One of the most hotly contested Democratic primaries of 2026 ended with a whimper rather than a bang Thursday, as Maine Gov. Janet Mills (D) suspended her Senate campaign, making outsider oyster farmer Graham Platner the overwhelming favorite for the party’s nomination.

The seat, currently held by five-term Sen. Susan Collins (R), is one of Democrats’ top pickup opportunities. But the primary battle surfaced many fascinating tensions inside today’s Democratic Party.

What doomed Mills — anti-establishment sentiment, her age, a bad campaign, or all of the above? How did Platner survive what many expected to be a campaign-ending scandal? Were his bold left views an asset or a liability? And can we read big national trends into this outcome, or is it mainly about the particular candidates, and the quirky state, involved?

To answer these questions, I spoke with Alex Seitz-Wald, a longtime national political reporter who moved to Maine and now works as deputy editor for the Midcoast Villager, a local newspaper. Since Maine’s Senate primary captivated national attention, Seitz-Wald has been a sort of Maine politics whisperer — a Maine-splainer — to national reporters. Here’s what he had to say.

Did Janet Mills’s age — and the Biden hangover — doom her?

Janet Mills is the sitting governor and was Democratic leaders’ dream candidate to take out Susan Collins. It was believed by many that she alone could put the seat in play. Now she’s gone down to defeat by a little-known outsider candidate — what went wrong?

If I had to pick one thing that explains the Mills-Platner thing, she just ran a terrible campaign. I’ve seen dozens of Senate campaigns. I covered national politics for 15 years, and this is one of the most shockingly bad campaigns I’ve ever seen.

The question she never really put to bed, but that everyone had was: Did she really want to do this? She kind of dragged her feet on running, as Chuck Schumer and national Democrats were very publicly trying to encourage her to run. She ran this very lackluster campaign, not doing a lot of public events, not a lot of energy, a media strategy that felt very dated. And that was what she could control.

The stuff that she couldn’t control — her age was the biggest factor. She would have been 79 when she was sworn in. Last summer, when she got in was right off the whole Joe Biden fiasco, the loss of the presidency to [Donald] Trump. 

So a lot of Democrats were very concerned about that. It was so fresh in people’s minds, so raw, and people felt like they had been lied to by the White House and the Democratic powers that be — it just made them all the more suspicious.

This is the oldest state in the country, so it’s not like people are ageist. But I talked to a lot of Democrats, including a lot of older women, who said they like Janet Mills as a governor, but they wanted a fresh face with new energy and new ideas in the Senate. 

She was not a Joe Biden — like, a doddering old person who was being protected by staff. I’ve spent time with her: she is sharp, she’s physically active. But Maine Democratic voters just never really saw that, because she was just not out there, proving it to them. 

Did Graham Platner triumph because of his left views — or in spite of them?

Platner is associated with the Bernie Sanders wing of the party. How important do you think ideology and views were in explaining his appeal — as opposed to the more generic vibes of “he seems tough and he fights.” Or are they intermingled?

Progressives gave Platner a good base of support, but I think they should be careful in overreading this as a victory of their ideology. Because there were a lot of other factors here.

There’s his Maine-ness, if you will. He just looks like a lot of people. If we went down to town, like a couple miles from where I am right now, we could find like a half dozen dudes who look just like Graham Platner. They’re guys who work with their hands who shower after work instead of before work. 

I think that resonates with people who are more working class — but also especially with Democratic progressive thought leaders who are more affluent, but who recognize the need for the party to reach those people more. He can do that kind of code switching because he went to GWU, because he comes from an upper-middle-class family, because he was a bartender at [the Washington, DC, bar] the Tune Inn. He can speak to the donors and thought leaders and he can also speak to the guys at the waterfront. 

Having covered a million campaigns, I’m not a huge believer in campaigns really mattering in general. I think it’s structural forces more often. But in this case, I really do think that the campaign that he ran — and the campaign that Mills did not run — were instrumental. It’s a small state, 1.3 million people. Everybody knows somebody who knows somebody. 

