From the New York Times, I'm Rachel Abrams, and this is The Daily.

For months, President Trump has tried to dismiss questions about his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein, notably denying that he'd authored a lewd birthday message

to the convicted sex offender. On Monday, Congress released the message, and many more like it.

Today, my colleague David Enrich explains how the book and an investigation into Epstein's finances

reveal how Epstein leveraged his rich and powerful friends

to fund a years-long criminal conspiracy.

It's Wednesday, September 10th.

So, David, on Monday we saw firsthand the release of this now very infamous birthday book to Jeffrey Epstein.

It's for his 50th birthday. It's from 2003. It's filled with notes from a lot of well-known, some rich, some powerful people, many of whom wrote kind of sexually explicit

messages. And there's one note in particular that by now a lot of us have heard about or seen

that seems to be from President Trump. It seems to be alluding to some secret that Trump

and Epstein have. Beyond, though, being, in some cases, lewd or sexually suggestive,

I'm just sort of wondering what we should be making from this book overall.

Yeah. So, I mean, to back up for a second, one of the enduring mysteries of Jeffrey Epstein is who surrounded him, why they were surrounding him,

and what they were doing around him.

And we've known for a long time that there was a whole band of very rich, very powerful people

who spent a lot of time and money with Epstein.

What most of those people have said is that they did not have any indication

about what Epstein was up to, and they've really downplayed the extent of their relationships.

But on Monday, because of a bipartisan and fairly belated effort by Congress to really dig into

what's been going on with Epstein, we finally got this birthday book that has been talked about for months now.

And what this 238 page book reveals is that, first of all,

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