to Russia and whose president, Howard Lorber, accompanied Trump on a 1996 trip to Moscow that attempted to get a Trump Tower Moscow project under way.6
Similarly, Barr held between $100,000 and $250,000 in assets in Deutsche Bank.7 In 2018, he resigned from the board of Och-Ziff Capital Management, whose management had run afoul of the Kremlin. And, of course, he was counsel at Kirkland & Ellis, which handled Russia’s Alfa Bank.
When it came to overseeing issues relating to Trump’s ties to Russia, these ties represented potential conflicts of interest. “The legal standard is really clear about these issues. It’s not about actual conflict, it’s about the appearance of a conflict, about the appearance of bias,” Jed Shugerman, a professor at Fordham University’s School of Law and an expert on judicial and government ethics, told Newsweek.8 “The problem is that we have so many flagrant conflicts that are so obvious, we get distracted from what the legal standard is.”
That said, Barr came to Trump’s defense early on in his administration, starting on May 12, 2017, just five months into Trump’s presidency, when he wrote an op-ed for the Washington Post defending Trump’s firing of FBI director James Comey. At the time Comey was dismissed, he was overseeing the ongoing FBI investigation into Trump’s ties to Russia, and Barr baldly asserted that “Comey’s removal simply has no relevance to the integrity of the Russian investigation as it moves ahead.”9
If the op-ed did not suffice in currying favor with President Trump, Barr took a bigger step thirteen months later. As his firing of Comey showed, Trump desperately wanted to have one of his allies in control. After Comey was fired, Deputy Attorney General Rod J. Rosenstein appointed Robert Mueller to be special counsel investigating Trump’s links to Russia. And Trump was now displeased with Attorney General Jeff Sessions, who had recused himself from overseeing the Trump-Russia probe.
On June 8, 2018, Barr offered up a nineteen-page memo addressed to Rosenstein that was widely seen as a way of auditioning to be Sessions’s replacement. Even though Mueller was a close friend, and the Muellers had been guests at the weddings of Barr’s daughters, Barr held back nothing and assailed Mueller’s theory of obstruction of justice as being “premised on a novel and legally insupportable reading of the law.” Barr added, “Moreover, in my view, if credited by the Department, it would have grave consequences far beyond the immediate confines of this case and would do lasting damage to the presidency and to the administration of law within the executive branch.”10
Specifically, Barr argued that Trump, as president, had the power to hire and fire FBI director Comey, and even if doing so was an attempt to obstruct the investigation, Mueller should not be allowed to investigate the Comey firing, because to do so would limit the president’s authority over government agencies. “Apart from whether Mueller [has] a strong enough factual basis for doing so, Mueller’s obstruction theory is fatally misconceived,” Barr wrote.
This was the theory of the unitary executive again—this time on steroids. “The unitary executive idea is an important idea within our constitutional framework, but it does not justify the sort of absolute control over every conceivable action taken by anyone in the executive branch that Barr’s interpretation would give it,” said Donald Ayer, who served in the George H. W. Bush Justice Department as deputy attorney general in 1989 and 1990.11
According to Ayer, back when Barr was in the Office of Legal Counsel under President Bush, he pushed many of the same ideas he is pushing today. “The big difference,” Ayer told me, “is that as head of the OLC and then as attorney general under Bush, Barr didn’t have the ability to implement his idea of an autocratic president who has essentially unrestricted powers because George H. W. Bush didn’t aspire to be an autocratic president. So Barr couldn’t do that. Whereas today we have a president who, we all know, wants to be able to do anything he wants, and Barr is busily engaged in advancing the cause.”
Donald Trump, of course, was not one for reading nineteen-page memos. But the bottom line was that Barr believed that the president should have a vast array of powers and that if the president wanted to do something, by and large it would be legal. It went without saying that Donald Trump would appreciate that position.
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On December 5, 2018, while waiting in line for a shuttle bus to go to George H. W. Bush’s funeral at the National Cathedral, William Barr ran into his old mentor, C. Boyden Gray.12 Gray, you may recall, oversaw Barr’s hiring in the Office of Legislative Counsel in the Bush Justice Department. According to the New York Times, Gray knew that Barr’s name was in the mix to succeed Jeff Sessions as attorney general, but he didn’t know the details. The two men spent much of the day together, but Barr never let on that the decision had been made. His appointment became public the next day.
By the time the Mueller Report was released, Barr had replaced Jeff Sessions as attorney general and was finally in a position to give Trump the far-ranging powers he sought. With his ferociously Manichaean approach to scan
dals and lawsuits—deny, deny, deny, and attack, attack, attack—Roy Cohn had epitomized the archetype Trump sought in a wartime consigliere. He had done it so well that even more than thirty years after Cohn’s death, Trump, a president who was deeply angered by Sessions’s refusal to tamp down the Mueller investigation, was known to shout, “Where’s my Roy Cohn?,” a plaintive cry that so perfectly crystallized Trump’s dilemma that it became the title for a 2019 documentary movie.
Now, in William Barr, Trump had found his new Roy Cohn. As Trump’s presidency devolved into authoritarianism, liberals were arguing that US institutions were strong and that the rule of law would prevail. What Barr did belied all that.
America was just starting to enter a period in which a cascading series of historic events, each one of which in ordinary times would have been monumental enough to define an era, began to take place—before being lost in the growing mountain of crises engulfing the country.
Was former national security advisor Michael Flynn a traitor in his dealings with the Russians? Did Trump pay hush money to a porn star? Was Trump crony Roger Stone in touch with Julian Assange, and was Assange’s WikiLeaks a proxy for Russia in releasing Hillary Clinton’s emails? Had Jared Kushner set up back channels to Russia? Was Trump campaign manager Paul Manafort a Russian spy? How big a role did Russia play in installing Trump as president? Why was Trump sharing intelligence with Russia? Was Trump’s firing of Comey an attempt to obstruct justice? How could the Republicans have an impeachment trial and not call a single witness? Indeed, the Senate Intelligence Committee Report, which was not released until August 2020, made it clear that even in the Republican-controlled Senate, Trump’s loyal supporters were well aware of his treachery.