So the fact that he was just out there doing town halls that would get a couple hundred people, a thousand people, building this kind of sense of energy — no one’s ever seen anything like that here. And eventually, he reaches some kind of critical mass where he has directly met with or been in a room with a significant chunk of the Democratic voting base. That’s before you get to all the podcast interviews that he’s done, social media, digital ad campaigns, and all of that that made him omnipresent — he just connected with people personally. 

Did Platner win because Democratic voters are furious at the party establishment?

People have been using the phrase “Democratic Tea Party,” and saying this is an example of it. Among Democratic voters in Maine, have you seen a white-hot rage at the establishment generally, or was this more about the specifics of the particular candidates in this race?

I would say it’s more of a simmering resentment than rage. And I think it’s existed for a long time. 

Maine is definitely a state that has a chip on its shoulder. Every summer, we get wealthy people from New York and Boston and DC and everywhere who come in, and then they leave. That’s the background music of this kind of resentment of outsiders telling us what to do. 

People really resented the sense that Chuck Schumer, the Washington Democrats, the people from away, were forcing Janet Mills upon them. I picked up a lot of that really early on. They just kind of anointed her as the candidate and then said, shut up and get behind her. So, more than the “establishment” or policy, it was just the sense that people who know nothing about Maine are trying to tell us what to do — and fuck you for doing that. 

Could Platner have survived Peak Woke?

Then there’s Platner’s tattoo [an image of a skull and crossbones used by Nazis]. This was a gigantic story in the beginning of the campaign. Do you think he overcame this mainly because of his specific skills and appeal? Or is it because we’re in the post-woke era now and progressives are thinking differently about things like this?

We can’t check a counterfactual, but I don’t see any way that he survives at Peak Woke — or even pre-Great Awokening, when the normal rules of politics existed.

Pre-Trump.

Yeah, pre-Trump. 

Before it came out, he’d had enough time to build support and get people emotionally invested in his campaign. And because it was dropped so close to the Mills campaign launch, it just immediately came with this added valence of, oh, this is a hit planted by his opponents. 

I talked to a lot of people, didn’t hear any initial abandonment, and it just kept going. And then it actually sort of inoculated him going forward because he was seen as talking about it so much. He went on a lot of podcasts, he talked to anyone who wanted to ask him the question, he got asked at town halls. He was perceived as being very open and honest about it. And then it was taken as a sign of growth — of his realness — because he was willing to admit a mistake and not try to explain it away, like most politicians. So it ended up reinforcing this perception that he’s a regular guy.

I also think, if you look at his bio, he was voted Most Likely to Start a Revolution in high school, where he’s holding up signs with Free Palestine and Free Tibet. Through that, and through the Reddit posts, we have something like an unvarnished window into his raw political id. And the Nazi thing just doesn’t really pass the smell test to me.

Will Susan Collins be doomed by the national trend — or can she defy that trend yet again?

Susan Collins is one of the last so-called moderate Republicans, who her critics say is now no longer much of a moderate at all. She’s now facing what could be her toughest environment ever. What’s your sense of how Maine voters are viewing Collins right now? Has she managed to retain some distance from Trump and her reputation for doing what’s best for Maine?

Discount or underestimate Susan Collins at your own risk, because she has proven time and again that she’s a very effective politician at winning campaigns in tough environments. That said, I do think this is probably the toughest environment that she’s faced. It’s a midterm; Trump won’t be on the ballot. The national environment, and locally here, is very much shaping up to be anti-Trump. She’s older. She’s more established, more establishment-coded.

That said, it’s really hard to gauge her support because it’s very sub rosa. She has just been around for so long. She has these personal relationships with, like, everybody in the state and seems to just be aware of everything going on. I talk to people all the time who are like, “all right, just emailed with Susan,” or “I just got off the phone with Susan.” So she’s just making these one-on-one connections. She seems to be a step ahead of everyone, knowing everything that is going on. And I think that goes a long way. 

She’s the chair of the Appropriations Committee. In olden times, that was like a guaranteed lock on winning reelection. It is not as powerful as it used to be, but I do think it’s meaningful in a state like Maine that relies a lot on federal money — and she has just absolutely opened the spigots in the past year.

