Matt Taibbi recently flagged this choice tidbit from a New York Times story attempting to downplay damning new revelations about the Russiagate hoax from Trump’s first term: “The administration is trying to distract supporters who are angry about its broken promise to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.”
There’s no evidence whatsoever this is the reason why the Trump administration is trying to hold people accountable for falsely accusing the president of colluding with Russia. Trump is rightly angered that his first term was derailed by manufactured accusations of treasonous collusion. His current FBI director, Kash Patel, was involved in unraveling the bogus Russia claims as they were being made and has been warning of a conspiracy against Trump emanating from the FBI and CIA for years — and nearly all of Patel’s warnings have been subsequently validated.
Even without digging through the particulars of the latest Russiagate revelations, since when has it been a respectable journalistic practice to make unsupported assertions that are little more than Democrat Party talking points? Well, major media organizations have been behaving this way ever since I can remember, but the point about it being bad journalism still stands.
Fair or not, it’s hard not to concede that the Trump White House brought this attack on itself. A month ago, Trump’s DOJ issued a memo bluntly refuting the existence of an Epstein “client list,” downplaying conspiracies surrounding Epstein’s death in jail and the blackmailing of wealthy powerbrokers, and announcing that, due to privacy concerns and the court-ordered sealing of documents, the release of more Epstein files wasn’t forthcoming. These might be reasonable conclusions based on the evidence, but the Trump admin had swept into office all but guaranteeing dramatic Epstein revelations. This was overpromising and underachieving on a fairly grand scale, and lots of Trump supporters weren’t happy about it.
It’s worth noting that the recent round of Russiagate revelations began on July 2 when CIA Director John Ratcliffe issued a report on the faulty Intelligence Community Assessment process in 2016. That was five days before the DOJ memo on Epstein that spurred the recent controversy; if anything, the facts support the notion Democrats are seizing on the Epstein memo to distract from very serious new allegations that implicate President Obama in weaponizing the CIA to go after a political rival. On that point, Lee Smith has a lot of eye-opening things to say about how the sudden Democrat interest Epstein is an attempt to obscure the new Russia revelations.
However, it’s not all strategic. At a base level, Democrats are simply trying to exploit a rift in Trump’s base to drag his approval down by tarring him with Epstein. This why you now have even the most milquetoast figures in the Democrat Party — Quick, what’s the name of the senator from Arizona again? Wasn’t he an astronaut or something? — gleefully intimating Trump is covering up and/or implicated in a dark pedophile conspiracy.
If they were so alarmed by this pedophile conspiracy and convinced it implicated Trump, you’d think they would have done something about this last year when Democrats controlled the DOJ and Trump was running for president. You’d think releasing concrete evidence of his unsavory involvement with Epstein would have put a damper on his reelection chances. After all, it has been reported that Trump’s name pops up numerous times in the Epstein files.
The problem is that, as we’ve noted, Trump has already been victim of a major conspiracy emanating from the Justice Department. Even Trump’s tax returns were leaked. New York state combed through his real estate docs to invent a charge against him and fine him $400 million for the crime of receiving a loan and paying it back with interest. It’s entirely possible Trump’s name appearing in the Epstein files is a reason why they haven’t been released; but it strains credibility to think that Democrats controlled the DOJ the last four years and didn’t bother splashing damaging information about Trump from those same files all over The New York Times.
What we do know is this: Trump and Epstein were friends throughout the 90s, but that the pair had a major falling out around 2004 when Trump supposedly banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago. The source of the feud is not clear, but one of Epstein’s most outspoken victims, Virginia Giuffre, had been working at Mar-a-Lago’s spa, and Epstein reportedly “stole” her from Trump’s employment. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said, “The fact remains that President Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club for being a creep to his female employees.” The investigation into Epstein was opened a year later in 2005.
These facts, combined with the total lack of leaks of damaging info from a hostile DOJ, are pretty thin gruel. And yet, the media and Democrats, but I repeat myself ad nauseum, are really flooding the zone here.
Hellbound and Down 