Loading ...WHAT IF ? …EPSTEIN
Eugyppius has an important take IMHO…It is Truly STRIKING and FOOD Thought !!
SNIP
“But be forewarned: you’re not going to find yet another heavily-footnoted Epstein expose. The internet has too many of those already. Instead, I’m going to explain as straightforwardly as possible why I think Trump and his administration are telling the truth when they plead that there are no great revelations about Epstein lurking in the archives of the Justice Department. Many things that seem plausible from the outside and at low resolution turn out to be rather less plausible upon closer inspection. The stories commonly told about Epstein suffer from serious problems of internal coherence and remain unsubstantiated at crucial points.”
https://www.eugyppius.com/p/epstein?
COPIED AND PASTED INTO THE 3RD COMMENT
AS IT IS PAYWALLED
Paywalled — can’t get to meat of the article even AFTER signed up.
And after saying it wouldn’t be.
I don’t want to be writing this, and I have two reasons for my reluctance:
First, there is no way to address the massive conspiratorial edifice of Jeffrey Epstein without seeming at least faintly absurd. And second, there is nothing I could write on this immensely charged topic that won’t piss off at least half of my readership. But, that is just the way it will have to be. I’ve been pregnant with this essay for a few days, and I need to get it out of me so I can begin talking about other things.
What follows will not be a blind and opportunistic defence of the forty-seventh President of the United States. I’ve always been wary of Epstein and the stories people tell about him for reasons that have nothing to do with Trump. This would be why, in the entire history of the plague chronicle, I’ve dropped the man’s name exactly once, and then only in passing.
The Epstein legend combines a lot of analytical themes (they are almost literary tropes) of which I am sceptical. It rests heavily on the Myth of the Secret World, it invokes multiple black box theories of politics (from “the Jews” to “the bankers” to “paedophile cultists”), and in general the theses yoked to Epstein are too loose, too malleable and too dependent on elaborate innuendo to make sense of or even to prove.
But I am getting ahead of myself. We need some disclaimers here at the top: I am not saying that Epstein was not a sex criminal (he was), that he was not wealthy (he was), that he did not lead a very strange and enigmatic life (he did), that he did not associate with many celebrities and political figures (he did), that all of his associates are above all suspicion (they’re not), or that many aspects of what people believe about Epstein are implausible (they aren’t). It is primarily the political significance assigned to Epstein’s crimes that I tend to doubt.
I’m going to pull the paywall curtain for this one, because I don’t want to fight with half the internet. If you want to keep reading, I invite you to subscribe. Your support is what keeps me writing.
But be forewarned: Below the fold you’re not going to find yet another heavily-footnoted Epstein expose. The internet has too many of those already. Instead, I’m going to explain as straightforwardly as possible why I think Trump and his administration are telling the truth when they plead that there are no great revelations about Epstein lurking in the archives of the Justice Department. Many things that seem plausible from the outside and at low resolution turn out to be rather less plausible upon closer inspection. The stories commonly told about Epstein suffer from serious problems of internal coherence and remain unsubstantiated at crucial points.
When the ruling elites and the rabble look upon each other, they see things that falsify their core ideological assumptions. To repair the dissonance and defend their beliefs, each group cultivates a different kind of conspiracy theory.
The elites behold an increasingly hostile rabble who dislike their political programme and who reject them as rulers. This threatens to falsify our elites’ vision of themselves as benevolent humanitarian do-gooders who want only the best for the world and whose policies are necessary, inevitable and without alternative. Thus they have decided that nefarious social media algorithms channelling disinformation from malign foreign actors have led the rabble astray. They sincerely believe this and are presently crafting a growing body of law and policy on the basis of this strange delusion.
The rabble, for their part, behold an indifferent and increasingly authoritarian elite who seek to nudge and herd them like cattle in baffling and often harmful directions. This threatens to falsify deeply held beliefs in liberal democratic principles and associated instruments like the United States Constitution, which many ordinary people believe should produce better leaders and a better style of politics in general. Thus many among the rabble, on the left no less than on the right, have decided that their politicians are only apparently in charge and that a shadowy cabal of some kind in fact controls the state and its organs behind the scenes. Liberal democracy and the Constitution would soon put everything right, if only this cabal could be exposed and cast out.