You can go on her website and you can see all the money and all the projects she’s funded, and there’s these little pins on the state of Maine, covering the entire map. When this money falls from the sky, it’s a huge boon. 

And a word of caution on the polling. In 2020, polls all had Collins down heading into election day. She had been outspent by her Democratic opponent two to one. And then she ended up winning by 9 percentage points. So it looks very anti-Collins out there — but I think behind the scenes, she has a lot more support than is obvious. 

This interview has been condensed and edited.

Since Elon Musk bought Twitter in 2022, it has often seemed that he transformed a platform that favored progressives into one that bolstered the right instead.

And in the years after that purchase, the right’s political fortunes improved dramatically. The woke era came to a close, conservatives gained the upper hand in the culture war, and President Donald Trump returned to power while Democrats and leftists became disillusioned and dispirited. A mood of right-wing triumph pervaded the platform Musk renamed X.

But in recent months, X has lost its ability to unite the right. Instead, it’s increasingly the place where Trump supporters turn on each other.

Intense and bitter public feuds have broken out over such topics as Israel, antisemitism, bigotry against Indian Americans, and whether people whose ancestors came to the US more recently should be considered less authentically American. Conspiracy theories are running rampant, with many targeting the Trump administration itself.

Importantly, much of this is happening because of X. That is: the changes to the platform’s policies and culture that have been made under Musk’s ownership have altered the norms of what it’s acceptable for right-wingers to say, and have incentivized a race to the bottom for engagement. It turns out that once guardrails against bigotry and misinformation are removed, there’s a huge audience-side “demand” on the right for both. 

“On the right, the public mind is now shaped by the X algorithm,” right-wing activist and X power-user Christopher Rufo recently wrote, arguing that X has usurped the role formerly held by Fox News. But, he went on, “the platform’s algorithm seems increasingly hijacked by bad actors who peddle baseless conspiracies” for “clicks, dollars, and shares.”

Meanwhile, as X grows more extreme and disconnected from reality, top Trump officials remain obsessed with pandering to its user base — focused on throwing red meat to the online right, rather than trying to win back the ordinary voters who have soured on the president.

In all this lies the seeds for the potential destruction of the MAGA 2.0 coalition. Controversies over antisemitism are shaking right-wing institutions like the Heritage Foundation. Overt bigotry and an obsession with online nonsense seem ill-suited to retaining the loyalty of the voters of color who backed Trump for the first time in 2024.

And in a way, this is a familiar story. Just a few years ago, when progressives were the most influential Twitter users, it was Democrats who often mistook retweets for reality and got out of touch with ordinary voters. Now it’s the right’s turn in the barrel.

Why Twitter/X is so important and powerful

Twitter was, and X remains, the closest thing we have to a “public square” where people of varying ideological persuasions from different walks of life come together and say what’s on their minds. 

Many of our country’s elites are still on the platform, which helps shape their views of what ideas are in vogue and correct — and how to make sense of the world. Amid an increasingly atomized media and content environment, it’s still the place where various writers and streamers and podcasters come together and talk directly to each other, rather than just to their own audiences.

Crucial to the platform’s power is the pile-on, in which large numbers of users come together to say that someone or something is bad. The pile-on is enjoyable to its participants, who derive meaning and belonging from coming together against a common enemy. Potential targets of the pile-on — corporations, media figures, politicians, other institutions — fear it, and shape their behavior to try to avoid it.

Yet the platform is also, in a sense, a trap. The saying goes that “Twitter isn’t real life” — though that sentiment has seemed somewhat quaint as real life and Twitter have come to resemble one another. But there remains a core truth to it: the platform’s heaviest users tend to be deeply politically engaged and ideological, while the many Americans who follow politics less closely or have more mainstream views are far less represented and vocal. 

The problem is that political actors and coalition participants seeking to gauge what people think of something use X and other feedback mechanisms that are dominated by the most super-engaged slice of their base. For many, the day-to-day work of their job essentially becomes pandering to their super-engaged supporters. (After all, if they’re mad at you, they’re surely going to let you know it, and you’ll likely try to make the problem go away.)

