Speaker 1: What's up, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the
Epstein Chronicles. Some things really are a stranger than fiction,
and this is one of those moments where reality doesn't
just tell on itself, it practically confesses in broad daylight.
Back in twenty nineteen, while Jeffrey Epstein was still being
treated like a closed chapter and an administrative inconvenience by
the federal government, one reporter refused to let the rot
stay buried. Julie K. Brown didn't just write a story.
She detonated a long delayed reckoning. She exposed a decade
of prosecutorial cowardice, backroom deal making, and institutional malpractice so
obvious it humiliated the very agency's task with enforcing the law.
And here's the part that should make your stomach not up.
The federal response was an urgency accountability, or a full
throated reopening of everything they'd buried. It was surveillance, it
was paperwork. It was the Wyatt bureaucratic act of opening
a case file on the journalist who exposed them. Let
that sink in, because this is the moment where the
mass slips. Instead of racing to re examine the non
prosecution agreement that never should have existed. Instead of scrambling
to explain how a serial sex trafficker was shielded for years,
instead of dragging Epstein's enablers into interview rooms under oath,
the machinery of the federal government pivoted towards monitoring the
person who made them look incompetent at best and canplicit
at worst. And look, that's not an accident, that's not
some rogue office freelancing on its own time. That's the
bureaucracy moving slowly. That's instinct. That's the system protecting itself
before it ever thinks about protecting victims. And anyone who
has spent real time covering federal misconduct, corruption, or institutional
failure will tell you this straight. This move is as
old as the playbook itself. When institutions fail catastrophically, they
don't look inward first. They look outward for threats to
their authority and their reputation. And let's be brutally honest
about something else here, because pretending otherwise insults the intelligence
of anyone paying attention. If they opened the file on
Julie K. Brown, they almost certainly opened files on others too.
Journalists researchers, independent voices, people who gained traction, built audiences,
and refused to shut up or accept the fairy tale.
And I don't think that's paranoia. I just think that
comes from us learning the hard way. We've been told
over and over that Jeffrey Epstein was a lone predator,
some isolated aberration who slipped through the cracks. Yet the
federal government mobilized its attention not against the network that
sustained them, not against the facilitators who met his life
and crimes possible, but against scrutiny itself. And we all
know that that behavior does not happen in clean cases.
It happens in compromised ones. It happens when exposure is
more aerous to the institutions than the crime ever was.
This is how cover ups actually work in the real world.
They're not just built from sealed documents, deferred prosecutions, and
missing indictments. They're built from intimidation, quiet monitoring, and the
unspoken message that anyone who pulls too hard on the
thread might find the spotlight turn back on them. It
just becomes another brick in the wall, a wall constructed
not just to keep secrets in but to keep accountability out.
And when you stack this behavior alongside everything else we've
already known about the Epstein case, it stops looking like coincidence,
it starts looking like strategy. So when people ask why
distrust of the DOJ and the FBI runs so deep
in the Epstein story, this is exactly why. When the
story finally breaks, when the public finally sees what survivors
have been screaming about for years, and the system's first
instinct is to monitor the messenger instead of dismantling the
machine that enable the crime. Time that tells you everything
you need to know about priorities. It tells you who
the system is designed to protect and who it's willing
to sacrifice to preserve itself. And with that firmly a mind,
let's dig into the independence reporting because what it reveals
isn't just disturbing or uncomfortable. It's damning in a way
that the federal government still hasn't come close to answering for.
Today's article was published by The Independent, and the headline
why was the DOJ tracking an investigative journalist who covers Epstein?
DEM's demand answers, Yeah, guess what sort of the rest
of us. This article was authored by Joe Summerland. Democrats
on the House Oversight Committee have demanded answers from the
Department of Justice after details of a flight taken by
an investigative journalist well known for covering Jeffrey Epstein turned
up in the Pedophiles files. I mean imagine being Julie K. Brown, Like,
what did she do that was so wrong that the
government would open a file on her and investigate her?
