Name: Rep. Ro Khanna takes on the “Epstein class” | Today, Explained
Uploaded: 2026-03-05T16:50:04.000Z
Duration: 25 min 35 s
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Hi, and welcome to Today Explained Saturday.

Basic passive voice

So everybody knows our politics are divided, Democrat versus Republican, left versus right, divided on lines like age, gender, and

But the biggest divide in our politics may not be about identity at all, in my opinion.

And it's only gotten more noticeable in recent months as issues like the Epstein files and questions about artificial intelligence have seemed to pit the elites against the rest of us.

Congressman Ro Khanna is at the center of both of these issues.

He brought one of the survivors of Epstein's abuse to this week's State of the Union, and

he's coined the term Epstein class, meaning the group of wealthy and connected individuals that he says deserve accountability, even if they're Democrats.

Khanna is also the congressman from Silicon Valley, meaning he's worked with companies like Google and Meta and seen them transition over the years.

And he's at the forefront of one of the most important political questions of our moment.

And is the government going to do anything about it?

So this week, I traveled to Washington, D.C.

to talk to Kana about this and a whole lot more.

Congressman o', Connor, thank you for joining me.

I want to talk to you for a lot of reasons, but specifically about two issues.

Most clearly, I think that with this second Trump administration, some of the big dramas have been expected, you know, over immigration, over things like the economy.

But things like the Epstein files and things like AI and the future of work have become these topics, and

I feel like you are really right at the center of both of those.

I wanted to start with the Epstein files.

This has become such a large part of the work you're doing in Congress.

I just wanted to know where that started for you.

How did you become a the voice for this issue or one of them?

I have traveled to a lot of rural towns, factory towns.

I've done a lot of podcasts of Trump voters, and

I knew that this was something that Trump campaigned on, that he was going to hold elites accountable, that rich and powerful people were getting away with breaking the law, and

And that's really what started my interest.

Obviously, there's been a massive document dump, but it can be hard to keep track of.

How much have we gotten, how much is still out there?

At least 50% still has been hidden, covered up, but what has been released is shocking.

Messi and I didn't think we'd get this far.

It's still that they're keeping the worst stuff.

But what they've released is not a good look at our elite class.

It's not a good look at the Epstein class.

I mean, these are powerful people in business in Silicon Valley and Hollywood who are visiting Epstein's island knowing young girls are being abused, knowing young girls are being raped.

They are prosecuting Lord Mendelssohn, they're prosecuting former Prince Andrew, former Prime Minister of Norway, leaders in France.

We are seeing resignations of powerful law firm people and powerful banks.

But we have not yet seen investigations and prosecutions.

Yeah, we haven't seen that level of accountability, particularly legal accountability here.

But I know that you've been focused on a couple of documents, most specifically the 302 victim interview statements, the prosecutor memo from 2007.

I wanted to know for the documents you've both been focused on, have we gotten those?

It's not just the F. The 302 statements of the survivors about the President.

It's the survivors statements about the many men who may have abused or raped them.

A lot of those 302 files have been redacted and we need to get that information.

That's where the survivors tell us who were the men who abused them.

And the prosecution memo tells us why these charges were not brought.

I mean, obviously your pressure, political pressure, public pressure is.

I mean, is there like some magic solution that can get you at least the documents you're most looking for?

Well, first of all, the public pressure has worked, right?

It worked from Donald Trump saying, absolutely not, not going to sign this bill to signing a Democrats bill.

I mean, who would have thought that the most significant piece of Democratic legislation that Donald Trump would sign would be the Epstein Transparency Act?

And it's worked in terms of, first they dumped documents that were total junk in December and now they've had a real release.

It's not a full release, but it's a real release.

So we need to continue the public pressure to get them to drip by drip, give us more of these documents.

You mentioned your work with Congressman Thomas Massie, who obviously that relationship has been critical for the success of you all's advocacy year.

It was because of our work against these overseas wars.

next week we're going to force a vote to stop the war in Iran.

We do not like America getting into wars overseas.

We think that's a waste of our money, it's a waste of the lives of our soldiers.

And that certainly Congress should be saying whether we should go to war or not.

So that's really where our friendship came in.

Now, of course, I've gotten to know him personally.

I have gotten to see him when he lost his wife.

I mean, I, you know, you get to know someone on a personal level when you work with them.

I think one of the reasons people have really like, you know, have been focused on this relationship is because it seems more and more rare to see Democrats and Republicans kind of pushing for similar issue, even if they have other disagreements.

You know, I want to do want to ask about the war powers resolution that you all are introducing.

Obviously, Donald Trump has made very clear that he is considering strikes on Iran.

Would that war powers resolution, I mean, what is the likelihood that it could, what is the likelihood that they could pass and could force Donald Trump to require to, to listen to Congress ahead of something like an Iran strike?

We will keep most of the Democratic coalition, I think probably 95 to 97%, and

But is this issue different than like Venezuela or other times it's come up like it's, it's a more of a commitment for the United States.

I mean, I didn't agree with what we did in Venezuela, but

you could say that's in our hemisphere and it wasn't a long drawn out war.

This is a country in the Middle east that has 90 million people that if we want to topple the regime, would take many, many troops.

Even the Joint Chiefs has said that Keynes, that this is not like Venezuela.

This is exactly what Donald Trump ran against.

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Rep. Ro Khanna takes on the “Epstein class” | Today, Explained

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