How Musk changed Twitter

Twitter was crucial in driving and amplifying the emboldened social justice activism of the 2010s and early 2020s. Musk then bought it to try and combat that activism, and he changed how the platform worked in a few important ways:

• He rolled back content moderation policies against hate speech and misinformation, restoring many previously banned accounts (such as that of the antisemite Nick Fuentes)
• He started letting anyone buy the “blue check” verified status previously given to journalists and other prominent figures
• He used creator payouts to incentivize people to create viral content

Finally and crucially, Musk also sparked an exodus. Many of the vocal progressives who had long set Twitter’s dominant tone and culture quit using the platform in protest of his behavior. 

The combination of these changes transformed X from a platform where right-wingers talked alongside progressives to a platform where the relatively more “reasonable” right-wingers talked alongside kooks and virulent bigots. 

On Twitter, if you said something too bigoted, you could be banned. On X, that won’t happen — and indeed, creator payouts may give you an incentive to say even more bigoted things, if an audience likes it. 

Tucker Carlson was fired from Fox and moved his show to X, and has since hosted increasingly extreme characters, culminating in his interview of Fuentes this fall, an interview that kick-started a controversy that eventually led to many resignations from the most important conservative think tank, the Project 2025-authoring Heritage Foundation.

All this helped change right-wing norms and standards on what is acceptable to say publicly, to the dawning horror of some in the movement. After being bombarded with anti-Indian attacks in October, conservative commentator Dinesh D’Souza — not exactly the most politically correct guy around — wrote: “In a career spanning 40 years, I have never encountered this type of rhetoric. The Right never used to talk like this. So who on our side has legitimized this type of vile degradation?”

Rufo, for his part, is not exactly uniformly opposed to racially charged conspiracy theories: He happily spread the accusation that Haitian immigrants were eating pets in Ohio last year. But he’s been perturbed by three ideological trends he saw gaining steam among parts of the right: racialism, antisemitism, and conspiracism. These trends have only worsened as the year continued — for instance, in the conspiracy theories over the murder of Charlie Kirk. 

Lately, Rufo has pointed the finger at X’s algorithm as a main culprit, complaining that “Musk’s decision to pay content creators has further detached reach from quality” and urged him to make changes on the platform. 

Longtime conservative blogger Razib Khan expressed similar concerns, recently writing that he’s “starting to worry reading X and seeing the impact of youtube influencers that we’re going to lose because our arguments are starting to sound very stupid.” This shift, he added, represents “a major decrease in IQ.”

The Trump administration’s X obsession – and the attempt to reunite the online right

X has grown more extreme amid a remarkable context: The second Trump administration is the most online in US history, with many current top officials positively obsessed with how they are viewed among the online right, and turning to X first to assess that.

Indeed, Trump administration policy seems to be driven in part by Trump’s own personalistic whims, in part by White House adviser Stephen Miller’s anti-immigrant fanaticism, and in part by various officials’ independent attempts to try and impress online right influencers.

The examples are legion. The continuing saga over the “Epstein files” began as Attorney General Pam Bondi’s botched attempt to pander to right-wing influencers. Top FBI officials Kash Patel and Dan Bongino are chronically online and obsessed with criticism from right-wing influencers over their supposed failures to reveal deep-state conspiracies. FCC chair Brendan Carr’s threats against Jimmy Kimmel were made as tough talk to impress a right-wing streamer. And Vice President JD Vance is the most online of all, driven to defend the honor of racist shitposters so long as they’re on his side.

This continued obsession with pleasing the fringiest figures on the right does not seem to have been very successful at making Trump popular — his approval rating is mired at about 42 percent, with 54 percent disapproving of his job performance. Yet his administration has plowed ahead with its base-pleasing strategy regardless, either mistaking X for ordinary voter sentiment, or thinking X is more important to their future career prospects than ordinary voters are.

