JEFF CHILDERS
Yesterday, President Trump shoved the Democrats down into the pit they’d been building to trap him. On cue, the New York Times yowled like a scalded cat in this morning’s top-of-page headline: “Justice Department to Investigate Epstein Ties, but Not to Trump.” We have reached peak Epstein: I couldn’t count all the Epstein stories clogging yesterday’s already dense news cycle. They were uncountable, like ticks on a dying deer from Fauci’s backyard.
Twenty-four hours after House Speaker Mike Johnson announced an pending vote to “compel” the DOJ to release the Epstein files, President Trump shocked the world by demanding an investigation of people named in the Epstein disclosures, including (but not limited to) Bill Clinton, former Harvard President Larry Summers, billionaire Democrat donor Reid Hoffman, and mega-bank J.P. Morgan-Chase.
In August, Trump appointed Jay Clayton as U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York. He is a serious guy. He served as SEC Chairman from 2017-2020, and before that, Jay was a long-time mergers & acquisitions lawyer. So he understands complex financial stuff. He holds degrees from U. Penn. and Cambridge. Jay has a solid and well-respected reputation.
The Times never saw this coming. The article practically gasped with shock, angrily reminded readers about the DOJ’s unsigned July memo closing the investigation, and frantically speculated that Trump only opened these new investigations so DOJ would have an excuse not to turn over its Epstein files because of pending investigations.
Nobody knows Trump’s plan, it is brimming with strategic ambuiguity, which has become Trump 2.0’s hallmark. But it was still politically brilliant, in a dizzying array of ways. Let us count them.
First, criminal investigations are at least part of what Trump’s MAGA critics have long said they wanted. It will be up to the US Attorney to decide whether he’s got enough evidence to defeat tall-building criminal defense attorneys and support any high-profile arrests. But it seems the investigations will soon be underway (if they weren’t already in progress).
Second, this puts high-profile Democrats, including former President Clinton, in play. In a hostile op-ed yesterday, the Washington Post editorial board called Trump’s move “escalation,” and predicted it would eventually backfire. “Trump is keeping the story alive,” the editors sneered. Someone is. But maybe the high-profile Democrats in the crosshairs would prefer the story to quietly die.
Third, Trump’s turnaround raises the stakes on all further disclosures. Each new tranche raises the stakes for whoever appears in them. The more stuff that comes out, the more “many other people and institutions” will require scrutiny.
In many remarkable ways, the Epstein scandal is unfolding just like the Russiagate revelations. First comes the “evidence” in the form of the document dumps. The now-public evidence supports the investigations. The investigations become indictments.
Beyond the initial three emails that Democrats unsuccessfully tried to mischaracterize, Wednesday’s dump of 20,000 new documents is beginning to bear fruit.
So far, the new documents have revealed media collaborating with Epstein against Trump (in yesterday’s post), a growing narrative in Epstein’s own sloppy words that he perceived Trump to be his Great Nemesis, and evidence that Epstein thus tried to destroy Trump by conspiring with media and House Democrats.
The emerging picture is of an Epstein who was terrified of Trump. Leading up to the billionaire’s arrest, he increasingly wanted to injure Trump, and created a false narrative that he, Epstein, was the ultimate Trump weapon. Gullible reporters, Democrats, and Trump enemies believed Epstein, which also gave him a huge public relations boost.
I’m not the only one saying it. Yesterday, after reviewing the latest Epstein documents, the Washington Post ran an astonishing story under this headline:
Here’s what we can now see of the timeline. In 2007, Trump threw Epstein out of his club, one month after Epstein signed the plea deal in his Florida prosecution. The widely reported story was that Epstein had sexually harassed the teenage daughter of another club member while the young lady was working at the spa. Trump heard about it and, according to accounts from both journalists and attorneys involved, revoked Epstein’s membership and banned him from the club in October 2007.
Over the years, Trump has also publicly complained that Epstein “stole people that worked for me,” going as far back as 2000, when Epstein poached Virginia Guiffre, then 16, when she was working as a locker-room attendant at Mar-a-Lago’s spa. Ghislaine Maxwell hired Guiffre in late 2000 to be Epstein’s “traveling masseuse.”
The emails and text messages from the latest dump show that Epstein smelled a rat. He suspected that Trump was behind all his criminal problems. He began to counterattack, and communicated with any Trump enemy who’d listen, up and down the progressive food chain. This revived the convicted pedophile’s flagging fortunes, since progressives happily overlooked his sordid criminal history, since Epstein could help them take out the Bad Orange Man.
So far, and don’t miss this, we’ve seen not a single email or text between Trump and Epstein. Zero. From the documents, it looks like they never spoke. Everything the media has published to date is just Epstein obsessively chatting about Trump.
More solid evidence of Epstein’s war against Trump appeared in a second WaPo story bearing this equally astonishing headline:
Last night, Plaskett admitted the texting had happened, but brushed it off as constituent communications. “During the hearing, Congresswoman Plaskett received texts from staff, constituents, and the public at large offering advice, support, and in some cases partisan vitriol, including from Epstein,” the statement said.
Whatever you think about this ghastly Democrat pay-for-play stuff, it proves beyond argument that Epstein was doing everything he could to hurt Trump, but had no real ammunition.
Indeed, in the many emails and text messages between Epstein and reporters, Epstein and other high-flyers, and Epstein and Democrats, he constantly hints that he holds incriminating evidence against the President but never actually says what that evidence is. So far as we can tell from tens of thousands of communications, he had nothing. Bupkis.
But Epstein used that nothing to get a whole lot of attention.
When you aim for the King, don’t miss. In Hamlet, King Claudius proclaimed, “Revenge shall have no bounds.”
Epstein is now a former pedophile. Yesterday —at last!— President Trump unexpectedly plunged the apparatus of government right into Democrats, using the same Epstein sword they’ve been sharpening since January. And what can they say? Having become a part of the dramatic political opera that they composed, Democrats cannot reasonably argue that anyone is off the table for investigations.
In short, it’s too late to say never mind.” WaPo’s editors whined, “Trump wants to redirect the Epstein furies away from himself and toward his political opponents.” Indeed.
The good money says Democrats will soon be playing defense on Epstein. And not just on that issue.
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