The Director of the F.B.I. is threatening to resign unless the Attorney General is fired.
Let’s discuss why.
A couple of months ago, Virginia Giuffre, the headlining complainant in the case against Jeffrey Epstein, died.
The report runs that she committed suicide, like her abuser. The speculation is, that’s not what happened.
I’m not going to indulge conspiracy theories about how she died. At this point, it almost doesn’t matter. The moral weight of that death isn’t in much doubt, whether she died by her own hand or someone else’s: the taking of her life was already complete.
Whatever the circumstances, she died because of Jeffrey Epstein and his cabal of wealthy, reckless hangers-on, friends, and… well, those on his “client list.” By every account available, and there are many, Giuffre’s life was wrecked by her association with Epstein. She suffered manipulation and was sexually used, certainly, and depending on local legal definitions was raped and / or sexually abused. She came to see this as “normal,” and she finally resisted that loss of ownership over herself until her life ended.
Whether that “client list” exists on a piece of paper someplace or not, there seems to be no disputation about the fact that Epstein acted as a funnel that carried young women like Giuffre and teen girls to men who felt entitled to enjoy them.
Trump ran for president, in part, on the platform of releasing everything the FBI knew about Epstein. The narrative, cultivated in Right Wing online circles and percolating up to the national campaign, ran that a cabal of powerful pedophiles, hebephiles, and ephobophiles was being protected by the Deep State, and only Trump could dismantle it.
But it’s a good rule for life that if you think Trump is the only answer, you’re asking the wrong question.
In his first term, he hired as Labor Secretary the prosecutor who let Epstein cop a deal, Alex Acosta; Acosta had to resign when it came out that he was not, in fact, a poster-boy for “releasing the Epstein files.”
Maybe Pam Bondi, being blonde, will have better luck? Ridiculously unqualified Kash Patel and hilariously unqualified Dan Bongino, the Sons of Blunder of the FBI, are standing up for the MAGA faithful and demanding full disclosure and (apparently) Bondi’s defenestration while Bondi digs in.
Gotta admit, of all the potential cracks in the MAGAverse that were possible, I did not see that one coming. And more fool me. On the one hand, the right-wing conspiracy cult that brought us Pizzagate and Q-Anon has always been tetchy about pedophilia and anything sexually abnormal in corridors of power. Their excuse for Donald Trump’s known association with Epstein has always been predicated on the delusion that Trump was playing some deep game, that his real interest in Epstein was subversive.
Only the clinically insane could continue to hold that position now, as his Administration drops the Epstein file into the Memory Hole. Trump himself lost his temper when asked about it; and if it is true that the FBI is warning media off, well, it’s not a good look. As Tina Brown writes,
It’s rare that I agree with the MAGA conspiracy theory loonies, but, in the case of the Epstein files, they deserve an answer about why the full folder has not been released. I have never fully believed that Epstein committed suicide and my skepticism grows the more the mysteries accumulate.
It’s not that I think Epstein, any more than Giuffre, did not commit suicide. It’s that the intense determination of many to see the question put to bed without complete information disinclines me to rule anything out, even given the near certainty that those of us outside government will never see the information we need to make a judgment.
And Bondi, a serial liar in disgusting servitude to a serial liar, is not exactly the person I want dusting her hands off and saying, “There, that’s that.”
For once, the pernicious “both sides” media coverage, in which mind-numbing stupidity is given an equal place with the best thought, is silent. There are only two positions: don’t release the Epstein files, or do release them. All of them. Redacted if necessary to protect sources or victims or unindicted persons. But release them.
(And it’s premature to speculate that Donald Trump is on the “client list,” but if he is, it should be known. If he was elected on the promise of purging himself as a sex-pest from society, he should be given that chance.)
At all events, it’s pretty clear that nobody gets fired from this Administration for incompetence or for a lack of qualifications.
But Bondi might just have found the one path out: forcing MAGA to choose between its raw meat and the leader who promised raw meat but isn’t delivering it. If a sacrifice has to be made to preserve that balance, Bondi will be that sacrifice.
Patel and Bongino, astutely, positioned themselves with the masses upon whom the president depends. They know he can’t very well tell them to go fuck themselves over the Epstein files without worsening the cracks in MAGA. If he fires them, it will appear to be a further cover-up. And it will be a further cover-up, if the goal is to get public disclosure.
He’s hoping, no doubt, to ride above this until he can jettison Bondi, possibly gracing her with some political plum to keep her onside, but that still leaves him with a rough question of who replaces her and whether they’ll be permitted to release the files, because this question doesn’t appear to be going away.
All of which begs the question, Why were the files buried last week? The Administration declines to discuss it.
A wild-card is Elon Musk, who had unprecedented access to government documents across multiple departments and who might conceivably have the receipts. Certainly the deterioration of the relationship between Musk and Trump has been uncharacteristically restrained on Trump’s part. Does he suspect Musk of knowing something? If there were nothing to know, would he behave as he has?
A cleft stick, he finds himself in, this president.
Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has not precisely come to the right conclusion here:
A good rhetorical jab, but of no truth-value whatever.
Conspiracy theories are odd things; the lack of evidence supports the thesis. “There is no evidence for alien activity, therefore alien activity must be true” is not great logic, but it’s more common than rational people might think. It’s a fetishization of power, in which the government is thought to have infinite capabilities for the suppression of impressive facts.
“The Democratic Party is led by pedophiles” is not actually a provable point, not because Democrats have hidden the evidence but because there isn’t any evidence to actually support it as a categorical statement.
In AOC’s social media post above, “Trump is a rapist, Epstein’s unreleased files are evidence of rape, therefore… Well, I don’t actually know what the “therefore” would be. Maybe the syllogism runs something like, “Trump is a rapist, Trump hides the Epstein files, therefore Epstein is a rapist.”
The premises are shaky, the conclusions not required. And here in this space, we are avoiding that kind of thinking.
But what we cannot avoid is the fact that Trump was all-in on releasing the Epstein files until last week. Then, it must be presumed because the buck stops at his desk, he spiked the files through Bondi.
That data supports no specific conclusions, but what it does do is raise a serious question: Why have the files been spiked? Why, if Dominic Michael Tripi is correct, has the F.B.I. warned off media from investigating?
One whisper that crops up a lot in national security blogs is that Epstein had ties to the Mossad, though the nature of them is opaque at least to me. Still, having a long list of sexually compromised people could not be at all disagreeable to any intelligence service.
Can’t speak to that, but the questions go on and on, and the Trump Administration, in advising us that we should stop asking questions, makes those questions considerably more interesting.