Rabbit holes, conspiracy theories, and bigotry are spreading on X with no end in sight, and alienating the less extreme people who are exposed to it. But right-wingers’ hope is that they can restore their frayed unity by redirecting their energy to targets they can all agree on.

And they’ve had some success on that in recent days, in right-wing outrage about fraud allegedly committed by Somali immigrants against Minnesota’s welfare programs. It was in fact Rufo who helped focus the right’s attention on this long-public scandal, and a young conservative YouTube influencer who helped it go mega-viral in recent days. 

On this topic, they could all agree on who the bad guys were: African immigrants, Democratic Gov. Tim Walz, and the media. It was like old times. Can it last?

Is CBS News editor-in-chief Bari Weiss censoring critical coverage of the Trump administration to please the network’s billionaire backers and the president himself?

It’s the crisis many have anticipated since Weiss — a center-right provocateur known for her outspoken criticism of “wokeness” and support for Israel — was appointed atop CBS News in October. And now it’s here.

On Sunday, 60 Minutes was set to air a report on conditions in El Salvador’s CECOT prison, where the Trump administration has sent migrants. But Saturday night, Weiss intervened to spike the story, declaring it was not “ready” for publication. 

A flurry of leaks then ensued, including an internal email from Sharyn Alfonsi, a correspondent on the story. Alfonsi asserted it had been fully reviewed and approved by the network’s standards and legal team, and that Weiss’s move was therefore “political,” “a betrayal,” and “corporate censorship.”

Weiss’s own internal explanation then leaked: She insisted both that there was not enough new in the report and insisted it should include Trump officials giving an on-camera interview. “I look forward to airing this important piece when it’s ready,” she told the New York Times in a statement. Other criticisms she’d made internally about the piece were later leaked to Axios, and they boiled down to: not enough was done to explain the administration’s point of view.

Behind Weiss’s move, her critics suspect, is an effort to please Larry and David Ellison, the father-and-son billionaires who helped purchase CBS’s parent company, Paramount, earlier this year. The Ellisons subsequently bought Weiss’s publication, the Free Press, making her very rich, and installed her atop a pillar of the mainstream media despite her lack of any experience in TV news.

The Ellisons are hoping the Trump administration will intervene to help them pull off another media mega-deal. The problem is that President Donald Trump has been very vocal about his unhappiness with 60 Minutes’s recent coverage of his administration — he’s insisted it’s gotten worse since the Ellisons took it over. The implied quid pro quo seems obvious: shape coverage of Trump more to his liking, or say goodbye to your media mega-deal. 

Yet there’s also a throughline that connects Weiss’s behavior here with her longstanding editorial line toward Trump — epitomized in the approach of the Free Press. That publication frequently runs criticisms of the Trump administration. But, typically, it tries to make sure it is done in a delicate and careful way, with sensitivity toward how its right-wing audience would receive it and care not to trigger them.

That is, when it comes to Trump, Weiss has long tried hard to be “politically correct.”

The billionaires behind the curtain

Let’s start by paying attention to the billionaires behind the curtain.

Larry Ellison has long supported Trump, and he and his son currently want the Trump administration to use antitrust review to scuttle Netflix’s purchase of Warner Bros. Discovery, so they can combine WB with Paramount to create an entertainment and media powerhouse. 

But Trump is no cheap date. He’s making his price clear. 

On December 8, Trump complained on Truth Social that 60 Minutes aired an interview in which his onetime ally Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) criticized him. But he clarified that his “real problem with the show” wasn’t Greene, it was that ‘the new ownership” would even “allow a show like this to air.” He continued: “THEY ARE NO BETTER THAN THE OLD OWNERSHIP… Since they bought it, 60 Minutes has actually gotten WORSE!”

He reiterated that complaint in another post Tuesday: “For those people that think I am close with the new owners of CBS, please understand that 60 Minutes has treated me far worse since the so-called ‘takeover,’ than they have ever treated me before. If they are friends, I’d hate to see my enemies!”

Anonymously sourced reports from Trumpworld soon suggested that the Ellisons’ hopes for federal intervention may be in vain. And a fund that had supported the Ellisons’ bid — Affinity Partners, run by Trump son-in-law Jared Kushner — pulled out from the deal last week.

