The House Judiciary Democrats put a case in writing Monday: Donald Trump as a participant in Jeffrey Epstein's crimes, and Todd Blanche covering it up. On Narativ Live, Ellie Leonard, who reads the Epstein files page by page, and Zev Shalev agreed on the aim and doubted the work.
Leonard called the report "a big buildup to a best-of album." The Katie Johnson story, the Jane Doe stories and the Maxwell proffer were already public, she said, and "it just wasn't good enough at this late stage in the game." Shalev said the point of the document is a special counsel in a new Congress, and launching one against a sitting president "is about as serious as you can get." "Don't fail this."
Both read the Blanche interview the same way. Blanche flew to a Florida prison in July 2025, Maxwell raised Jane three times, and he cut her off each time; the FBI had built him a slide deck of prominent names the night before, and Jane was on it. Leonard typed her own transcript of the tapes. By her count Blanche asked about Trump far less than about Bill Clinton, Bill Gates, Reid Hoffman and Bill Barr, Maxwell called Trump "a total gentleman," and that short exchange, in her reading, is what got Maxwell moved. She put the dates together: the birthday letter Wall Street Journal reporters published, the Situation Room meeting the same day, the proffer one week later, the move to Bryan, Texas, one week after that. Shalev held the line: obstruction "may be true, but we don't know," and the report does not say who sent Blanche the deck or who compiled it.
Leonard's own leads sit where the report did not look. Hundreds of pages of handwritten FBI notes are unsearchable, so nothing in them was scrubbed. A whistleblower says documents under case number 31E-HQ-C1461253 are withheld from Congress, and someone at the Justice Department leaked Jane Doe 4's notes, unredacted, to conservative media. She counts 43 on-the-record accusations of sexual assault against Trump. There are no foreign-language files in the release.
Shalev's lead is money. Paolo Zampolli, Trump's "my friend Paolo" in Beatrice Keul's account, arranged visas for models, sold fake passports through the United Nations and sold Trump Soho condos, and was a special envoy until last week; the report mentions him only as the visa guy. Nothing in the files predates 2008, the year Shalev says Epstein helped crash the market. A special counsel scoped to sex crimes alone would repeat the Mueller mistake, and one that reports to the attorney general cannot work. Leonard added the shield: executive privilege, which only the Supreme Court can override.
Shalev said on air that he gave Raskin's office material from Narativ's Zampolli reporting and introduced one witness, and that this is not an endorsement of the report. The Keul allegation, he said, is the new thing in it, and the question now is who in Congress writes the special counsel's mission.