The Free Press

Do I believe that George H.W. Bush once participated in an orgy along with Bill Clinton on Jeffrey Epstein’s yacht, and that dear old Poppy ritually sacrificed babies and ate excrement from their intestines? No, in fact, I do not. But somebody reached out to the government with this claim, so it’s in last weekend’s massive Epstein file dump.

Do I believe that Bill Gates might have gotten the clap from a Russian hooker and tried to hide it from his then-wife, as Epstein himself alleged in a (perhaps unsent) email to Gates? That’s not impossible. Gates denies the claim, but then, who really knows?

How about Lord Peter Mandelson, the former senior Labour Party politician and until recently the UK’s ambassador to Washington? His extensive ties to Epstein have been meticulously demonstrated by earlier Epstein releases. The new upchuck revealed that, among other things, Mandelson shared confidential government emails with Epstein, including a tip-off to the shadowy financier about a major Eurozone bailout in 2010, on the eve of the event.

Yeah, that’s true—and that’s why, as of Tuesday, Mandelson has resigned from the House of Lords, may be stripped of his title, and is under investigation by the police.

At long last, the much-desired release of the Jeffrey Epstein files—a key goal of the MAGA movement (previously) and the Democratic Party (currently)—is underway. On Friday, the Department of Justice made millions of files available, including partially redacted emails, photos, and investigative reports, many of which have now flooded social media.

The release has been a long time coming. This past November, in the face of overwhelming congressional support for disclosure, President Donald Trump dropped his stated opposition to the Epstein Files Transparency Act and signed the measure.

In the House of Representatives, the vote had been 427–1. The lone dissenter, Rep. Clay Higgins (R-LA), expressed his doubts in stark terms. “As written, this bill reveals and injures thousands of innocent people—witnesses, people who provided alibis, family members, etc.,” he wrote on X. “If enacted in its current form, this type of broad reveal of criminal investigative files, released to a rabid media, will absolutely result in innocent people being hurt. Not by my vote.”

Perhaps we should have taken his concerns more seriously. It’s been just days since the majority of the files were released, and a vast campaign is already underway to embarrass, harass, or smear anyone tangentially associated with Epstein—a serial sexual predator—no matter how slight or incidental the connection.

New York City mayor Zohran Mamdani is facing criticism for his plans to phase out the public school system’s gifted and talented (G&T) program for kindergarten, starting next year. This feels like Groundhog Day for public school parents like me who fought former mayor Bill de Blasio’s efforts to end G&T, abolish entrance exams for the city’s prestigious specialized high schools, and root out, in the name of “anti-racism,” any honors program that smacked of academic excellence.

The same tired arguments about the racism of meritocracy are still unconvincing and are still unsupported by data or evidence, yet tenaciously hang on like land acknowledgments, “hands up, don’t shoot” chants, and the idea that socialism will actually work this time.

No matter what happens to the New York City school system, which had 906,248 students during the 2024–25 school year and is the largest in the United States, Mamdani’s first month as mayor will be forever marred by the deaths of 16 people who “passed away outside during this brutal stretch of cold,” as he put it on Monday. The new mayor reversed a policy by predecessor Eric Adams that would have allowed the police to get the homeless inside. Mamdani’s brand of progressivism essentially handcuffed the police in order to “protect” the homeless from the very people who might have saved their lives.

About 18,000 elementary school students in the city are enrolled in G&T, with about 2,500 admitted for kindergarten each fall.

In September 2022, about a year after Joseph Wang left his job at the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he came across an odd new research paper from his former employer. Wang had been a senior trader on the Open Market Trading Desk, carrying out the Fed’s monetary policy. In his five years there, the usual Fed research covered topics like inflation, labor markets, and bank capital. This paper, though, was titled “800,000 Years of Climate Risk.”

“I thought that was very strange,” Wang recalled. “The Fed writing about CO2 concentrations.”

Wang wasn’t the only one to notice what looked like mission creep at the Fed. Just before Thanksgiving in 2021, a tweet from the St. Louis Fed suggested replacing Thanksgiving turkey with “a soybean-based dinner.” The post drew thousands of replies, many of them demanding that the Fed get back in its lane.