At a rally on Friday, Trump complained about 60 Minutes again, saying they’ve “treated me worse under the new ownership,” and that “they just keep hitting me, it’s crazy.”

The next day, on Saturday, Weiss decided to spike the CECOT story, which was set to air Sunday.

Bari Weiss’s political correctness toward Trump

Yet it isn’t exactly surprising that Weiss would be skeptical about a hard-hitting investigative report into the Trump administration’s abuses.

The Free Press is distinguished by its opposition to “wokeness” and its staunch support of Israel. But in contrast to other center-right publications that distinguished themselves from their more conservative brethren by criticizing Trump, Weiss’s Free Press was, at the very least, Trump-curious.

To be sure, the Free Press ran criticism of Trump. But Weiss criticized what she called the “overzealous, out-of-touch, hysterical reaction” to Trump in his first term, particularly scorning claims that he was a budding authoritarian. In fact, it was Trump’s critics, she said, who often proved “extraordinarily authoritarian and totalitarian.”

So, in contrast to the Free Press’s hair-on-fire coverage of leftists on campus, the publication took a notably measured tone toward Trump’s second term. One go-to move for when the administration did something that was widely viewed as outrageous or terrible was to convene an expert roundtable — get some critics in there as well as some Trump supporters, and let the readers decide.

Trump was not, so far as we know, reading the Free Press. But the anti-woke audience Weiss was cultivating was full of Trump supporters, and to keep them subscribing, Weiss had to ensure the Free Press never became viewed as overtly anti-Trump, even after Trump regained office and began imposing a hardline agenda.

Some commentators who liked Weiss’s anti-wokeness takes were appalled by this turn. “The almost total avoidance of coverage of the current government threats to freedoms as basic as habeas corpus, due process and free speech on campus is quite something,” Andrew Sullivan wrote, adding: “When there is coverage, it’s nitpicking in order to defend Trump.”

We don’t actually know what the CBS News CECOT report contains. But it is common for investigative journalists to take an adversarial approach to the people in power — to expose abuses by them and try to hold them to account. In Alfonsi’s email, she framed her CECOT story as “giving voice to the voiceless.” Weiss’s longtime critique, though, is that she believes mainstream journalistic institutions became too adversarial and reflexively hostile to Donald Trump. 

Before Weiss founded the Free Press, she was a mid-level editor at the New York Times’s opinion section. But in summer 2020, she publicly posted her “Resignation Letter,” blasting the paper for what she said was progressive groupthink and a culture hostile to conservative or even centrist views.

In the letter, she complained that on certain topics, “self-censorship” had become “the norm” at the paper. She complained that politically sensitive pieces were treated according to a different set of rules and standards, and that they could run “only after every line is carefully massaged, negotiated and caveated.”

This sounds like what Weiss is doing right now. Some of the criticisms she’s made of the CECOT story — that it doesn’t have on-camera interviews with Trump officials and doesn’t break enough news — sound strained, unconvincing, and unlikely to be the true reason for this high-profile last-minute intervention. 

Rather, Weiss saw a torrent of criticism from the right (and, plausibly, Trump himself) headed her way, made an awkward intervention to try to prevent it from happening, and consequently created a far greater uproar.

The Trump administration was legally required to release all documents related to federal investigations of Jeffrey Epstein by Friday, with only limited grounds for withholding documents and full explanations required for any redactions.

It did not do this. Or anything close to it.

The Justice Department released several thousand documents Friday, but top officials acknowledged that they had hundreds of thousands more that weren’t released yet, purportedly because they weren’t reviewed or ready. Most of the documents they did release were photos — either photos the FBI took of Epstein’s properties, or photos Epstein himself possessed. Of the investigative documents released, many were entirely redacted, covered in black boxes.

Some of the leading Republicans who’d pushed the administration for disclosure expressed disappointment in their compliance, with Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) saying the release “grossly fails to comply with both the spirit and the letter of the law.”

