Jeffrey Epstein spent his final weeks in federal prison furiously scribbling on a legal pad, trying to dig up dirt on Donald Trump that might shave a few years off his sentence. His conclusion, written in his own hand: 'Trump is a total con artist, smoke & mirrors' and 'Never had money.' The kicker? Even Epstein couldn't find anything prosecutors didn't already know.
The Most Damning Thing About the Notes Is How Useless They Were
The New York Times Magazine ran what The Guardian's Emma Brockes calls an 'absolute corker' of in-depth reporting this week, detailing the final 35 days of Epstein's life inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center after his arrest at Teterboro airport in July 2019. It is, by all accounts, essential reading.
Among the more remarkable details: Epstein was actively trying to trade information about powerful people, including Trump, in exchange for a lighter sentence. He sat through hours of meetings with his lawyers and kept returning to the president on his legal pad, trying to conjure something useful. What he came up with was 'Trump is a total con artist, smoke & mirrors' and 'Never had money.' According to the Times Magazine, his scribblings suggest he could produce little that wasn't already public knowledge.
So there you have it. The man who allegedly had blackmail material on half of Washington's elite, who ran one of the most sophisticated influence operations in modern American history, sat in a federal cell racking his brain for something damaging on Donald Trump and landed on: he's broke and he lies. Groundbreaking. Revolutionary. Absolutely useless to federal prosecutors.
The Prison Itself Was a Catastrophe Before Epstein Arrived
The Metropolitan Correctional Center, closed in 2021, was not exactly a model facility. The Times Magazine piece makes clear it was chronically underfunded and badly run, the kind of place that previously housed Bernie Madoff and John Gotti. Epstein, upon being booked in, reportedly looked around and said: 'Oh, this is bad. This is really bad.'
He wasn't wrong. Before anyone recognized him, he was dumped into general population, where someone tried to extort him almost immediately. He was then moved to the high-risk unit. From there, his primary strategy for staying out of his cell was scheduling marathon legal consultations, which is where the Trump note-taking happened.
The piece also addresses one of the more persistent conspiracy theories: that Epstein was deliberately housed with Nicholas Tartaglione, a quadruple murderer, as some kind of setup. The reporting pushes back on that. Experts explained to the Times that convicted killers awaiting sentencing are actually considered low-risk cellmates precisely because they have every incentive to keep their noses clean until the judge speaks. It's a grim little corner of institutional logic, but there it is.
Meanwhile, at the G7, World Leaders Are Still Laughing at Trump's Jokes
While Epstein's posthumous assessment of Trump as a smoke-and-mirrors con man ricocheted around the internet, the actual Trump was in Evian-les-Bains, France, opening a G7 meeting by walking into a room full of world leaders and announcing: 'I'm the boss!' According to The Guardian's coverage of the summit, this killed. Everyone laughed.
This is where we are. The heads of the world's most powerful democracies, assembled to address war in Ukraine, global trade, climate, and economic instability, cracking up at a septuagenarian's I'm-in-charge bit. There's a version of this that's charming. This is not that version.
Elsewhere at the summit, UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer got caught on a hot mic asking 'Are they having a meeting?' after Trump, Macron, and Zelenskyy temporarily disappeared. The Guardian notes the absence of those three leaders seemed to prompt the question, but the image of Starmer, left behind at the table, plaintively wondering where everyone went, is doing a lot of work as a metaphor for Britain's current geopolitical standing.
The Hot Mic Is the Truest Diplomatic Document
There is a long and distinguished tradition of world leaders saying the quiet part loud when they forget the microphone is on. Obama told Sarkozy at a G20 in 2011 that he had to deal with Netanyahu every single day, which reads less as a complaint and more as a cry for help. Jacques Chirac once told a European summit, in what one imagines was a perfectly conversational tone, that you simply cannot trust the British because their food is so terrible, adding that only Finland has worse cuisine. These are the historical record.
Starmer's 'Are they having a meeting?' doesn't quite reach those heights of diplomatic indiscretion. But The Guardian's framing of it as a 'beseeching' question, from a prime minister trying to figure out where the important people went, captures something real about the current moment in British foreign policy that a thousand op-eds haven't managed to.
Meloni, for her part, spent part of the summit informing people she quit smoking in May. So everyone brought their A-game.
The Dingo Take
Here's what actually sticks about the Epstein story. The man had connections to royalty, presidents, prime ministers, billionaires, and intelligence services across multiple countries. He ran a trafficking operation that prosecutors believed compromised some of the most powerful people alive. And when he sat down to think about what he could offer the government in exchange for leniency, his best shot at Trump was: he doesn't actually have much money and he's kind of fake. That's it. That's the file.
This tells you one of two things. Either Trump was genuinely peripheral to whatever Epstein was really running, which contradicts years of association and documented friendship. Or the stuff Epstein actually had was so radioactive, so embedded in his operation's core, that he couldn't offer it up without torching himself entirely. The Times Magazine piece doesn't resolve that. It just drops you in a cell with a man frantically scribbling on a legal pad and coming up empty. You can draw your own conclusions.
What you cannot do, in good conscience, is look at a sitting American president who has been described in a convicted sex trafficker's private prison notes as a 'total con artist' who operates on 'smoke and mirrors' and treat that as anything other than a remarkable sentence to type in the year 2026. We didn't write those notes. Epstein did. On a legal pad. In prison. While trying to save his own skin. That's about as unspun as primary sources get.