There are many versions of Cabal Theory. Some hold that it is the World Economic Forum that controls everything, others that it is really the Jews and still others that it is a blackmail paedophile cult. Jeffery Epstein is a central figure in the latter variation of Cabal Theory; indeed, he has been instrumental in forming this view of politics, and without him the Blackmail Paedo Cult Thesis (BPCT) would lack much of its detail, its seeming immediacy and its adherents. Epstein inspires such emotion because, for millions of people, he is the cornerstone of BPCT, which is how they make sense of the political world and their place within it.
Adherents of BPCT argue that political leaders are induced systematically by obscure paedophile cultists to have sex with children, or at least with underage teenagers. The cultists then use evidence of their offences to control them in their exercise of public office. BPCT exists in a maximal form, as a theory of everything that happens politically in the United States and even other countries; and in a variety of minimal forms, which address only specific aspects of state behaviour (for example, and very commonly, the special relationship between the United States and Israel).
BPCT first caught on in a big way among Trump supporters with the Pizza Gate conspiracy of 2016, which emerged after hackers released the personal emails of Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, and internet people began discovering various obviously coded messages in his correspondence. Pizza Gate went nowhere, and was rapidly overshadowed by Epstein, as journalists first at the Miami Herald and then everywhere else began promoting his case in the context of the MeToo movement.
Media efforts to foreground even the more dubious accusations of Epstein’s victims fed the mythology of the man, and when BPCT adherents latched onto Epstein for their own reasons, the usual debunkers and the fact-checkers were nowhere to be found. From this happy collision of diverse beliefs and agendas, the Epstein myth was born. This myth holds that Epstein was either a spy or the agent of a secret and powerful cabal, or perhaps both. He was assigned to recruit teenage girls, whom he trafficked to third-party celebrities and politicians so that his paymasters could control these people via blackmail. Some combination of these activities explain Epstein’s personal wealth, why Epstein was given such a lenient plea deal following his federal Palm Beach indictment in 2007 and why he died in such mysterious circumstances in federal custody in 2019.1
Many people find this story extremely compelling, but it suffers from grave problems. The biggest such problem, is that the blackmail operation as alleged could never be secret, because it would have involved dozens upon dozens of uninvolved, uninitiated ordinary people, namely the girls themselves. Epstein’s case has seen an enormous amount of litigation, and there are substantial monetary incentives for any victims of third-party trafficking to come forward and assist in lawsuits against the men to whom Epstein trafficked them. With basically one dubious exception (more on this below), no such women have corroborated this aspect of the Epstein myth. This is the biggest way in which the BPCT theory of Epstein a) doesn’t make sense, because secret blackmail could never work like this, while also being b) unfounded, because c) evidence we would expect to have were this scenario true is almost entirely missing.
That is the biggest problem I see here, but there are others. The third-party blackmail trafficking scheme is the most insanely risky criminal enterprise I could imagine, being both illegal and wildly socially unacceptable. Were Epstein involved in any kind of sexual blackmail, word would have gotten around and all of his rich and famous celebrity associates would have avoided him like the plague. The only alleged targets of this blackmail ever identified – Alan Dershowitz and Prince Andrew – are the last people any kind of secret political cabal would bother dealing with. If Epstein were working for a foreign power, it’s hard to imagine why the American FBI would grant him a lenient plea deal because of his intelligence connections; if he were working for some kind of American intelligence cabal that secretly controls US politics, it’s hard to understand why he was arrested and indicted in the first place. Epstein also told multiple people that he was an intelligence agent, which is not something I imagine intelligence agents actually tell people, and before he became successful he did goofy things like carry around a possibly fake gun and show off a certainly fake Austrian passport. He was plainly what Germans call a Hochstapler. Finally, nobody can explain why Epstein’s assassins would have waited for his arrest to stage his suicide; any target would be far easier to assassinate outside of federal custody.
Those are the internal problems, but there are evidentiary problems too. There are two wildly different versions of the Epstein case – the media pop mythology version, and the court documents version. The two have almost nothing to do with each other.
Let’s start with the court documents version, which is helpfully encapsulated in the 2019 Southern District of New York indictment. This is not necessarily the best or most thorough source for Epstein’s misdeeds, so don’t get mad, I’m not trying to hide anything from you. I’m just trying efficiently summarise the most central details of this vast case in a readable way.