The 2011 film Moneyball, based on the best-selling book by Michael Lewis, chronicles the rise of sports analytics to detect hidden patterns in Major League Baseball. For the Oakland Athletics, this embrace of data took a team with a shortage of star power to victory in the American League West in 2002.

John Hart, the CEO of Open the Books, a right-leaning watchdog that tracks federal and state spending, and Citizen Portal AI founder Paul Allen, who co-founded data giant Ancestry.com, are now building what they hope will be a sort of nonpartisan Moneyball for politics.

They are melding a massive database of government funding assembled by Open the Books with Citizen Portal AI’s database of over one million hours of interviews, speeches, and other comments by public officials, Hart and Allen told me. They said the move will better inform the public about the most consequential public policy decisions and debates—and make it possible for users to easily compare what politicians spend with what they say. The partnership has not been previously reported.

It’s the second month of the new year, and the news cycle is just as difficult to keep up with as ever. So we thought: Who better than Nellie Bowles to help us all get up to speed? So Nellie sits down with some of our brilliant editors and writers to discuss politics, culture, and more.

Free Press senior editor and writer Will Rahn discusses new reports …

This week I was BUSTED for the crime of REPORTING. A journalism professor is even on the case. And it’s true: I met Jeffrey Epstein once for coffee.

When I was a reporter on the New York Times business desk in the fall of 2018, a representative for Epstein invited me to have coffee with him. I was curious.

I googled Jeffrey Epstein one last time and popped my head above my cubicle to ask colleagues: “Should I really do this? Would I be killed inside the largest home on the Upper East Side?”

There were a few stories I thought he could be useful for—the curious and ubiquitous Russian woman who made the introduction was potentially a profile, though The Wall Street Journal had just done one; Epstein’s effort to reemerge on the social scene, and the many famous people who were in his orbit, was absolutely a story; and various tech stories I was doing at the time could have an Epstein angle.

A colleague in the newsroom assured me I’d be safe and that Epstein was an occasional source for business reporters at the Times. So I agreed to meet the man for coffee. I’ll never forget ringing the doorbell of that mansion. Doors the size of a truck swung open and an elegant woman in her late 20s welcomed me in.

It’s Tuesday, February 3. This is The Front Page, your daily window into the world of The Free Press—and our take on the world at large. Today: Nellie Bowles does the news, live. Is Trump’s best friend in Europe about to lose? The problem with therapy. And much more.

But first: The Iranian who would be king.

Iran is back in Donald Trump’s sights. Weeks after the president threatened to punish the regime’s leaders for slaughtering protesters, Trump now appears poised to follow through, having deployed a “massive armada” to stand by in the region.

White House Middle East envoy Steve Witkoff will meet with Iranian leaders Friday to discuss a last-ditch deal to avoid a clash. But Trump is demanding steep concessions that the mullahs aren’t likely to stomach: an end to Iran’s nuclear energy and ballistic missile programs, the end of support to terrorist groups, and no more attacks on protesters. Instead of pleading for peace, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei warned Monday that a U.S. attack would set off a regional war.

Naturally, many Iranians’ eyes have turned overseas toward Reza Pahlavi, the son of the shah and heir to the Peacock Throne. Pahlavi has spent decades in exile on American soil, but he has urged on the protests from afar as the regime begins to falter. He believes he could return to Tehran as a transitional leader to succeed Khamenei, guiding the country toward democracy.

Yet is Pahlavi the man to lead Iran, even temporarily? Free Press writer Eli Lake spoke with friends and advisers of Pahlavi to understand the complicated, even flawed, man who finds himself at the heart of the most important story in the world.

—Mene Ukueberuwa

It’s only February, and the news cycle has not stopped since the beginning of the year. So we thought, why not get Nellie Bowles to help us make sense of it all?

