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He befriends Bill Clinton in his new after-office life. And that’s quite the fatal pairing. The post-Monica Clinton, now having pardoned the on-the-lam financier Marc Rich—at this point, before his own rehabilitation, Clinton really is the world’s ultimate sleaze ball—is suddenly being ferried around in the jet of... who exactly? The New York Post is the first to take formal media note of the Clinton-Epstein connection, hinting at a sex and money bromance. (“I suppose travel with Clinton changed the arc of my life,” Epstein tells me. “There were, I knew, lots of obvious reasons not to do it, but having the ability to spend 100 hours with a former president just doesn’t happen to many people.”) The instinctively private Epstein is not just increasingly exposed, but clearly curious about the nature of exposure. I met Epstein around this time. Epstein had become a more and more active backer of advanced scientific research and in 2002 he was taking a small group of scientists out to the TED conference in Monterey. The TED organizers invited various other TED participants, including me, to join the flight. A small group assembled at the private plane terminal, most of us unfamiliar with our benefactor, and as we headed in the direction of the discrete private plans we were gently pointed to our ride: Epstein’s 727. It is some thoroughly updated drawing room set-up, all of us nervously ensconced in this luxury plane, waiting for our unknown host to arrive—and soon he does, tanned, relaxed, with wide open smile, accompanied by three young women. It would be unlikely, outside of a men’s magazine fantasy of the luxe life, that you could locate this in reality. Epstein’s attentions, taking time with each of his passengers, seemed impossible to account for. The quiet of the plane, engineered into acoustic perfection, seemed spooky. Epstein’s three companions were witty, poised, helpful as well as powerfully alluring—as though stewardesses of bygone times. (One more thing about this trip: Google founders, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, with their company still in its infancy, came out to see the plane on the Monterey tarmac and, with a few other Googlers, literally ran whopping from one end of the plan to the other. Then they described for Epstein, in what I can not now remember as a put on or entrepreneurial brainstorm, a brand extension in which they would market a line of Google bras with the Os as convenient cups. In fact, the name Google, they said, was invented out of the belief that men would focus on a word with two Os in it.) HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_022759