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After months of histrionics, self-aggrandizement, and apoplexy from Democrats and Republicans obsessed with the supposed links between disgraced and deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein and the sitting president of the United States, Donald Trump has called Congress’s bluff. In an overnight about-face, Trump announced that House Republicans should join the Democratic minority to release the document dump referred to as the “Epstein files” because, Trump posted on Truth Social over the weekend, “we have nothing to hide, and it’s time to move on from this Democrat Hoax perpetrated by Radical Left Lunatics in order to deflect from the Great Success of the Republican Party.”
Within 48 hours, the Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House with a 427-1 vote, and the next day, it passed the Senate via unanimous consent. Now, Trump has signed the bill, compelling the Justice Department to release in “searchable and downloadable format” all classified records of the federal investigations into Epstein. Crucially, the act doesn’t follow any standards of due process to ensure that only vetted, verified, or truthful testimonies are released.
WHY WERE THEY HANGING OUT WITH JEFFREY EPSTEIN AFTER HE PLEADED GUILTY TO TRAFFICKING MINORS?
“We have a list of reasons they can’t use to redact materials,” bragged Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who has famously crusaded against Trump since the start of his second term as president. “For instance, there’s been a lot of discussion about men who might be embarrassed, let’s say, because they went to the island. They can’t redact it for those reasons.”
Democrats and their Trump-hating allies across the aisle, namely Massie and Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA), have claimed victory. As the narrative goes, the anti-Trump alliance outmaneuvered a president who was petrified because he’s somehow implicated in Epstein’s crimes.
“This was a massive child sex abuse and trafficking ring, which was covered up originally by Alex Acosta, who later gets rewarded with an appointment to the Trump Cabinet as secretary of labor where Trump could keep a close eye on him, and the cover-up continued in the first Trump administration, and it continues to this very day,” said a triumphant Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD), the ranking member of the House Judiciary Committee.
Unlike Raskin, Greene made herself the main character of her supposed triumph, but like her newfound Democratic allies, Greene was happy to insinuate that Trump had deeply nefarious reasons for supposedly blocking the files’ release.
“I’ve never owed [Trump] anything, but I fought for him, for the policies and for ‘America First,’ and he called me a traitor for standing with these women and refusing to take my name off the discharge petition,” Greene said while flanked by self-described Epstein victims. “Let me tell you what a traitor is: A traitor is an American that serves foreign countries and themselves. A patriot is an American that serves the United States of America, and Americans like the women standing behind me.”
If Greene and the anti-Trump Republicans are correct, and the files reveal that Trump was concealing their release because he “serves a foreign country” that somehow collaborated in Epstein’s reign of terror, Trump would deserve to be impeached. If Democrats are correct, and the files really do reveal that Trump was concealing their release because he was indeed partaking in Epstein’s criminal sex abuse of children, he would deserve prison.
But it’s not just that the gamble on Trump’s guilt seems vanishingly unlikely to pay off, but rather that the anti-Trump Epstein obsession will likely achieve the opposite of its stated and implicit intent. In the end, Trump will not have conceded to their release because he was boxed in, but instead because he knew he was innocent all along.
Whether he died by suicide or not, Epstein was found dead on Aug. 10, 2019, at New York’s Metropolitan Correctional Center. The MCC was then under the jurisdiction of the Federal Bureau of Prisons, which was then being run by an Obama BOP appointee and Warden Lamine N’Diaye, a career BOP appointee. Epstein had only been arrested the month prior because of a brand new federal criminal investigation heralded by Geoffrey Berman, then the U.S. attorney for the Southern District of New York, whom Trump had hand-picked to replace Preet Bharara.
The 2019 prosecution was a legal blockbuster. Berman charged Epstein with the sex trafficking of dozens of minor victims across state lines, an alleged criminal enterprise that would have risen to the level of conspiracy.
Local police first heard reports that the unmarried, childless Epstein was inexplicably hosting a rotating cast of unrelated underage girls over 20 years ago, with the FBI opening a federal case in conjunction with local authorities shortly after. The FBI’s Operation Leap Year identified over 30 minor victims to back the same charges that were eventually levied against Epstein in 2019. But Acosta, the eventual Trump labor secretary who was then the U.S. attorney of the Southern District of Florida, was operating under a series of pessimistic assumptions. Epstein’s elite legal team convinced Acosta that he would lose a politically explosive criminal case at trial, and the eventual inspector general report into the matter found that Epstein’s legal team exerted an “inappropriate” pressure campaign on the DOJ. In effect, President George W. Bush’s DOJ killed a potent federal case, and Acosta instead allowed Epstein to sign a legally toothless nonprosecution agreement.