Today at 12 p.m. ET, the Free Press co-founder and Queen of TGIF sits down with Suzy Weiss, Will Rahn, and Mene Ukueberuwa to talk news, politics, and culture in a livestream for paying subscribers only. If you’re already signed up, click here to mark your calendar.

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• A partial government shutdown began Saturday, after Democratic lawmakers objected to renewed funding of the departments of Defense, Homeland Security, and more. Speaker of the House Mike Johnson predicted an end by Tuesday, but so far a resolution is still out of sight.

• Former president and First Lady Bill and Hillary Clinton agreed Monday evening to testify before Congress about the Epstein files. The Clintons’ decision comes as House Republicans were planning a vote to hold the two in contempt for their refusal to appear this week.

• In this weekend’s release of over three million documents in the Epstein files, the names of at least 43 victims were accidentally revealed. The Justice Department is required to redact all names, and has since begun removing and reuploading the files to preserve the victims’ privacy.

• Elon Musk’s SpaceX acquired his AI company xAI on Monday. The deal brings the companies’ combined value to over $1 trillion, and will likely help further Musk’s aspirations of building data centers in space.

• At least 12 people were killed after a Russian drone struck a bus in Ukraine on Sunday, authorities said. A separate attack on a maternity hospital injured six. The strikes come days after President Trump claimed that the countries had reached an aerial ceasefire.

• The Rafah border crossing between Gaza and Egypt reopened on Monday after 20 months. The opening of the only passage between the two countries marks a key advancement in the Gaza ceasefire plan.

• Erfan Soltani, an Iranian anti-government protester who reportedly faced a death sentence, has been released from prison on bail. Soltani’s release comes amid President Trump’s threat of a military strike against Iran.

• U.S. officials have reportedly told Iran that they are ready to negotiate a deal between the two countries. The recent communication shows a continued interest in diplomacy, even as the U.S. has not ruled out a strike on the country.

• Arizona police are searching for the 84-year-old mother of Today show host Savannah Guthrie, Nancy Guthrie, who was first reported missing on Sunday. She has no cognitive ailments, and local police now believe she was abducted.

• In the traditional Groundhog Day ceremony in Pennsylvania, Punxsutawney Phil predicted six more weeks of winter on Monday morning. As freezing temperatures continue to sweep the country, Phil is likely not alone in his analysis.

Reza Pahlavi, the heir to Iran’s Peacock Throne, looked for the first eight days of January to be the star of his own comeback film. The Islamic Republic, which ended his father’s reign in the 1979 revolution, was wobbling and lurching as the value of the rial collapsed. Furious merchants in Tehran and other big cities shut down the bazaars. Hundreds of thousands of Iranians streamed into the streets, with many shouting “Javid shah”: Long live the king.

All of this was different from previous uprisings. When Iranians demonstrated against their regime in 2009, 2019, and 2022, the country’s powerful merchant class joined reluctantly and not en masse. The economy teetered during these bouts of unrest, but this time it was in free fall. And this time, the American president stepped forward to offer support. If the regime shot peaceful protesters, President Donald Trump posted on Truth Social, “the United States of America will come to their rescue.”

The Iranian regime seemed to be near its end, and the crown prince looked like the only plausible answer to a pressing question: Who comes next? Pahlavi himself appeared to accept this mantle. He called for two days of demonstrations on January 8 and 9 at the height of the protests, and Iranians seemed to heed his call, flooding the streets in unprecedented numbers. “The bond between me and the Iranian people is not new,” he said at a January 16 press conference in Washington. “It’s been with me since birth and it cannot be broken. Even in exile, I’ve pledged my life to the service of the Iranian nation.”

“You know what American voters hate?” asked Alex Nowrasteh. “They hate chaos.”

Nowrasteh is the senior vice president for policy at the Cato Institute, the libertarian think tank. One of his primary areas of focus is immigration policy, which is why I had called him. Why, I asked, had most Americans opposed former president Joe Biden’s loose border approach, which allowed over 5.7 million migrants into the country during his term in office? Because, replied Nowrasteh, “having large numbers of people crossing the border willy-nilly”—with no idea of who they are, or what they will do once they get here—is untenable.