He’s back!
Just when you might have thought we would not have the late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein to talk about anymore, he plunged back into the headlines this week — and his former friend, President Donald Trump, is not happy about it.
Epstein is a sore subject for Trump and his loyalists in Congress, but it was not always thus.
Epstein was arrested in 2019 and charged with sex trafficking, but he died in what the authorities said was a suicide in prison while awaiting trial. During the Joe Biden interregnum, Trump supporters developed various conspiracy theories about Epstein and the Democratic administration’s supposed efforts to hush up the Justice Department’s investigation, including suppressing an Epstein client list.
The implication was that Epstein was intimately linked with elite circles in government and academia, including key Democrats. Various right-wing influencers, including Kash Patel (now FBI director), JD Vance (now vice president) and Donald Trump Jr. called for releasing the “Epstein list.”
After Trump was reelected, his attorney general, Pam Bondi, promised to publish the “list,” even avowing that it was sitting on her desk. Then, when it became clear that any meaningful release of files relating to the Epstein investigation would likely embarrass Trump, MAGA was forced to do an about-face.
The party line now is: “Move along. Nothing to see here.”
The problem is that a handful of Republicans do not wish to move along with their eyes averted. When the long summer recess in Congress began in July, Rep. Thomas Massie, the maverick Republican of Kentucky, had almost a dozen members of the House from his side of the aisle ready to sign on to a discharge petition that would allow the Epstein Files Transparency Act out of committee and onto the House floor for a vote.
That would bypass House Speaker Mike Johnson, who like other GOP members showed little enthusiasm for the measure, which Trump opposes.
Things took a turn for the worse for Trump on Wednesday, when Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released more than 20,000 pages of Epstein’s emails, which were received from Epstein’s estate. The Democratic committee members highlighted several emails that mentioned Trump, and journalists spent days poring over the trove to gain insight into Epstein’s ties to Trump and other luminaries.
Among the insights revealed were that Epstein and his convicted associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, coordinated their public response to a 2015 lawsuit brought by an anonymous woman who later was revealed to be Virginia Giuffre.
Giuffre died by suicide in April. Maxwell told the Justice Department this year that her relationship with Epstein was “almost nonexistent” between 2010 and 2019.
An exchange of particular interest was from 2011, in which Epstein wrote to Maxwell: “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned.” (The appalling punctuation is Epstein’s.) Maxwell replied: “I’ve been thinking about that…”
In another nugget, from 2018, Epstein did not sound kind to his friend the president, writing, “I know how dirty Donald is.”
For his part, Trump has pushed back, accusing Democrats of bringing up Epstein to “deflect” from their handling of the government shutdown.
Which brings us back to Massie’s petition, which as the House went into recess was one vote short to go through. Democrats say Johnson kept Arizona Democrat Adelita Grijalva from being sworn in precisely to block her from becoming the 218th signer on the Epstein petition, which Johnson denies.
Yet in order to end the government shutdown, Congress had to reconvene and Johnson had to swear in Grijalva.
Meanwhile, the White House leaned on the dissident GOP lawmakers, warning them that signing on to the discharge petition would be “a very hostile act.” Among the Republicans who had broken from their usual MAGA loyalties before the recess were three famously conservative Republican women.
The stalwarts were Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, Nancy Mace of South Carolina and Lauren Boebert of Colorado, a staunchly conservative trio who said they saw the Epstein affair as too sordid to ignore.
Despite the administration’s best efforts, which included corralling Boebert in a meeting in the White House Situation Room, the three Republican women held firm. On Wednesday, Johnson stated the vote on Massey’s bill will take place in the coming week.
A dose of political reality is in order. Even if the resolution passes the Republican-led House, it faces near-certain doom in the Republican-led Senate.
Yet a vote in both houses on transparency is what a growing number of Americans expect and what we all deserve. The “Epstein files” have emerged from the foggy precincts of conspiracy theory and now raise genuine concerns about an administration that has not been shy about using the powers of office to persecute its political adversaries.
The allegations and victims deserve to be taken seriously — and so do abuses of power — regardless of which party or which exalted dignitary is affected. The public has a right to see the Epstein files.
Email Clarence Page at cptimee@gmail.com.
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