One of the more demanding habits of Socratic irony, that business of knowing yourself as others might know you, is that you have to hear how your worst political or religious or intellectual enemy actually thinks in his or her own voice. Thus, I’ve spent a fascinating hour in the Breitbart comments section as well as in One America News.
In both places it’s tough to find a story on the Epstein files, but when you do, it doubles the comment-average for those sites. MAGA are really, really anxious to talk about Epstein.
And the reason isn’t difficult to find. If you insist for six years that Epstein is part of a cabal of sexual predators that the Deep State is covering up for, which Candidate Trump did, you’re in a bit of a bind when, for whatever reason, you start demanding people forget you ever brought it up.
And MAGA are taking it about as well as could be expected, in the logically muddled way that the movement has always lurched. The ant-hill is well and truly kicked.
Consider this, the most intelligent MAGA comment I could find, by user ProudAmerican on Breitbart, buried in 5,625 comments at this writing:
MAGA gets credit for giving this issue due diligence.
If you are trying to defend Democrats? they had last 4 years to bring this issue to light.
You can blame Trump Admin, but not MAGA.
There’s so much to unpack here, and it’s representative of the befuddled politics we live under.
ProudAmerican correctly identifies that Trump and the MAGA movement appear to be diverging on this important issue. (I say it’s important because the Trump family and their supporters said, quite a lot, on the campaign trail and during the Biden Administration that the Epstein files matter.) To the degree that MAGA genuinely wants justice for rape-victims and not just to perpetuate delusions about Democrats, I’m on their side.
But unfortunately, that’s not all they’re interested in, or if ProudAmerican is focused solely on justice, he or she is determined to see it politicized in a logical kaleidoscope that’s become all too familiar.
Let’s focus on this belief: Democrats "had a chance to “bring this issue to light,” but didn’t.
There can be several reasons for the Biden Administration’s refusal to prosecute a lot of people who were complicit in Epstein’s schemes. (Let’s permit the conflation of the demands to “release” the files to the public and to prosecute people for presumed offenses documented in the files.)
Let’s consider the most likely three reasons:
There was no actionable material in the Epstein investigation, as lurid as it was; or
The investigation is ongoing and releasing the Epstein files would alert others under investigation of their legal exposure prematurely; or
The Biden Administration either ineptly or corruptly buried the file.
No actionable material is a high bar to clear, involving the standards of proof required in American courtrooms. It isn’t the same as saying “There’s nothing there,” an astonishing admission which Trump has made, and he’s almost certainly lying on that point, as on so much else.
But if there’s “nothing there,” then, yes, that means there’s no actionable material, not enough evidence to prosecute anybody. That often happens; if the Epstein investigation cannot credibly connect any person to the victims in the case, there’s no point in releasing the file or continuing the investigation unless evidence comes to light.
And I’ll be the first to say that if Epstein wrote in his logs, “Trump came on the plane, if you get my drift, several times,” it’s not by itself actionable material. If you presented it in court, there would be enormous distances in the path from here’s-what-we-know to therefore your-worst-suspicions-are-confirmed.
The world can judge by its wits, but the Department of Justice has to judge by the law. If both Biden (because Clinton is “on the list”) and Bondi (because “Trump is on the list”) declined to release material that wasn’t legally actionable anyway, well, that’s part of the messy world of living under law instead of under justice-by-pitchfork. I don’t love it, but I much prefer it to releasing the list and having MAGA pursue Clinton with a noose while the rest of us try to hang the President of the United States from a lamp-post.
We all know Trump is a sleazebag, but that’s not a legal judgment that permits us to attach “rapist” to him in the absence of other evidence, argued by rules of law. We all know Clinton was sexually immoral; and that’s not a legal judgment. It’s just what we know and probably could not prove if we had to. “Innocence until guilt is proven” is not just a platitude: it’s a guarantee on our right to live freely.
Epstein, like the Nazi Party, kept meticulous records. But it seems unlikely that his records gives details that would stand up in court, connecting specific “clients” to specific victims. (One victim did come forward and allege that she was raped by one Donald John Trump, but she dropped her civil suit after having her life threatened. Your interpretation of those events will say a lot about whose side you’re on.)