Unsurprisingly, these limited releases do nothing to clear up the swirling questions people had about the Epstein scandal. 

And while some of those swirling questions amount to conspiracy theories that will never be definitively cleared up by any document release, there is one big question that could be answered to some extent by documents in the government’s possession.

Namely, did investigators believe there were other men involved in Epstein’s sex crimes, and if so, why didn’t they charge any of them?

The Justice Department has documents that would answer this question

Officials at the Justice Department have been very clear that they believe Epstein sexually abused at least hundreds of women or underage girls in the 1990s and 2000s.

But officials have been much less clear on a related question: whether Epstein trafficked certain of these women or girls to any of his prominent and influential friends.

Certain Epstein accusers — most notably, the late Virginia Roberts Giuffre — claimed that this is indeed what happened to them. Giuffre said publicly that Epstein groomed her to have sex with him and his influential friends in exchange for money, which she did for a few years. And Giuffre specifically named some of the men who she said participated, including the UK’s now-former Prince Andrew.

The FBI has been aware of Giuffre’s allegations since 2011. One of the documents in the new release describes some of officials’ conversations with Giuffre that year, in which she “indicated Epstein had instructed her to have sex with numerous associates in both the United States and overseas.” 

It is primarily Giuffre’s claims that convinced many people that Epstein was not only abusing victims himself, but that he was also providing young women and underage girls to other men.

Yet no other men were ever charged with Epstein-related crimes. And the big question is: why not?

There are many possible explanations, ranging from the prosaic (evidentiary problems, statutes of limitation) to the nefarious (cover-up) to somewhere in between (questions about witness credibility). But surely, at some point, someone involved in the investigation wrote something down about this, assessing whether Giuffre’s claims appeared credible, whether other women made similar claims, and whether such claims merited further investigation — or not.

More broadly, investigators had to at some point grapple with whether they themselves thought the evidence suggested Epstein was supplying girls or young women to his friends. 

Typically, such internal assessments would never see the light of day if they didn’t result in charges. But they should be somewhere in the Justice Department’s Epstein files. So will we ever see them, or not?

Hundreds of thousands of pages of the Justice Department’s files related to investigations of Jeffrey Epstein are set to be released Friday, and though all the files won’t be released just yet, this batch is sure to create a frenzy on social media when it drops.

The Epstein scandal is an important national story, and key questions about it remain unanswered. Hopefully these documents will shed some light on these questions. Valuable and even revelatory information could well be in the released files somewhere.

But as the hivemind of the internet grapples with this imminent release, one thing that’s sure to ensue is an onslaught of misleading, out of context, or outright wrong claims — many of which will go viral — about what these files show.

The way social media functions, this is inevitable. People will post anything they see that looks suspicious or damning, and the posts that express the most outrage will go the most viral. In some cases, this viral outrage may be merited; in others, it won’t.

The documented facts about Epstein — that he abused hundreds of young women and underage girls, while maintaining friendships with powerful and influential people — are damning. They’ve helped make the Epstein saga the mother of all conspiracy theories, with something for practically every political faction to obsess over. Any tidbit in the files that can conceivably be used to bolster the darkest theories will be so used.

The nature of investigatory files, though, is that they will include a ton of information that is hearsay, rumor, unproven, or false. This, my colleague Ian Millhiser recently wrote, is why the Department of Justice typically doesn’t release files like these — because they could smear people with false or unproven information, without giving them a chance to prove their innocence in a court of law.

Elon Musk’s X is a sewer where the most virulent right-wing-coded conspiracy theories regularly go viral. It’s beyond hope. But Democrats — and many journalists, particularly in their social media posts — haven’t always reacted all that responsibly to these Epstein revelations either. (Last month, House Democrats released an email in which Epstein said Trump had spent “hours” with a victim at his house; however, it quickly emerged that the victim in question has long said Trump never abused her.)

But I cling to the hope that there are people out there who are legitimately interested in trying to find out what actually happened, and who are not just looking for ammo to use against their political opponents or prove the conspiracy theories they’re already completely sure are true. So if you, dear reader, are interested in advice on how to consume the Epstein files responsibly, read onward.

