Three clues to the Epstein coverup
Drip, drip, drip goes the news machine.
I’d rather be getting an early start on mowing the lawn this morning but duty calls, so I’m here doing a quick rundown of more MAGA madness about Epstein and Trump. If you want to support my work, you can subscribe to Doom and help to fund our independent, adversarial journalism for as little as $4.80 a month.
With Trump and Epstein, the simplest explanation is probably correct. Do I need to explain what that explanation is?
If so, you can read it in the headline of my piece at Public Notice on the long and sordid history between Trump and Epstein. Then you can keep reading to learn about all the ties between the two men that the American right has conveniently ignored for all these years — until now, it seems.
Also, you can check out the accompanying Doom piece and video that ties all this up pretty neatly, I daresay.
Now, onto some Sunday morning thoughts after a relatively offline couple of days…
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I hate to use the word “cover up” because that leads us down a path that is well tread on the American right — and mostly unfounded on any number of conspiracies that our fellow Americans have gotten sucked into over the last decade. But three bits of news from the past 36 have caught my attention.
First, it appears that there was significant effort within the Justice Department to “flag” any mention of Trump in the massive trove of evidence that the agency had compiled on Epstein as part of its case against him. Much of the conspiratorial clamor over Epstein has to do with his ties to the rich and powerful. Trump’s supporters have demanded that those ties be laid out for the public to examine. It now appears that the Trump administration and Pam Bondi’s Justice Department was engaged in an effort to withhold that information because it was damaging to Trump. What will MAGA do with this information? Because it sure is starting to look like a straight up coverup.
Secondly, the Times has a tantalizing anecdote that appears to be a new piece of information about the relationship between Trump and Epstein. In 1992 — the same year the two men were seen ogling girls at the dance floor at Mar-a-Lago, as caught by NBC News cameras — Trump “hosted a party at Mar-a-Lago for young women in a so-called calendar girl competition, Mr. Epstein was the only other guest,” the Times reports.
As I wrote at Public Notice, that strange letter that Trump wrote to Epstein alludes to a “secret” that the two men shared, perhaps in reference to their sexual appetites. Trump hosting a party with just himself, Epstein, and young girls looking to impress the two men seems pretty solidly within the bounds of this theory.
Third, Vice President JD Vance flew to Montana on Tuesday to meet with the Murdochs, according to the Associated Press. This was between 36 and 48 hours before the Wall Street Journal dropped its bombshell about the strange Trump-Epstein letter. This means that Vance was also part of the administration’s desperate efforts to kill the Journal’s story.
Those efforts in and of themselves don’t imbue guilt, but they certainly are noteworthy. That Vance took the time to fly all the way to Montana to engage in these efforts shows that the administration is deeply concerned about the effects this story will have.
What remains to be seen is whether those effects will include further erosion of support from the MAGA base, which for years has been accusing every Democrat it can find of the very type of coverup that Trump may now be engaged in.
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