A New York Times spokesperson told WIRED in a statement that Brooks “regularly attends events to speak with noted and important business leaders to inform his columns,” and that Brooks had no contact with Epstein before or after attending the 2011 dinner where the photo was taken.
A representative for the Gates Foundation did not immediately respond to a request for comment, nor did representatives for Google, Allen, Chomsky, and Bannon’s War Room podcast.
The release also includes closeups of women’s body parts with quotes from Vladimir Nabokov’s book Lolita scrawled onto them, a photo of a pill bottle labelled with a medication usually used to relieve the symptoms of urinary tract infections, and redacted images of travel documents from several countries, including Ukraine and Lithuania.
The House committee’s investigation into Epstein has been going on for several months, and is separate from the document dump expected to be released by the US Department of Justice this week. The Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was signed into law last month, requires the DOJ to release “all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials” in its possession by December 19.
As part of the investigation, the committee subpoenaed the Epstein estate, and included instructions for the estate to produce two separate sets of documents—one to the Democrats on the committee, the other to Republicans. As the committee has been receiving documents from the estate, both Democrats and the committee as a whole have done their own releases. Material in these releases has raised new questions about the well-documented relationship between Epstein and president Donald Trump; among other things, it shows Epstein claiming intimate knowledge of Trump’s views in exchanges with a Gates adviser.
Documents related to investigations into Epstein have overshadowed the first year of the second Trump administration, several members of which made the release of the documents a central talking point in the lead up to the 2024 presidential election. The political dynamics have shifted over the past year, as it became clear that Trump, a one-time friend of Epstein’s, appears repeatedly in the investigative record.
“As we approach the deadline for the Epstein Files Transparency Act, these new images raise more questions about what exactly the Department of Justice has in its possession.” said Representative Robert Garcia, the ranking Democratic member on the committee, in a press release. “We must end this White House cover-up, and the DOJ must release the Epstein files now.”