Which brings us to #2 above: one or more ongoing investigations, the integrity of which depend on us not releasing further information at this time.
This seems unlikely, as it’s the easiest thing in the world to both placate the MAGA base and keep from releasing the records by saying, “It would be premature at this time as the investigations are ongoing.”
But of course that isn’t what was said. What was said was, no “further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted… only a fraction [of the evidence] would have been aired publicly had Epstein gone to trial.” In other words, We’ve released everything we’re going to release, and none of it has anything to do with specific clients of Epstein, only Epstein himself.
A bit odd coming from the people who demanded that the clients should be prosecuted. But we’ll leave that for the political meat-eaters to sort out.
And finally, there’s the corruption explanation.
This one is satisfying, because it proves everybody right in saying how corrupt everybody else is: the Bidens for scurrilously not releasing the Epstein files earlier, and now the Trumps for inexcusably not releasing it now.
Trump has tried to short-circuit all this by suggesting that Democrats actually wrote or falsified the document; and while anything is possible, this seems unlikely. If they were going to go to the trouble of falsifying an entire FBI report to Justice, which is not easy to do, they’d probably want somebody to see it.
What are we to make of all this? The paranoia and alarm from Trump is pretty unmistakable, but reading into his panic is not the kind of augury that I’m interested in right now. I want clarity, and the quickest path to political clarity is ignoring Donald Trump.
Occam’s Razor, that invaluable intellectual tool, says that we should prefer the explanation that requires the least complexity, the least special pleading. It does not always lead to the correct conclusion; but it usually does.
Let’s apply it.
Let’s assume for a moment that the government, in neither the Biden nor the Trump Administration, is hopelessly incompetent or corrupt. Two different Departments of Justice have assembled all that is discoverable about Jeffrey Epstein and his sexual abuses, and there is no charge that sticks to anybody else except somehow Ghislaine Maxwell (whom nobody in the Administration wants to hear from, apparently).
It’s difficult for fan-bases rabid about sexual abuse to just say, “You know what, there’s nothing in that file.” Particularly when those fan-bases have been conditioned to think that government is both corrupt and incompetent.
It’s easy from an arm-chair to say, “I have heard that the file is filled with smoking guns, and so I believe it.” It’s a lot more difficult to acquire expertise in the prosecution of child sexual abuse, in admissible evidence, and to process the data of thousands of pages of information. Remember the Mueller Report? Few of us actually read it. I did, cover to cover and all the end-notes; and what was striking was how none of the media representations of it that I saw actually presented it accurately, including the Attorney General’s summation.
So do I think I have a good idea of what’s in the Epstein file? I do not, and I have no grounds whatever for challenging two administrations’ consensus that it was not in the best interests of the Republic to release that information.
And that’s where I’m sitting in the absence of other information.
But it would be dishonest of me not to say, it’s not at all a stretch for me to believe that a lot of names are in that file that neither Democrats nor Republicans want aired publicly, and that consequently they have tacitly agreed, “It’s better that the public not know.” I can easily understand that the presence of a name might be embarrassing especially if there is no real admissible evidence that they did anything wrong.
Fine.
But if so, you don’t get to make distinctions between MAGA and Democrat, between Trump and Clinton’s names in the files. You only care about protecting those whom you irrationally trust.
And if that turns out to be the case, let’s stop pretending then that this is all about the victims. Are two administrations so concerned that America will turn on innocent people just because their names are in the Epstein file? They probably should be, given the political environment we live in (and that’s not new to the human race).
Or are they concerned because they know those names in the file are heavy donors or political rock-stars, on both the Right and Left? (And let’s return to a major theme of this Substack: neither the Right or the Left enjoy special privileges in the house of virtue.)
We don’t know, we’re in the dark.
But when it really is about the victims, you’ll see an outrage that consumes the perpetrators regardless of party politics, and if institutional Democrats and Republicans agree on anything, that’s the one outcome they most fear: the people of America to act without partisan preference. When it really is about justice, not about partisan advantage, you’ll see much different conversations.
But that’s not America tonight in the age of Trump, where innocence is no protection against the awful power of the State, as I close this post and hit “Send.”