Here’s the most relevant bit from that document:
From at least 2002 through at least 2005, JEFFREY EPSTEIN enticed and recruited, and caused to be enticed and recruited, dozens of minor girls to visit his mansion in New York, New York (the “New York Residence”), and his estate in Palm Beach, Florida (the “Palm Beach Residence”), to engage in sex acts with him, after which he would give the victims hundreds of dollars in cash. In order to maintain and increase his supply of victims, EPSTEIN also paid certain victims to recruit additional underage girls whom he could similarly abuse. In this way, EPSTEIN created a vast network of underage victims for him to sexually exploit, often on a daily basis, in locations including New York and Palm Beach.
EPSTEIN’s victims were as young as 14 at the time he abused them, and were, for various reasons, often particularly vulnerable to exploitation. Moreover, EPSTEIN knew that many of his victims were under 18, including because, in some instances, victims expressly told him they were underage.
In creating and maintaining this network of minor victims in multiple states to abuse and exploit sexually, EPSTEIN worked with others, including employees and associates who facilitated his conduct by, among other things, contacting victims and scheduling their sexual encounters with EPSTEIN at the New York Residence and at the Palm Beach Residence.
In both New York and Florida, EPSTEIN perpetuated this abuse in similar ways. Victims were initially recruited to provide “massages” to EPSTEIN, which became increasingly sexual in nature and would typically include one or more sex acts. EPSTEIN paid his victims hundreds of dollars in cash for each encounter.
In particular, during encounters at the New York Residence, victims would be taken to a room where they would perform a massage on EPSTEIN, during which EPSTEIN would frequently escalate the nature and scope of physical contact with his victims to include, among other things, sex acts such as groping and direct and indirect contact with the victims’ genitals. In connection with the encounters, EPSTEIN, or one of his employees or associates, typically paid each victim hundreds of dollars in cash. Once minor victims were recruited, EPSTEIN or his employees or associates would contact victims to schedule appointments for “massages.” As a result, many victims were abused by EPSTEIN on multiple subsequent occasions.
To further enable him to abuse underage girls, EPSTEIN asked and enticed certain of his victims to recruit additional minor girls to perform “massages” and similarly engage in sex acts with EPSTEIN. When a victim would recruit another underage girl for EPSTEIN, he paid both the victim-recruiter and the new victim hundreds of dollars in cash. Through these victim-recruiters, EPSTEIN maintained a steady supply of new victims to exploit, and gained access to dozens of additional underage girls to abuse.
From this we learn two extremely important things:
1) Almost all of the victim allegations, as summarised here and as otherwise known, involve offences committed by Epstein himself, and enabled by his sometime girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. Third-party trafficking is nowhere to be found here.
2) Epstein committed his crimes with the help of Maxwell and his own staff, but most importantly with the recruiting assistance of his victims themselves. This is crucial to remember when interpreting the notorious non-prosecution agreement that Epstein received from Alexander Acosta, then-U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida. This agreement extended immunity to all of Epstein’s potential and as-yet unidentified “co-conspirators,” I would imagine because nobody had any interest in going after young girls whom Epstein had victimised.2
When you read things like this indictment, or the partially released 2006 Grand Jury transcripts, you find yourself very far indeed from the pop mythology of Epstein. It’s almost invisible. This is because the pop mythology has little time for the tawdry testimonial reality of Epstein’s crimes as they were indicted and prosecuted, and emphasises far more heavily the outlier testimony of one particular victim. This was, remember, the MeToo era, and the press were given free rein to indulge the most central MeToo doctrine, which held that all women are to be believed.
Unfortunately, believing everybody is never a good idea, and not all of Epstein’s victims are credible. Juliette Bryant, who was 20 years old when she came into contact with Epstein, has described various times the man’s shape-shifting capabilities and his reptilian nature. Sarah Ransome, another victim, told journalists as the Epstein story was gaining ground in 2017 that Epstein had recorded sex tapes of various celebrities, among them Bill Clinton, and that these tapes were in her possession. She later retracted these allegations, admitting that she fabricated them to draw attention to the story.
Nobody, however, has influenced the mythology as much as Epstein’s most famous victim, the late Virginia Giuffre. Giuffre’s story has changed in so many ways over the years, and differs so substantially from the stories told by all of Epstein’s other accusers, that it is very hard to credit, and yet the pop mythology of Epstein is equal parts vague unsupported innuendo and things Giuffre said to journalists. Giuffre is basically the only source of the third-party trafficking claims. All the litigation associated with these accusations ended in a settlement with Prince Andrew, in which the Prince admitted no wrongdoing; and a settlement with Alan Dershowitz, in which Giuffre acknowledged she may have been mistaken in identifying Dershowitz and withdrew all her claims against him.
