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For those who read the Harry Potter books, or have kids who read them, Epstein was basically a somewhat sleazier Horace Slughorn. Slughorn was a character who made himself valuable by cultivating networks. People came to his parties to meet the other famous people he was able to get to come.
The problem to me with the so-called Epstein files is that plenty of people took advantage of this opportunity for normal reasons - if celebrity X wanted to meet politician Y, an Epstein party was the perfect opportunity. Some just went to a Manhattan party, some took advantage of his offers of jet flights to get a free trip and mingle with famous people, and some went all the way and indulged in the delights of his island.
So, what you end up with is a list which is highly prejudicial, since the implication has been that anyone named in the files is guilty of the worst alleged offenses, but a list which includes many people who only interacted with Epstein on the periphery, like President Trump himself. I suspect they were trying to cull the lists to separate the "good" from the "bad", but realized it would not be possible, and they realized that releasing the whole list would damage a fair number of innocent people. And at the end of the day, that still wouldn't make some people happy, because there are still some searching for proof of their own conspiracy theories, such as that Epstein and/or Maxwell were assets of [insert country]'s foreign intelligence service.
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