Don't you think the right way to do it would
be to contact Julie K. Brown and say to her, Hey, look,
we saw your report and we are interested in what's
going on, and we want to take a look at
everything you have if you're willing to share it with
us so that we can open a case file and
get this going. But you'd have to have some accountability
to do that. You'd have to be willing to deal
with the screw ups over the years and come correct
and tell the American people what's what. And they're not
willing to do that. They're not willing to tell you
the truth, and that should terrify you. Miami Herald reporter
Julie K. Brown, author of the book Perversion of Justice,
which was published in twenty twenty posted on X Sunday.
Does somebody at the DOJ want to tell me why
an American Airlines booking information and flights in July twenty
nineteen are part of the Epstein files as the flight
itinerary includes my maiden name and I did book this flight?
Why was the DOJ monitoring me? And again, that's a
great question, and it's a legitimate one, and the DOJ
should be forced to answer that question. The FBI has
time to open up all these case files, they should
have time to arrest Jeffrey Epstein's co conspirators as well, right,
I mean, they have all this time on their hands,
obviously going after somebody like Julie K. Brown. And like
I've told you from the jump, don't get it twisted.
I'm not gonna sit here and tell you that Julie K.
Brown is the only one who broke this story open.
Before Julie K. Brown was even involved, you had Brad Edwards,
you had Virginia, you had Maria, you had Brittany Henderson,
you had Spencer Covin, everybody that was involved on the ground.
But Julie K. Brown most certainly amplified the story and
brought it to the masses. And what was her reward
for that? Hey, we'll throw you on a list. Very american.
Isn't it just very american to throw people on lists
and follow their movement and see what they're up to
because you don't like their reporting. Absolutely disgusting. And here's
an idea, and try and stick with me. Don't be
corrupt and you don't have to worry about people blowing
your shit up. Why is it so difficult for these
politicians and these bureaucrats just to do the right thing.
You're being paid a ton of money, getting great hours,
great benefit package, and your only job is not to
be a jerk off. And the vast majority of these
people can't even accomplish that. And these are the people
that are going to stop major attacks on the country
by terrorist organizations and what have you. Boy, I'm sure
going to sleep great tonight. Brown also addressed the matter
in a post on Substack in which she said she
had expected to see her name in the Epstein files
because of her reporting, but added, what I didn't expect
was to see an American Airlines flight record from twenty
nineteen with my full name on them. And including my
maiden name, which I don't use professionally. It's an unusual name,
so it's clear to me and the DOJ needs to
answer for this. This is ridiculous. Her ex message was
reposted by the official Oversight DEM's account with the comment
the Department of Justice needs to explain why travel information
and booking itineraries for a journalist or in the Epstein files.
I mean, it's unbelievable. I don't even know what else
to say. It's very rare that I'm out of loss
for words, But when you look at situations like this,
words don't really do it justice. It's so disgusting to me,
and it's so negligent that it's not even funny. Anybody
who's making these decisions to follow around somebody like Julie K.
Brown because of her reporting on a story like this,
that person needs to be fired. And frankly, if I'm
Julie K. Brown, I'm thinking about filing a lawsuit, a
civil rights lawsuit here, because this is just unbelievable. I'll
tell you right now. I find out that I'm being
surveiled by the federal government or they're following my movements,
I'm suing them. So if they're listening, I hope they're
a ready because also the shit out of you, believe it.
It's about time somebody stands up to these people and
tells them enough is enough. Do your fucking job. Stop
acting like the goon squad. The Independent has contacted the
DOJ for comment. The near unanimous passage of the Epstein
Files Transparency Act through Congress in November set in motion
a thirty day deadline for the DOJ to publish all
of its past investigative material on Epstein, the billionaire pedophile
and sex trafficker who died by suicide in New York
City jail in August of twenty nineteen while awaiting trial.
