Editor’s note: This is a lightly edited transcript of today’s video from Daily Signal Senior Contributor Victor Davis Hanson. Subscribe to our YouTube channel to see more of his videos.

Hello, this is Victor Davis Hanson for The Daily Signal. I’m tired of the Epstein files, as you are. Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted pedophile, died over six years ago, in 2019. Yet, his ghost seems to haunt the political atmosphere today.

So, what are these so-called Epstein files? Well, there’s no manila envelope that says or manila folder that says, “Epstein.” Rather, that term loosely refers to a corpus of hundreds, if not thousands, of text messages, emails, phone records between Jeffrey Epstein and hundreds of people.

And because he was a spider-like person that had a web of entrapment and gave lavishly—I would just say at the outset, 90% of the monies that Jeffrey Epstein gave that had a political affiliation were Democratic and Left, not Republican. Get that straight right now.

So, he was everywhere, trying to buy influence. And one of the ways he bought influence was, apparently, in his various domains, he had underaged, attractive girls that he trafficked and manipulated.

And his modus operandi was to get powerful figures to come in, under the auspices of discussing statecraft, politics, great donations he would go to, and then they would succumb to these temptations of pedophilia, supposedly, unlawfully so. And he would have cameras and document that. And then, the subtext was they would be bribed. And he would offer to manage their financial affairs, or for a small donation to him, then he would keep that secret. And he used that to gain influence and money. And at his death, he was probably worth half a billion dollars.

And so, now, people want to find out who was included in those communications. But here’s the problem. Everybody says, “Donald Trump. Donald Trump. We’re gonna get Donald Trump. He doesn’t wanna release it. He doesn’t wanna release it.” But it doesn’t quite make sense because the “trove” was under the jurisdiction of the Joe Biden Department of Justice, under Attorney General Merrick Garland. They had them for four years.

Do you really believe that if they had something on Donald Trump, who admittedly knew Jeffrey Epstein, as a 1980s, 1990s celebrity in Manhattan—everybody seemed to know him—but if they had something incriminating—they leaked almost everything about Donald Trump. Remember, they raided his home. To get what? Just a few classified documents, 102 out of 14,000 papers. They raided an ex-president. Twenty-five states tried to get him off the ballot. He was the object of 91 felony charges in five different jurisdictions, civil and criminal.

You think if they’re going to go to the—impeached twice during the first term—if they’re gonna go to that effort and they had incriminating evidence in this trial, they wouldn’t have leaked it?

So, they kept it quiet. And then when Donald Trump became president, he had it under lock and key. And there were rumors that Attorney General Pam Bondi or FBI Director Kash Patel were gonna release it. And he didn’t.

And there’s two schools of thought, why he didn’t. The first is that he thought that it was a distraction from his economic—and it is. I mean, he had a better economic record than former President Joe Biden. He didn’t have 5.2%, on average, every single year. But people were talking about the Epstein files. And so, he just wanted to get it outta mind and not visit it. It had the opposite effect. By suppressing it, people became more curious.

And of course, there was the charge from the Left that he suppressed it because he would be incriminated, there would be a direct reference that he was involved. But we have just the opposite. What files or communications that have leaked out suggest that even some of the young girls knew that Donald Trump was not engaging in the type of activity that others were.

So, what was the other reason? Why didn’t he release it then? He was innocent? If it wasn’t a matter of distracting from his economic—was there another reason? Probably. Maybe the same reason that Joe Biden didn’t leak it, that there were prominent donors or officials that were either Republican or Democrat who just didn’t wanna be embarrassed.

How would that function? Somebody might call up President Trump: “This is Mr. Smith. Jeffrey Epstein came over to my home twice. I visited his home. We were discussing a large gift I was going to give to Harvard University. But my name came up. And without context, if my name is released, I will be incriminated because he is toxic.” That could happen.

So, there’s all sorts of explanation. There is even a fourth- or fifth-dimensional chess explanation. And I’ll throw it out there. In other words, Donald Trump knew that he was not in those files. But he had heard, before he became president for a second time, during his first term, or he had seen in the first months of his office, that 90% of the references of fundraising and money and associates, to the degree they were political, involved Democrats.

He also knew that, unlike himself, who had ostracized Jeffrey Epstein before he was convicted of trafficking and sexual crimes—that is, before he was a de facto pedophile—he had distanced himself, and others had not.

So, in this kind of strange explanation or exegesis, Donald Trump, then just let this sit, like hot water on a kettle, and simmer and simmer and simmer. So then, the Democrats would overreach and say, “Get it out. Get it out. Get it out.”

And he thought: Ah, they didn’t get it out because they are incriminated. And now they’ve leaked all they can about me. And unlike me, a lot of these people were involved after Jeffrey Epstein was convicted of a sexual crime. And I’m just gonna let them demand and clamor, until an opportune moment, I will release it.

I’m not sure I believe this exegesis. But that is what has been commonly alleged, more recently.

And lo and behold, they’re starting to release the Epstein files. And Democratic luminaries like Larry Summers, former secretary of the treasury, former president of Harvard, you can’t get much more elite and renowned than that, has already distanced himself from his Harvard former employer and Democratic grandees because he is mentioned in the Epstein files as asking for advice, how to, I guess you would call it, he says, “get horizontal,” or bed a young woman—I don’t know of what age.

So, in this case, they are going to release the files. And there is going to be Democratic names in those files and liberal names in those files. And their names will occur in context, not before private citizen Epstein was charged with anything, but after they had to know that he was a convicted sex criminal. And after he was convicted of that, they continued these relations of some sort of nefarious activity, as alleged.

And we’re gonna watch this. If that were to be true, then Donald Trump put a big noose out there. The Democrats unwisely put their head in it and screamed and yelled that Donald Trump was guilty. And then he pulled the lever, so to speak. And they’ve hung themselves. We’ll see. But it’s a sorted business all the way around.

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