It's not the story that Politico really wanted but unfortunately for them, it is the story they ended up with due to cold hard reality. The story in question by Erica Orden appeared on Sunday, "The Epstein files’ cottage industry."
What is interesting is that none of the clients that the lawyers are representing is named Donald Trump despite the desperate Politico attempt in the summer of 2025 to link the President to Jeffrey Epstein culminating in SIX Epstein-Trump stories in a 24 hour period in July of that year.
As you read the story about the new "cottage industry" for lawyers, the main takeaway is the absence of Trump as a client despite the previous red hot Politico hopium last year that this would not be the case.
Scores of people named in the files — including high-profile figures as well as people whose names may have simply been mentioned in an email — have turned to criminal defense lawyers to help them navigate public scrutiny or professional blowback from their relationship with late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein or his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.
Major organizations and academic institutions have also enlisted some of the biggest white-shoe law firms to conduct internal investigations into their ties to Epstein and Maxwell.
Imagine if all those Politico writers last year forced to write Trump-Epstein tales could have traveled in a time machine to the current period and had seen such a story sans any suggestion that Trump had been implicated. Would they experience a sense of anger or frustration that all their work dig dig digging for that elusive Trump-Epstein connection had been for naught?
Among the prominent clients of lawyers needing legal defense help concerning the Epstein files was also someone who is easily much better known that most of the others: Bill Gates. And the difference between Bill Gates and Donald Trump upon whom Politico was so focused on last year is that Gates actually does have a very strong connection to Jeffrey Epstein even beyond the fact it was a major cause for his divorce. Politico obviously isn't unaware of such a connection since last December it published this story, "Bill Gates appears in newly released photos from Epstein estate."
Gates' absence from the current Politico story is even more mysterious since a few days ago, his Gates foundation popped up in the news with nefarious revelations about the strong ties that Epstein had to it as illustrated by this Vanity Fair article last Thursday, "Jeffrey Epstein's Lasting Grip on the Gates Foundation."
Buried among the massive tranche of documents released by the DOJ in January and the roughly 4,000 pages of grants on the Gates Foundation website is yet another complicated Epstein story: ghost-written emails, Middle Eastern intelligence, a personal loan to the former head of a prestigious think tank who allegedly helped afford visas to young Eastern European women.
Between 2013 and 2019, the Gates Foundation provided $8 million in grants to the International Peace Institute (IPI), a think tank that works closely with the United Nations and is focused on multilateral approaches to global peace and security. According to emails released by the DOJ, Epstein appeared to help facilitate a large portion of those funds.
The most prominent of Epstein's clients and now his entire foundation has come under scrutiny due to the release of the Epstein files and yet Erica Orden somehow avoids mentioning him despite the fact this is something that would supercharge the Epstein files "cottage industry?" Last summer we saw the frenzy that Politico went into over someone it obviously detests so is the opposite effect now happening in which Politico provides cover to one it favors despite the revelations in the Epstein Files?
