Matt Taibbi: Epstein Files Are "Uniquely Destructive" To Both Political Parties

Matt Taibbi: Epstein Files Are "Uniquely Destructive" To Both Political Parties Submitted by QTR's Fringe Finance This week I interviewed Matt Taibbi at a moment when, as he put it, “this is a pretty weird time.” He had just learned that his outlet, Racket News, had been investigated by the British government using what he described as “human intelligence sources and all kinds of crazy stuff.” “It’s been pretty weird,” he told me. What struck him most was how normalized this kind of pressure has become. Governments, he said, now routinely “hire out private intelligence firms and private PR firms to devise strategies to undermine negative press.” If you’re doing adversarial reporting, he added, “you’ll get swept up in this. So you probably have been, you just don’t know it.” From there, we moved into the Epstein story, which has become a political third rail. I asked him whether bipartisan silence around certain issues should worry people. Taibbi said most of what happens in Washington is already bipartisan; the public just doesn’t see it. “The thing that we call the news,” he said, is “a sliver of disagreement” between parties. The rest—“98% of the business that’s done there”—happens with quiet agreement. On the Epstein files, he argued that both parties miscalculated. The Trump camp, he said, built expectations around full transparency and then stumbled. “Dumping tons of stuff out without any context tends to have a lot of unintended consequences,” he said. The result has been politically damaging across the board. He also pushed back on some of the public narrative. The fascination with Epstein, he said, rests on three assumptions: that Epstein worked for intelligence, that he ran a vast trafficking ring, and that the two were connected through political blackmail. “There’s an abundance of evidence” of serious sexual crimes, he acknowledged. But on the intelligence-blackmail theory, “there’s nothing that puts it all together and says that’s what was happening. It could, but it’s just not there yet.” What he does see is a slow-burn release strategy. “You’ll notice that they never fully release everything,” he told me. “It’s like Zeno’s paradox. We’re never going to get all the way to the wall with this.” Each new tranche fuels public demand and media frenzy, with the promise that the next batch might contain the “kill shot” that takes down someone powerful. We then shifted to New York politics and the rise of Zohran Mamdani. Taibbi sees his early proposals—like raising property taxes—as predictable. If state-level backing doesn’t materialize, he suggested, the Democratic Party may distance itself. “The Democratic Party has decided not to back this horse,” he said. In his view, the party faces a structural dilemma: a base that is moving left out of economic frustration, and a national electoral map that may not tolerate that shift. He connected that frustration to student debt and monetary policy. When I brought up inflation and deficit spending, he traced the arc back to post-2008 policies and the explosion of quantitative easing. “All you’re doing is accelerating inequality on the one hand,” he said, “and you’re raising the debt burden for everybody else.” The result, he argued, is a generation that feels locked out of homeownership and upward mobility. On immigration and recent ICE enforcement actions, Taibbi resisted simple partisanship. He said he found neighborhood sweeps and masked agents “scary,” comparing aspects of the approach to “an enhanced federal version of stop and frisk.” At the same time, he criticized the ideological shift that made even basic border enforcement seem taboo. “It’s not like having borders is inherently xenophobic,” he said. “It’s just a part of governance. Part of being a nation.” At the end of the conversation, Taibbi outlined changes at Racket News. He said he had “basically fired” himself as editor-in-chief and brought in new leadership to refocus on document-based investigations. The site, he told me, is doubling down on FOIA-driven reporting and digging into stories like expansive FBI investigations and the British controversy now touching his own outlet. The through line of our discussion was less about left versus right than about institutions under strain—media, parties, law enforcement, and financial systems alike. Taibbi’s core warning was that much of what truly matters happens in the bipartisan shadows, while the public argues over the sliver that makes it onto cable news. (WATCH THE FULL VIDEO INTERVIEW WITH MATT HERE).  Tyler Durden Fri, 02/20/2026 - 10:00

By Tyler Durden