What not to do

To many, it looked damning. Just last month, the New York Times’s David Brooks had written a column arguing that there was too much focus on the Epstein story. On Thursday, after a new release by House Democrats, it turned out that Brooks was in the Epstein files, implicated, photographed, hobnobbing with the man himself! Clearly, his column was an enormous ethical violation, covering up his own complicity!

But was any of that actually true?

In fact, Brooks told reporter Max Tani Thursday that he’s never even met Epstein. He said he attended a TED conference in 2011 “and was invited to an adjacent dinner.” He continued: “There were about 60 people there if memory serves. Apparently Epstein was also at this dinner. I don’t think we met or exchanged a word. I never heard of Epstein until I read a Miami Herald story about him in 2018. I’ve never had any contact with him by email or any other means.”

Brooks’s clarification does, in fact, still tell us something about Epstein’s influence; the dinner in question, an annual event called the “billionaires’ dinner,” was put on by an organization called Edge that was in part funded by Epstein. But Epstein wasn’t the face of the organization or the dinner, and he wasn’t very well-known nationally then (in 2011). So on its face, Brooks’s account — that he went there to have dinner with a bunch of billionaires and had never heard of Jeffrey Epstein — sounds plausible.

But many on social media were already convinced of his malfeasance. After all, there was a picture of him in the Epstein files! (Even though the picture in question was one of several from the dinner that had been on Edge’s website for years.) Clearly, they argued, Brooks’s denials must be lies. So in the minds of many, Brooks is guilty until proven innocent, and if prior experience is any guide, the denunciations of him will be far more viral than any attempt by him to correct the record.

A more responsible way of assessing this information would have been to pause and assess what it actually shows, which was: House Democrats released a picture of Brooks at a dinner that Epstein also attended. Pausing to try to ascertain when the dinner was, who else attended, and other basic facts would have been the responsible reaction. Instead, the default social media response was to run around like a chicken with its head cut off and yell: “David Brooks is in the Epstein files!”

Focus on the big picture

So what actually matters in the Epstein scandal?

People have different unanswered questions. How did he make his money? Was he tied to intelligence agencies in some way? Did he really kill himself? Was Trump involved in his crimes?

Journalists have tried to answer these questions — take, for instance, the two new lengthy Times reports on Epstein’s money and his friendship with Trump. The government has offered other answers, asserting that, yes, its investigation found he did kill himself. But many people have been unsatisfied with these answers, believing there must be more to the story.

Personally, the biggest unanswered questions I have about the Epstein scandal that the files could conceivably shed light on are: Did investigators believe other men committed sex crimes with Epstein, and, if so, why weren’t any of them charged?

For background: Hundreds of women have accused Epstein of sexually abusing them in the 1990s or 2000s. There is also a smaller subset of that vast group of victims that has said Epstein trafficked them to other men as well. 

This, of course, has been the centerpiece of Epstein theories — that he was not just a solo sexual predator, but rather a procurer and supplier of young women and underage girls to his wealthy, powerful, and influential friends.

Yet none of these male friends has ever been charged by prosecutors with any crimes related to Epstein. (The only other person charged was Epstein’s longtime companion Ghislaine Maxwell.)

So what did investigators conclude about the claims from certain Epstein accusers that other men were involved in his crimes? Why didn’t they bring charges about it?

That’s what I’ll be looking for in the files: candid assessments from prosecutors and investigators about what the evidence showed and why they didn’t move forward with charging anyone else. I have no idea if the Trump administration will choose to release this information — they could conceivably use loopholes to avoid doing so — but I’ll be on the lookout for it.

In contrast, information from the investigation phase — tips, rumors, leads — should be taken with several grains of salt. Not every source being interviewed by the FBI is honest. Not every lead checks out. 

But the broader takeaway is that, if you’re interested in assessing whether something is actually true, you should assess where the information is coming from, how reliable it seems, whether it’s corroborated, whether it fits the timeline of what we know about the scandal, and more. You should not just take something as gospel truth because “it’s in the Epstein files!”