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The U.S. Department of Justice has so far released 3.5 million documents related to New York financier Jeffrey Epstein and his associates, and even this amount is only a partial release.

The files include correspondence and references involving numerous high-level public figures, such as Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor, former U.S. president Bill Clinton, academic Noam Chomsky, former U.K. ambassador to the U.S. Peter Mandelson, and current U.S. President Donald Trump.

Estonia turns up over 200 times in the Epstein files, while a reference to an unnamed Estonian prime minister has attracted much attention inside the country.

Speaking to "Aktuaalne kaamera. Nädal," Delfi investigative journalist Holger Roonemaa said despite this, no bombshell revelations or scandals involving Estonia have emerged so far, though experts say Estonia's two main national security agencies, the Internal Security Service (ISS) and the Foreign Intelligence Service (Välisluureamet), also need to review the files.

This is particularly the case since Epstein is suspected of having had strong ties to Russian intelligence agencies.

"Our responsibility is to assess whether our key individuals might be open to blackmail with the material that may be in there - or could still get released. Reviewing these kinds of matters is just basic hygiene," said U.S. expert Andreas Kaju.

It remains unclear whether any Estonian security agency has as yet begun an investigation, however.

Former ISS director Arnold Sinisalu said any review which may happen should primarily focus on individuals who have had access to NATO, EU or national classified information.

The data to be sifted through is vast, he added. "We're talking about something like three thousand gigabytes of data - documents, recordings, videos, images, all sorts of things. It's a massive volume. I hope the IT infrastructure at the ISS has improved, and that modern AI tools now make processing this kind of material far easier than it would have been even three or four years ago," Sinisalu said.

Even if the Epstein files end up not bringing major repercussions to Estonia, it has already been made fairly clear that in many parts of the world, the existing "elite" is headed for a day of reckoning of sorts; more so than the WikiLeaks revelations which came to light around a decade ago, partly because these dealt with official state actions and their documentation, as against the personal conduct of high-profile individuals.

"In a way, this is one degree worse even than WikiLeaks," Sinisalu said. "This involves real people's lives - abuse, exploitation. Ethically and morally, this is far worse. The fact that so many wealthy, prominent individuals - including scientists, artists, and high-level professionals - essentially members of the global elite, are implicated … airing out this dirty laundry is likely to be a very long process."

According to Kaju, the very release of the files has already been eroding public trust in that same elite, though with the upshot being it can play into the hands of populism.

"Whose interests does this serve? Naturally, it serves those regimes that want to show democracies - or elites - as incapable of functioning within the norms of liberal democratic systems," he noted.

Roonemaa noted that Latvia was of more direct interest to Epstein and his cohorts.

"Latvia was clearly one of the destination countries where Epstein and his associates were looking for girls and young women," Roonemaa added; Estonia's southern neighbor has already launched a human trafficking criminal investigation linked to the Epstein files

Lithuania's prosecutor's office has also launched a pretrial investigation into possible human trafficking relating to Epstein and his circles.

Finland's Marko Ahtisaari, musician and businessman son of former president and UN diplomat Martti Ahtisaari, was also named in the files.

What makes the Epstein files release different from the previous leaks like the Panama Papers starting in 2016, and the Pandora Papers starting from 2021, includes the fact that the Epstein files have been made wholly public rather than being vetted first by a select group of journalists. This means analysis is happening in real time, by anyone interested, without coordinated fact-checking or editorial controls.

Kaju argued that the lack of verification possible due to the scale of the released data makes that release unethical, but added the U.S. government is under intense public pressure to disclose everything - in part due to a belief that elites failed to identify and hold accountable those deserving prosecution.

Epstein was found dead at the age of 66 in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC) in New York City in August 2019. In his early life, he had quickly risen from being a physics and math teacher at an elite New York school in the mid-1970s to become a highly influential financier with an elite social circle, making much of his fortune by providing tax and estate services to billionaires. The first criminal investigations into human trafficking and sex offense allegations regarding Epstein began in 2005.

The FBI maintains that Epstein, together with his former girlfriend, British socialite Ghislaine Maxwell - imprisoned in 2022 for 20 years - abused underage girls. However, no other high-profile figures have been formally charged. Those figures generally strenuously deny all allegations of wrongdoing.

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Editor: Andrew Whyte, Valner Väino

Source: 'Aktuaalne kaamera. Nädal,' interviewer Maria-Ann Rohemäe.

LIVELihtsad uudised 6. veebruarillisten: radio tallinnLIVEwatch: jupiterLIVEAbout usERR News is the English-language service of Estonian Public Broadcasting, run by a fully independent editorial team.To read up on ERR News' comments rules and to contact ERR's other services, please follow the link below.Staff, contacts & comments

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