Canada-born David Brooks has been a columnist at the New York Times for 22 years. But his name search witnessed a sudden surge on Thursday (US time), as Democrats released a new batch of pictures from the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s estate.

The opposition did it to exert even more pressure on the Department of Justice to follow through with the December 19 deadline to release government files related to the financier. The emerging stash of photos ended up incriminating several high-profile figures in the process as well.

NYT columnist David Brooks seen with Google’s Sergey Brin in Epstein photos

Some of these happened to be people as big as Microsoft founder Bill Gates, linguist and philosopher Noam Chomsky, director Woody Allen, and Donald Trump’s former advisor Steve Bannon, among others.

Author and NYT opinion columnist David Brooks was yet another prominent personality pictured in the images. He was spotted sharing the space with Google co-founder Sergey Brin in the camera click, which happens to be from a 2011 event.

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In yet another photo, the author was seen smiling straight into the camera by himself.

According to a years-old Buzzfeed News report, the said event was held a few years after Epstein first went to prison for sex crimes. It also highlighted that the 2011 event took place in Long Beach, California, and was organised by New York literary agent John Brockman.

Buzzfeed noted that Epstein regularly visited Brockman’s exclusive intellectual club called Edge before his 2006 arrest. By the time of the event, the financier had completed his then-13-month prison sentence in Florida.

David Brooks’ Epstein connection exposed?

Presumably addressing the 2011 event, Brooks told Semaphor Media Editor Max Tani that he attended a Ted conference that year, and was invited to an adjacent dinner.

As for claims that he may have shared any ties with the deceased sex predator, he told Tani, “I never met Epstein… There were about 60 people there if memory serves. Apparently Epstein was also at this dinner. I don’t think we met or exchanged a word. I never heard of Epstein until i read a Miami Herald story about him in 2018. I’ve never had any contact with him by email or any other means.”

Consequently, a New York Times spokesperson told the Daily Beast in a statement that Brooks regularly attended events as a journalist, which allowed him to be in close proximity to “noted and important business leaders.”

The news outlet’s spokesperson further noted that the same thing happened at the said 2011 event. “Mr Brooks had no contact with him before or after this single attendance at a widely-attended dinner,” they added.

Just a month ago, the NYT columnist railed against Democrats’ ‘Epstein obsession’

The Democrats’ new batch of Epstein photos featuring Brooks comes a month after the 64-year-old columnist penned an op-ed titled “The Epstein Story? Count Me Out.” Therein, he took swipes at “America’s political class” for “obsessing” over Jeffrey Epstein the past few months.

“Why is Epstein the top issue in American life right now? Well, in an age in which more and more people get their news from short videos, if you’re in politics, the media or online it pays to focus on topics that are salacious, are easy to understand and allow you to offer self-confident opinions with no actual knowledge,” he wrote in the piece.

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Brooks went on to compare Democrats and those focussed on the Epstein saga with QAnon conspirators, noting that any issue only escalates to the standards of a “vast conspiracy” discussed in the mainstream when politicians make it happen. However, he didn’t just target Democrats therein, he spoke out against every other possible leader, including “Machiavellian Republicans,” Trump himself, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace and Robert Kennedy Jr, hyper-focussed on the scandal.

Candace Owens and Ro Khanna also became targets of his critical op-ed, especially with the latter being one of the leading voices backing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which was signed into law last month and called for the records to be released publicly.

“I have been especially startled to see Ro Khanna, a House Democrat and one of the most impressive politicians in America, use the phrase “the Epstein class” in his public statements,” Brooks wrote in his NYT op-ed. In the same breath, he added, “If I were a Democratic politician (this role-playing is kind of fun) I’d add that America can’t get itself back on track if the culture is awash in distrust, cynicism, catastrophizing lies and conspiracymongering. No governing majority will ever form if we’re locked in a permanent class war.”