The contrast could not be starker. At 8am on Thursday, British police descended on the Sandringham Royal Estate to arrest the former Prince Andrew on charges of sharing confidential material with the late US sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. It was a seismic shock to the monarchy.
A week earlier US law enforcement official Pam Bondi was asked how many of Epstein’s co-conspirators her department had charged or whether it would give state prosecutors general access to evidence to build further cases. She refused to answer.
As for Donald Trump, whose name appeared thousands of times in the Epstein files, with no apparent indictment, Bondi insisted he was “the greatest president in American history” and warned members of Congress not to talk about the rising stock market instead.
It is a tale of two countries. In one, with a member of the royal family arrested for the first time in nearly 400 years and a prime minister struggling to survive, the establishment is rocked by the Epstein files. In another, the “Epstein class” – in Senator Jon Ossoff’s phrase – faced public opposition through a legal or political reckoning with the US president, but again, got off scot-free.
“Other countries, like the Brits, can hold their leaders and high-ranking people accountable, yet here in the United States we somehow continue to obfuscate the facts,” says Olivia Troy, a former national security official. “We have a Justice Department that’s complicit in all of this, and we in the United States of America can’t hold people accountable. What message does that send to the world?”
Only one person in the US has been arrested or convicted in connection with Epstein’s activities. His ex-girlfriend and partner Ghislaine Maxwell, who was serving a 20-year prison sentence in 2021 after being found guilty of providing underage girls to a wealthy financier, died in a New York jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial for sex trafficking.
There are hopes that the long-awaited release of the Epstein files will bring more justice to survivors of his abuse. And they made uncomfortable reading for Epstein’s class, a global network of powerful politicians, business executives, academics and celebrities.
Several prominent Americans resigned from high-profile positions in 2008 when the files revealed that they had continued relationships with Epstein after he was convicted of sex crimes. Former Treasury Secretary Larry Summers quit the board of the OpenAI Foundation, billionaire Thomas Pritzker stepped down as executive chairman of Hyatt Hotels, and lawyer Kathryn Roemmler announced her departure from Goldman Sachs.
The matter also tarnished Microsoft co-founder Bill Gates, who canceled a speech at an artificial intelligence conference in India on Thursday; Casey Wasserman, the top US official overseeing the 2028 Olympic Games in Los Angeles; wellness influencer Peter Attia; And former President Bill Clinton, along with his wife Hillary, will testify to a congressional panel next week.
But none other than Maxwell faced legal consequences. In fact, further investigations are unlikely. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche told CNN: “The Department of Justice said in July that we had reviewed the Epstein files and there was nothing that would allow us to prosecute anyone. And we stand by what we’ve seen and released from the Epstein files.”
That explanation didn’t satisfy some members of Congress, who accused Bondi’s Justice Department of dragging its feet.
Senator Ruben Gallego, an Arizona Democrat, blamed the lack of action in the US on Trump, who was once a close friend of Epstein’s. He posted on X: “Countries around the world are holding their Epstein class accountable. It’s not happening in America because we have a paedo protector in the Oval Office running a government coverup for him and his cronies.”
Trump fought for months to prevent the Epstein files from being released, but eventually signed legislation passed by Congress requiring their publication. The 79-year-old Republican’s name appears repeatedly in the files, but he has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
Trump was asked Thursday if any of Epstein’s associates in the US would be “handcuffed.” Trump sidestepped the question, calling Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor’s arrest a “very sad thing” and reiterating his claim that he was personally “absolutely innocent.”
Trump’s inaction is compounded by Britain and other countries going to extraordinary lengths to establish accountability Critics say that it is a great relief.
Political commentator and former congressional aide Kurt Bardella says: “You would think that the entire world community would get behind the idea that trafficking in underage women and trading secrets and money is not good. Everyone got that memo except the United States of America.”
“As long as this goes on and those in power here in America are not held accountable, we have no moral authority to tell any country in this world what they should or shouldn’t do. We can’t tell Iran what to do. We can’t tell the Middle East how to have peace. We can’t police it.”
The conflict between the UK and the US will not end in court. Peter Mandelson, the British prime minister’s ambassador to the US, Keir Starmer, had to fight questions about his judgment after documents revealed he had a more extensive and intimate relationship with Epstein than previously revealed. Mandelson was fired last September and is now under police investigation over allegations he leaked government materials to Epstein.
Compare and contrast US Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick. Lutnick claims he vowed never to “room” with Epstein after a 2005 incident in which the financier showed Lutnick a massage table in his townhouse and made a sexually suggestive comment. Further emails show Lutnick visited Epstein’s private island for lunch in 2012 and invited him to a fundraiser in 2015. “We had lunch on the island for — that’s right — an hour,” Lutnick admitted to Congress earlier this month.
He was caught in a lie and Democrats demanded his resignation. In Britain and many other countries around the world, that outcome was inevitable. But Trump has no intention of handing such a victory to his enemies.
Troy, a former homeland security and counterterrorism adviser to Mike Pence, commented: “You’ve got the former Prince Andrew in a police station, yet we have cabinet-level people who are in their positions and there doesn’t seem to be any accountability.
“These people continue to lie repeatedly along the way, and then new evidence comes out and the American people can see for themselves that these people lied about what happened here. Even though they know he’s a convicted pedophile, they’re obsessed with this guy.”
Trump is on much safer ground than Stormer, who was elected precisely because of his milquetoast ownership, seen as an antidote to the shabby Conservative years; Any hint of scandal destroys that core identity. Trump, by contrast, has sunk to so many moral depths that it has a numbing effect; His presence in the files has long been anticipated and has little shock value.
But there may be more calculations to come. His right-wing base has long been obsessed with the Epstein saga and believes the financier oversaw a sex-trafficking ring for the world’s elite. Some people in that police station are expressing their anger on how the release of the files was handled wrongly. They are unlikely to vote against Trump’s party in the November midterm elections, but they may not vote at all.
Mountbatten-Windsdor, who denies any wrongdoing, is held accountable by the long arm of the law. Trump and his allies may yet face a different kind of justice at the ballot box.
Rick Wilson, co-founder of the Lincoln Project, an anti-Trump group, said the president is “facing a political disaster” with Democrats on track to control the House of Representatives and possibly even the Senate. “And then subpoenas start going out, lawyers are hired, and House committee rooms are wired for cameras and sound.
“The intensity of the investigation into the Epstein cover-up, the redactions and the omissions will surpass any previous investigation in the history of the United States, and they will open it wide open. Any insulation anyone has will be stripped away.”
