‘It’s Not a Crime to Party With Mr. Epstein’: The Empty New Defense from Trump's DOJ

Todd Blanche seems remarkably unbothered by the fact that powerful figures continued to associate with a man whose abuse of minors was widely known and publicly documented by the mid-2000s.

Brian Daitzman is the Editor of The Intellectualist. Subscribe to his Substack.

Illustration by Riley Levine

When Todd Blanche, Donald Trump’s former personal defense attorney and now Deputy Attorney General, said on Fox News’ The Ingraham Angle that “it’s not a crime to party with Mr. Epstein,” he was technically correct—and revealing just how empty that defense is.

Criminal law sets the minimum threshold for prosecution; it does not set the standard for leadership, competence, or judgment—least of all for the presidency of the United States. When a senior Justice Department official retreats to the narrowest possible legal framing to defend social association with a convicted child sex offender, he is not answering the question being asked. He is avoiding it.

The question is not whether it was illegal to attend a party. The question is what it says about judgment when powerful adults continue to associate with a man whose abuse of minors was widely known and publicly documented by the mid-2000s. Saying “it’s not a crime” is not a defense of competence. It is a concession that no higher standard is being asserted.

Blanche’s response relies on a category error. Yes, social association is not, by itself, a crime. It never has been. It is not a crime to email a criminal. It is not a crime to attend a dinner where a criminal is present. The law is deliberately narrow, because it must be. Guilt must be proven beyond a reasonable doubt, and association alone cannot satisfy that standard.

But the presidency is not governed by the criminal code. It is governed by judgment, discretion, and the ability to recognize disqualifying circumstances before they harden into irreversible failure. Presidents are not evaluated on whether they barely cleared the threshold for indictment. They are evaluated on whether they exercised discernment when warning signs were obvious and alternatives were available.

Jeffrey Epstein was not an ambiguous figure. He was a convicted sex offender whose exploitation of minors was established beyond dispute. Long before his 2019 federal arrest, and following his 2008 plea involving a minor, his reputation was widely known. His conduct was not a rumor circulating in dark corners; it was a matter of public record.

Beyond the facts established in court, there are additional allegations reflected in civil filings and document releases. They remain unresolved and should not be treated as proven. A serious argument does not rely on them, and this one does not need to. Even stripped to the minimum of adjudicated reality, Epstein was a man any competent adult with power and options should have avoided. The claim that association was legal does nothing to alter that judgment.

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John Wayne Gacy and Jeffrey Dahmer were extreme cases: serial killers whose crimes unfolded over time, involved multiple victims, and left lasting harm not only to those they murdered but to families and communities permanently marked by that violence. Hypothetically, it was not itself a crime to have spent time with them; mere association, standing alone, is not a prosecutable act. But once the scope of their conduct became known, continued social association would have signaled a profound failure of judgment. That is why comparisons to figures like Gacy or Dahmer are clarifying rather than reckless. They test judgment, not legality. Society instinctively understands that continued social association with known perpetrators of extreme harm would be disqualifying on its face, even absent criminal liability for the associate. In practice, no elite social migration followed their convictions; association collapsed because judgment reasserted itself.

Objections to the comparison misunderstand its purpose. The analogy is not about method or spectacle, nor about body count. It is about the scale and duration of harm, the credibility of victim testimony, and what was reasonably knowable to those in a perpetrator’s orbit. After Gacy and Dahmer were exposed, social association ended. Epstein’s case unfolded differently. He was convicted of abusing a minor, later charged by federal prosecutors with sex trafficking underage girls, and accused by numerous victims of operating a years-long system of recruitment, coercion, and abuse—yet he remained socially connected to wealthy and powerful figures long after his conviction.

Legal experts, investigators, and civil filings have long warned that the full scope of Epstein’s conduct may never be known, and that the number of victims likely exceeds those publicly identified. Even without proof of homicide, the scale, duration, and persistence of the harm alleged—and the fact that it was publicly knowable—place Epstein squarely in the category of figures any competent adult should have recognized as morally disqualifying to associate with.

That is what makes the Epstein case more disturbing, not less: the failure was not merely individual, but collective. After Gacy and Dahmer were exposed, they became social pariahs; association ended because judgment reasserted itself. After Epstein’s conviction involving a minor, the opposite occurred. He remained socially embedded among wealthy and powerful figures, signaling that status, access, and utility were permitted to outweigh the known abuse of children. That normalization—treating a convicted child sex offender as a peer rather than a warning sign—is the moral failure at issue. If a public figure were photographed repeatedly socializing with John Wayne Gacy after his crimes were known, no serious person would defend it by saying, “Well, it wasn’t illegal.” The response would be simpler and more damning: what does that say about his judgment?