But again, that deal was legally toothless. Practically speaking, it meant that Epstein had to plead guilty publicly to soliciting prostitution from a minor. The victim was publicly reported to be a 14-year-old girl at the time of Epstein’s NPA. That’s two years younger than the youngest age of consent in the nation and four years younger than the age of consent in Florida.
By 2008, Trump had long dumped his former friend. Although Epstein was famously pals with Trump as a part of the Palm Beach billionaire set during the ’90s, Trump reportedly cut ties with Epstein and banned him from Mar-a-Lago around 2004 or 2005. This claim was first made in a legal filing in 2011, and to date, there is no evidence that Trump ever again socialized with or reached out to Epstein after 2004. By the time the world found out the truth about Epstein, then 52, Trump either didn’t know about Epstein’s predation or had already discarded himself of the creep.
The same cannot be said of a torrent of new Democrats exposed by the Epstein Files. According to the latest document dump, Clinton Treasury Secretary and Harvard professor Larry Summers solicited Epstein for advice on how to seduce a Chinese subordinate whose father also happened to be a senior member of the Chinese Communist Party for years, leading up until the day before Epstein’s 2019 arrest. In 2013, the consultants of now-House Minority Leader Hakeem Jeffries (D-NY) invited Epstein to the Democrat’s fundraiser. And while Del. Stacey Plaskett (D-VI) was questioning Michael Cohen during a 2019 House Oversight Committee hearing, Plaskett was texting Epstein for advice.
Democrats sent dinner invitations and asked for professional and romantic advice from Epstein long after the world discovered his misdeeds. But not Trump.
We’ve already seen the gambit blow up in the faces of Democrats in real time, as party leadership bent over backward to defend Plaskett on the grounds that she was merely texting with a constituent who used her district to host his little pedophile island. Will the gamble end as poorly for the Republicans who went along with them?
It depends on what their actual goal was. During four years of the Biden administration and at least the first five months of the Trump administration, Massie and Greene, and for that matter, the current loudest right-wingers fulminating over Epstein, Steve Bannon, and Tucker Carlson, were publicly pretty disinterested in the dead pedophile.
From the start of Trump’s presidency until June 22, Greene posted on X about Epstein five times, Massie posted once, Bannon posted three times, and Carlson mentioned Epstein in just one vlog.
Everything changed after Operation Midnight Hammer. After Trump successfully decimated Iran’s nuclear weapons capability without putting a single American boot on the ground, Epstein posts among this crew skyrocketed over 1,000%. Greene has since posted on X about Epstein 33 times. Bannon has done so 12 times, Massie 96 times, and Carlson has cut six separate videos about Epstein.
Carlson hasn’t exactly been coy about his insistence that Epstein was an Israeli agent, but Greene is the only dolt dumb enough to come close to explicating her accusation that Trump, the leader of the free world, is being puppeteered by a foreign government to protect a dead pedophile.
It’s a bold wager, and one that’s unlikely to pay off.
EPSTEIN CONSPIRACY THEORIES ARE EASIER TO BELIEVE THAN REALITY
The latest tranche of Epstein files reveals that in the decade and a half after Trump and Epstein last talked, Bannon himself was advising Epstein on how to rehabilitate his image. We have more confirmation of the already endlessly proven alliance between Epstein and Ehud Barak, the left-wing Israeli politician, but the newest files indicate the opposite of the alt-right charge against the Israeli government. Epstein appeared to try to take credit for Barak’s attempts to undermine Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s government — something Epstein and Bannon were colluding on together. If anything, Netanyahu and the Israeli government wouldn’t have an interest in interfering with the American government and concealing the Epstein files — instead, Bannon and Epstein were colluding with a left-winger to undermine the Israeli government.
Among the Democrats and the desperate, every accusation is understood as a confession. The only erstwhile Epstein associate to ever come out innocent from all of this may very well be Trump.
