Epstein Files Describe Billionaire's Secret Supervillain-Style Library of Relics

​A February 9, 2014, email in the Epstein files describes a secret billionaire dinner on the premises of a major defense contractor that reads like the kind of dark conspiracy you would find in the browning pages of a twentieth-century occult thriller or in a knockoff James Bond movie. The dinner was hosted by ultra-wealthy internet pioneer Rick Adams, who founded UUNET, and featured fellow internet pioneer Vint Cerf, a cast of unnamed “famous people,” and skeptical activist James “The Amazing Randi” eating in what sounds very much like a villain’s lair from a bad movie, stuffed with ancient relics, Nazi memorabilia, and priceless historical artifacts.

​The email, the name of whose author the Justice Department has redacted for unclear reasons, states that on February 8, 2014, guests gathered at the Hay-Adams hotel in Washington, D.C. and were transported to an undisclosed location that turned out to be a Virginia office building used by General Dynamics, a major defense contractor. The scene then played out this way, according to the missive:

Rolled up to a huge General Dynamics Building (office building) but inside was not an office. It was a library with some of the most bizarre and unbelievable relics. Declaration of Independence ....all of Vesalius stuff (did you know he was a dwarf?). ...nazi weirdness...samples of all elements in the periodic table...stuff from the moon...meteors... Bible things.
 
Anyway it was so cool and the space wasn't fancy. Wood floor, square room. You could open and touch all of the books even the super super olds ones. I enjoyed the Amharic stuff on wood and leather about medical magic from like a zillion bc.
 
Table in mid room. […] Dinner hosted by reclusive and weird mad genius billionaire dude named Rick Adams who I loved.

(All ellipses, except for the bracketed set, in original)

(Many of the emails exist in multiple versions across the Epstein files, with different computer coding errors in their texts, including missing letters replaced by symbols; I have collated the extant copies to produce a cleaner transcription.)
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This would be ridiculous in a potboiler novel, let alone real life.
 
According to a subsequent email from April 16, 2015, the redacted author of the original email identified Adams as the owner of the library of relics, as well as Randi’s secret patron:

[...] Rick Adams founder of unet internet super crazy billionaire reclusive - owns most of the worlds relics. Super super smart and wayyy crazy. Keeps his copies of Declaration of Independence right by dinner table. Built a whole "library" around funky stuff. August 1. Private landing strip where he has his planes in Manassas Virginia. He's also inviting the Amazing Randi bc he finds his work to keep him alive.

To the best of my research, Adams has never spoken of this alleged library of relics nor confirmed it exists. I suppose one could innocently assume it was some sort of private museum of scientific history, but why do our elites collect so much Nazi memorabilia?
 
In 1996, Adams, described at the time as Randi’s close friend, donated $1 million to fund Randi’s Million Dollar Paranormal Challenge,” which promised payment to anyone who could prove they possessed paranormal powers. The prize went unclaimed when it was terminated in 2015. (Randi died in 2020.) I do not believe it was previously known (assuming the email to be correct) that Adams continued funding Randi’s operation, or that they had secret dinners with global power brokers, though it is known that Adams served as the treasurer of the James Randi Educational Foundation. 

[Update 2/16/26: I heard from a correspondent who has visited Rick Adams’s library that the so-called Nazi memorabilia is in fact two copies of the Enigma machine, and Adams is simply a collector who primary collects material related to the history of science.]