The Epstein Files Rosetta Stone

A Quick Thought About Why Some People Will Never Be Satisfied

Every great scandal seems to generate a single imagined document that promises finality. In the Epstein case, that document is the so-called client list: a definitive roster that would convert years of insinuation, association, and suspicion into clear criminal accountability.

It is the Rosetta Stone people believe will decode everything.

I understand this dynamic intimately. I lived it with the JFK assassination, where generations searched for the one CIA file that would prove Lee Harvey Oswald was a U.S. intelligence asset. When the last major tranche of records was released earlier this year—and no such document appeared_—the reaction was not reassessment but escalation. If the file was not produced, then it must still be hidden. Or destroyed. Or buried inside some undisclosed agency. In time, the absence of evidence itself became proof, and a “mosaic” of unrelated facts was assembled to sustain a conclusion that no longer rested on demonstrable reality. The absence of proof has not s…