When the United States woke up from the longest government shutdown in history, Jeffrey Epstein was still there.
For 43 days, while the public purse faucet remained partially shut off, the memory of the horrific crimes committed by the billionaire pedophile who has persecuted Donald Trump since his death in 2019 took a backseat to other emergencies, from food stamp payments to 42 million people at risk of starvation to thousands of flight cancellations due to a shortage of air traffic controllers.
Once the crisis was overcome and the House reconvened with the administration in tow, the White House’s refusal to distribute documents related to the case in its possession again put the White House in jeopardy and reopened the fault line between the president and some parts of the Republican Party. The party returned to work this Wednesday, signing a petition calling on the White House to force a vote in Congress and release the Epstein files “on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s desk.”
Four Republican senators, Thomas Massie, Nancy Mace, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, joined their rivals in adding the 218 needed to request the documents’ release. Parts of that document became known over the years.
The last one arrived this Wednesday and was in two stages. First, in three emails released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee, Epstein said that Trump “spent many hours with one of the victims” of the financier and that he “knew the girls” about the underage victims. Then, more than 20,000 documents, unfiltered by the Republican Party, were released proving the billionaire’s close ties to the powerful and that he stood by Trump until his final moments (by suicide, according to the coroner and the government, although many conspiracy theories doubt this).
And what was supposed to be a glorious day for the U.S. president as he celebrated the Republican Party’s efforts to reinstate his government at the behest of his Senate rivals without much in return, turned out to be yet another day of bad blood implicated by Mr. Trump. Within days, his party was badly defeated in the polls, the Supreme Court was skeptical about the constitutionality of the tariffs, and a civil war erupted over how much extremism existed within the ranks of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement after a controversial interview with Tucker Carlson and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
On his social network Truth, President Trump tried to pressure people not to vote in favor of releasing the Epstein documents, urging them to “not be distracted from what’s important.” An effort that only fuels suspicions that something must be hidden.
The president even tasked one of the dissidents, Lauren Boebert, with the mission. According to American media, she asked some close allies to put pressure on her in a public (and enclosed) space like a crisis room.situation room), scenes of major decisions such as what would be used to start a war and the best way to assassinate Osama bin Laden. There was no way. Boebert left there with the same conviction she entered.
In the White House Crisis Management Room
Mr Johnson was thus forced to call a vote on the pedophile file, after months of evasion using every trick at his disposal. It will be next week. Even if the party succeeds in the House, where Republicans are preparing for more defections (“between 40 and 50,” according to Massey, one of the promoters), they may not succeed in the Senate. There is also the possibility that it would violate the president’s veto.
Ms. Boebert and Ms. Greene are part of the far right wing of the party, a faction that has no tendency to align with Democrats. In a classic Washington twist, the latter, who for years has dismissed as a hoax the far-right’s conspiratorial obsession with newspaper content about Mr. Epstein’s rich and powerful friends, including former President Bill Clinton and Britain’s former Prince Andrew, is at the forefront of a demonstration by people demanding to meet with them. And there is no indication that they intend to release their prey. “This is very similar to the efforts they made during their first president’s time using the Russian interference hoax,” MAGA activist Laura Loomer says in her book. political.
Newly declassified documents show no evidence that Trump was aware of his friend’s crimes for 15 years until the two separated in 2004. Trump claims they separated when Epstein kicked him out of his Mar-a-Lago club for his “unusual” behavior toward some of his employees. In the message, the billionaire pedophile denies this is the reason. There are also emails that appear to show Trump spending a 2017 Thanksgiving party with the new president, the first of his kind, but there is no evidence that this was the case.
Epstein said the White House accused Democrats of selecting specific emails to harm President Trump and of selfishly blacking out the names of victims who “spent hours” with Trump. That’s according to Caroline Leavitt, a spokeswoman for Virginia Giuffre, who said she committed suicide in April, a month after being hit by a bus in Australia, where she lived.
Mr. Levitt also recalled that Mr. Giuffre told the judge that during his time with Mr. Epstein and his recruiter Ghislaine Maxwell, he never saw Mr. Trump having sexual relations with minors. Maxwell is serving a 20-year sentence for being an accomplice in Epstein’s sex trafficking network. In her recently published posthumous memoir, Giuffre wrote that President Trump could not have been more “friendly” to her.
Republicans who rebelled against Mr. Trump are also struggling to come to terms with reports published this week that Mr. Maxwell is receiving preferential treatment after being moved to a minimum-security cell in Texas. The announcement came after she met for nine hours over two days with Trump’s lawyer, Justice Department Special Envoy Todd Blanche. A confidant assured the Oversight Committee that the director was allowing Ms. Maxwell special meals and was helping her prepare paperwork to request a pardon from President Trump.
If he admitted it, it would be hard to believe he had nothing to hide.
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