President Donald Trump signed off on a bill after months
of pressure to release the information, as he had previously
promised his supporters he would and admit persistent questions about
his past friendship with Epstein, which he said ended long
before it became fashionable in two thousand and four. Trump
has not been accused of any wrongdoing in relation to
the financier, and anyone's appearance in the files not be
interpreted as evidence of guilt. Well, that's true too. We
have to be honest about everything, and the best way
to do that, like I've said before, is to be
as precise as possible. Does it look like the DOJ
is being as precise as possible when they're going after
Julie K. Brown? Certainly seems like they have their priorities
a bit flipped. The DOJ duly published a significant tranch
of Epstein documents and photographs on December nineteenth, in compliance
with the Act. Still, they were found to be incomplete,
lacking in context, and not presented in a searchable format,
as the original bill had expressly stipulated. Well, to the
DOJ's credit, they fix that. The search bar does work now,
so if you put in certain words, you'll get back
the documentation that relates to those words, and it has
been helpful in me navigating through those files. So at
least the DOJ has went back and fixed that, because
that was a big deal Without that search function, forget it.
There's so many of those files it's hard to make
heads or tails of what's going on, so that's why
they had to all be in a searchable format. A second,
even larger batch of files was posted on the department's
website on December twenty third, two days before Christmas, leaving
interested parties scrambling to comb through the almost thirty thousand
pages released. And obviously I haven't even made a dent
in all of that. I've been focusing a lot on
the murder or death of Jeffrey Epstein inside the jail,
and a lot more on the internal conversations that were
being had by the staff. And boy, is it revealing
not to digress too far here, but over five staff members,
five guards refuse to speak to the FBI or the
OIG inspectors about Jeffrey Epstein's death. And I'm going to
go a bit deeper on that later on. I'm working
on a little something right now to try and put
that all into focus and make it a little bit
more digestible. But man, there's a lot going on right now,
and I'm doing my best to stay on top of everything.
But boy, there's a lot. And also, while we're talking
about that, if you've sent me an email over the
past three weeks and I haven't responded yet, don't worry.
I'm going to get to it, I promise you. But
with the holidays here and all this information piling on
top of us, remember I'm a one man operation, so
as I'm trying to create content and edit and all
the rest of it, I have to go through the
emails and still go through those files. So I'm trying
to prioritize the content over everything else. And as far
as emails go, like I said, I'm going to get
to those over the next few days. So by the
first of the year, I should have those emails answered.
If you've sent them to me, and if you've sent
me emails with files attached, they go straight to my quarantine,
So I have to go in there and manually look
at those, and I'm going to do that over the
next few days as well, So just bear with me,
all right. Back to the story. Brown is credited with
helping to reopen the case against Epstein after the mysterious
financier was allowed to plead guilty to two state level
prostitution offenses in two thousand and eight as part of
a plea deal with Florida prosecutors that saw a escape
more serious federal charges, which was an absolute travesty of justice.
We won't go too far deep down that rabbit hole
because we have plenty of times before, but that NPA
is the nexus for all of this, and if the
DOJ really meant business, that NPA would go away. The
Miami Herald began publishing a series of Brown's reports in
November of twenty eighteen that saw her identify eighty potential
victims of Epstein's sexual abuse, some of whom were as
young as thirteen when the abuse took place, and speak
to eight individuals about their experiences. Epstein was eventually rearrested
and charged again in July twenty nineteen, chain of events
that also saw then Secretary of Labor Alex Acosta resign,
given that he had been the US Attorney for the
Southern District of Florida at the time the pedophiles plea
deal was agreed. The deal not only shielded Epstein himself
from further prosecution, but also protected his co conspirators. Now
imagine John Gott you got a deal like that, or
El Chappo or insert criminal here. But Jeffrey Epstein, no
big deal. Hook him up. Now, Julie K. Brown being
followed by the government. Nothing good about that. And everybody
should be enraged because when you chop it up, what
it shows you is that the DOJ was more worried
about the story getting out than actually pursuing justice. And
if they were worried about things getting out, then well
it tells you everything you need to know about their
behavior now. So, like usual, we'll keep an eye on
things and we'll see where this all goes. All of
the information that goes with this episode can be found
in the description box.