Excavating the Epstein files

This election season you can streamline your news intake with up first. Our team of reporters and editors works overnight so you can start every morning with three stories you need to know in short episodes, 12-14 minutes long, to save you time and your sanity. Follow up first on the NPR app or wherever you get your podcasts. This is Fresh Air, I'm Tanya Mosley. Two days ago, Ghlaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's longtime associate, and the woman convicted of helping him recruit, sexually abuse and traffic teenage girls, appeared on a screen from a federal prison camp in Texas before the House Oversight Committee.

She said nothing at the closed door session, invoking the Fifth Amendment, but through her attorney she made an offer give me clemency and I'll talk. Maxwell isn't the only witness being called before the committee. In the coming weeks they plan to hear from Les Wexner, the billionaire who gave Epstein control of his fortune, former President Bill Clinton, former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, as well as Epstein's accountant and his lawyer. And for the first time, members of Congress have access to a secure room at the Department of Justice to read the unredacted Epstein files. Those documents, totaling more than 3 million pages, are the largest release of Epstein-related files to date.

They include private emails, a draft indictment that was never filed, an FBI diagram mapping his network, photographs and the unredacted at names of victims, including minors. And yet the Justice Department says, its review is complete, no further prosecutions are expected. My guest today is investigative journalist and author Vicky Ward. She was one of the first reporters to investigate Jeffrey Epstein's world in 2003 for Vanity Fair.

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