After Monday night’s US Senate debate between Senator Ed Markey and Representative Seth Moulton, everyone’s talking about how Moulton tried to connect Markey to Jeffrey Epstein, the convicted sex offender who died by suicide in a New York jail cell while awaiting federal trial for sex trafficking charges.
But my first reaction to the night was not about that. It was that Markey, who turned 80 in July, should not have run for reelection. With an open seat, the next generation of Democrats, including some newcomers, could have duked it out. Instead, after 50 years in Congress, Markey decided to seek a third Senate term and Moulton —the “insurgent the left loathes,” as Vox put it— is the only Democrat to challenge him.
Which brings me to the debate, which I endured from start to finish. Markey looked his age and the physical contrast with Moulton, 47, was especially stark on television. Meanwhile, Moulton, a Harvard physics major who is not known for generating warmth, generated slightly more than usual.
In what could have been Moulton’s big debate moment, heapologized fora controversial statement made after the 2024 presidential election in which he expressed concerns about his two young daughters “getting run over on a playing field by a male or formerly male athlete.”
Instead, inserting Epstein into the debate turned into a bigger moment. Given a chance to pose a question to his opponent,Moulton posed this one:“In the newly released Epstein files, your name appears repeatedly. I’m not going into all the details, but I do want to ask one question … Why would you even take a meeting with a lobbyist on behalf of Jeffrey Epstein?”
Like a defibrillator to the heart, this gotcha question jerked Markey to life.
“What you are doing right now is absolutely reprehensible,” he said. “I have never met Jeffrey Epstein. I don’t know Jeffrey Epstein. I have been calling for the investigation of Jeffrey Epstein since day one. … What you’re saying right now is absolutely the worst of the playbook of destruction and character assassination which is so characteristic of MAGA Republicans.”
The issue for Moulton is not whether the allegation is reprehensible. It’s whether it’s true. At best, this one is complicated — and the Markey campaign insists it’s false.
According to Moulton’s campaign, which links its information directly to the Epstein files, Epstein hired Nelson Mullins, a Washington-based lobbying firm, to help Karim Wade, the son of a one-time president of Senegal, who had been sentenced in Senegal for corruption. Bob Crowe,a longtime friend of former Secretary of State John Kerry and a top Democratic fund-raiser, who was also a partner in Nelson Mullins, had a business relationship with Epstein, and played some role in the effort to help Wade — or at least communicated to Epstein about it.
For example,a 2015 emailfrom a partner in Nelson Mullins highlighted that Crowe “has been in touch with the State Department on this matter and had a very detailed discussion with a high ranking official working closely on this. We are engaging Congress and had an initial briefing with Senator Ed Markey, the top Democrat on the Senate Foreign Relations Committee on Africa.” Crowe forwardedthat email to Epstein, who replied, “they are skeptical … will you be in palm over the holiday?”
Asked for a response, Markey’s campaign said he was never briefed on the Karim Wade case, and that neither he nor his staff met with anyone lobbying on behalf of Wade. “We were not involved in the release of Karim Wade in any way,” a campaign spokesperson said.
Other backup material supplied by the Moulton campaign is hazy about an explicit Markey-Epstein connection.
For example, a colleague of Crowe’sinvited Epsteinto attend a 2015 fund-raiser that featured Markey and two other senators. It’s unclear whether Epstein attended the fund-raiser.
In a June 2016 email to Epstein,reported by the Organized Crime and Corruption Reporting Project,Crowe also wrote, “I was told by the congressional delegation that they put pressure on Macky Sall (the president of Senegal) and felt he was going to release him.” Again, Markey is not specifically named.
Wade was released from prison in June 2016. In August 2016, Markeyled a congressional delegationto meet with the president of Senegal. While that’s interesting, it’s not explicit proof that Markey was involved in Wade’s case or knew that Epstein was involved in it.
