As said, we know that the circlings were done as part of Alfred Rodriguez describing Epstein’s activities to Brad Edwards, from which Edwards crafted a list of people. It was just being used as a memory aid for Rodriguez.
So, we can assume that at least the initial form of the list matched the circlings. We know that Epstein was at least having inappropriate relationships with underaged girls, but we can’t say for certain that, that’s all that was mentioned by Rodriguez. Likewise, we can’t know that Rodriguez was telling the truth.
But, from an Occam’s Razor standpoint that if a person really was arrested and successfully prosecuted then we shouldn’t have any big reason to doubt that someone was lying about him being a criminal. And if we know that the person was successfully charged with the sexual assault of minors then that’s the crime and we shouldn’t assume that there’s any other crimes involved, minus evidence that says otherwise.
Given what we know, we should lean towards thinking that Rodriguez really did know something and that what he knew about was about girls.
Additionally, the history says that no one else outside of Epstein’s household was charged with anything. So we should give the benefit of the doubt to people who visited Epstein to seek his services. If he was tracking down stolen money for people, then that’s probably why those people were there - minus evidence to the contrary.
So we might imagine that the reason that Rodriguez was talking to Edwards about Dershowitz and Trump isn’t to say that they were having sex with minors, but rather to say that they seemed to do (potentially legal and above board) business with Epstein or that they might be able to testify against Epstein.
We know, for example, that Edwards called Trump and that Trump dished on Epstein.
That’s the safest and most supportable version. The list of clients is just literally that. It’s people who might have seen something and who were worth it for Edwards to call.
But, introducing evidence that’s more questionable, we have Maxwell’s description of Epstein’s business was that he tracked down money. But her specific example was to say that he might, say, track down money that was stolen from the Sinaloa Cartel - i.e. his work may not have been entirely above board.
We note that Epstein’s properties were located in New Mexico, Florida, and in the Caribbean. That seems well situated for working with Latin American Mafia - if he was.
A client list doesn’t necessarily need to be dealing with pedophilia to veer into criminality.
Likewise, we have Acosta’s statement that he was told to ignore some amount of what Epstein was doing, because he was an intelligence asset.
So we could, perhaps, just squeeze in the idea that Epstein was doing things, unrelated to young girls, that the US government might have wanted to keep on the down-low and thus is effectively unreported and off-the-radar so far. E.g. he was helping the government to keep tabs on the cartels, helping to recover drug money, who knows.
In this case, a “client list” might have a somewhat more nefarious meaning.
But, we are also told by Maxwell that some of Epstein’s most frequent visitors were lady billionaires. And so far there’s been no mention of Spanish speaking visitors.
It’s not clear to me why female billionaires, in particular, might visit a “stolen money finder”, particularly.
But, as is Maxwell’s habit, for mentioning that he was constantly being visited by wealthy women, nearly every name that has been mentioned is male. I’d currently lean towards thinking that she was just fixating on the few women that visited, rather than there actually being a lot of women.
As of yet, I haven’t seen anything that looks positive for a “blackmailing” business.
Ultimately, adding in all the questionable evidence doesn’t really get us anywhere.
I’d judge that the people on the list are most likely to be potential witnesses. So the real question is what they knew, and what they did with that information.