What remains of the Epstein mythology, after all of this? Perhaps the man really did have some contact with intelligence agencies. The alleged statement of Alexander Acosta, that Epstein “belonged to intelligence,” is however something we have only at second- or third-hand and that Acosta himself later indirectly repudiated (p. 169 at that link). The blackmail claims are probably the weakest element of the edifice, resting as they do exclusively on descriptions of Epstein’s surveillance equipment and of electronic storage devices seized from his residences; and on a single solitary email Epstein sent to Bill Gates in 2017, which Gates ignored and which has nothing to do with the Epstein’s sex crimes or anything else in this story. Epstein’s dubious death is beyond the scope of this piece, but I’ll grant my critics the point if they wish.
In fact, for the sake of argument, my critics can have Epstein-as-intelligence-agent too. Why not? The general effort to tie everything up together in the same package is one of the greatest problems in the way people think about Epstein. Epstein the spy has to be part of the same story as Epstein the sex offender which has to be part of the same story as Epstein the socialite which is naturally also related to Epstein and his dubious suicide. The thing is that not everything must be or even plausibly can be related to everything else like this. Perhaps Epstein was some kind of spy or federal informant who also, in his private life, abused teenage girls. That actually seems infinitely more plausible to me.
I’ve been writing for a long time and I’m a little tired, but I have a final point, and that is about Trump and the promises his administration made with respect to the Epstein files. That Trump flirted with some kind of big release during the campaign, and that people like Pam Bondi and Dan Bongino made even more explicit pledges on this front, really ought to indicate that they had no deep knowledge of or interest in this matter at all. Some of Trump’s most devoted constituents demanded that the Justice Department stop hiding the truth about Epstein, so why not give them what they wanted?
In fact this was a grave error, because the nature of the Epstein mythology, is that it can brook no falsification. There’s no way to tell people that it’s just not true, even if it isn’t true, without becoming a part of the villainy yourself. After an internal review and a fairly lame effort to string along supporters while interns reviewed files, the U.S. Department of Justice ended up confirming what some people had long predicted they’d have no choice but to confirm – namely that they had nothing they could release.
If Trump himself were implicated by the Epstein files in any way, that material would’ve been used against him years ago, and he never would’ve leaned into this popular myth in the first place. After his failure to deliver, Trump demonstrated the anger and frustration typical of somebody who has made an honest effort, regrets that he has nothing to new to share and is frustrated that he is not believed. If there were any deception within Trump’s administration about the Epstein materials, you’d expect all of this to have gone much differently.
1
To this brief list comes vaguely articulated, later-breaking allegations that Epstein was involved in money laundering and that he had some connection to Adnan Khashoggi and perhaps even the Iran Contra affair. You see what I mean, when I say the mythology is malleable. Epstein is everything to all men. This post will deal with the Epstein myth only in its most minimal form.
2
A critic has disputed my conclusion here, so I will note that the 2020 Office of Professional Responsibility review of the non-prosecution agreement concluded explicitly that the immunity provisions therein were intended to shield Epstein’s staff.
I don’t buy that there is no there, there. I don’t know exactly the specifics of what is being covered up but there is definitely something important being covered up. Even if it is just embarrassing about how the US, Israeli and British intel organizations care little about their citizens. What tells you they are hiding something is the fact that they know and have all the wire transfer info for billions of dollars between Epstein, his bank(JPMorgan) and whoever was paying him. Given that Epstein is suppose to be dead, why can’t the FBI release that info? Who are they protecting and why?
It very well could include massive weapon sales, money laundering, drug dealing on a massive scale etc. We deserve to know what our governments have been and are still involved in but those types of activities are unlikely to be revealed.
Thanks Fully. I needed another perspective, at least to ponder.
Given Epstein modest beginnings, and then ultimately his vast wealth, something of immense value to people in high places was exchanged.
I do think the blackmail angle has been overplayed.
But it is probably still a part of it.
If not, why all the video taping? Everywhere.
That aspect was ignored here.
A sexual Pervert would want to video his encounters for personal gratification would he not ?