Finally, I heard from the FBI, denying my records request for the Epstein files. I wasn’t surprised. But I discovered that Dan Novack, a New York lawyer working on the celebrity gossip website Radar Online, had filed a court motion to force the FBI to release the files. As the months went by, and I lost track of his effort, he actually gained a victory of sorts when the FBI began turning over some of the records to him in large batches in the fall of 2017. I didn’t realize that my additional request triggered the FBI to place all the records online, in what it calls its “vault,” a portal of publicly released FBI case files. But for some reason, Radar Online wasn’t publishing anything about the records. The site is owned by American Media Inc. (AMI), publisher of the National Enquirer. Its CEO, David Pecker, was friends with Donald Trump, and a year earlier, in 2016, AMI had paid Playboy model Karen McDougal $150,000 for exclusive rights to her claim that she had an affair with Trump while he was married. Instead of publishing the story, however, AMI killed it to protect Trump, a pattern that came to be called “Catch and Kill.”
Novack couldn’t explain why Radar passed on publishing Epstein’s FBI records, but I was glad they did, and in the daily chaos of the Trump White House, no other media noticed.
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