Trump’s State of the Union vs. trafficked victims who may have “encountered” the president as minors: Which broadcast would you tune in to?
Listen To This Story
There is a certain genius in the way Donald Trump’s Department of Justice has handled the Jeffrey Epstein files. First, it was stonewall, probably because Trump himself didn’t know what was in the files that might tie him to Epstein’s misdeeds. Then, when Reps. Ro Khanna (CA) and Thomas Massie (KY), a Democrat and Republican respectively, teamed up to rouse the House to force the release of the files, the wall cracked, and the files began sputtering out and then suddenly pouring out, millions of documents, which at the time sounded like a victory for justice.
Anyone thinking, however, that this might lead to the indictment of all wrong-doers, on up to the president, would have been sadly mistaken. The very scale of the release — with possibly millions more documents still to come — worked against a careful examination of all the evidence, much less the eventual prosecution of anyone, even those combover-deep in Epstein’s human-trafficking scheme.
Names — not just of victims but of possible high-profile malefactors — have been redacted (the clear edict of the Epstein Files Transparency Act notwithstanding), buried, slighted, or disappeared, more than suggesting that the whole purpose was to exculpate Trump and other members of the so-called “Epstein Class,” not to implicate them.
In Europe, by contrast, anyone who had the slightest connection to Epstein, no matter how many degrees of separation from him, was immediately censured. You might say accountability has been the default setting. Here — not so much. Even Epstein’s co-conspirators, save for longtime co-collaborator Ghislaine Maxwell, have not been identified in the redacted files or in the press, much less indicted.
And so the whole thing is likely to peter out, Trump once again triumphant.
Related: The Fog of Epstein
The proof that the fix is in may be found in material discovered in the Epstein database by two independent journalists, Nina Burleigh and Roger Sollenberger, and funneled by them to The New Republic.
That material includes at least four interviews conducted by the FBI in 2019 of an alleged victim of Trump. The girl, a minor at the time of her supposed encounter with Trump back in the mid-1980s, claims she was forced to have oral sex with him and then was hit by him when she bit him.
According to Sollenberger, the Justice Department considered the girl a “credible accuser” who said that Epstein had introduced her to Trump. Another accuser in material the journalists found — a minor who said that she had met Trump and he had agreed with Epstein that she was a “good one” — was a witness in Maxwell’s trial.
But according to TNR, none of these interviews are now available in the Epstein files release, despite the explicit provision of the Epstein Files Transparency Act that all documents be made public. Nor has word of these accusations migrated from TNR to the major legacy media, whether because the DOJ has hidden them or because they are needles in the larger haystack cache or, most likely, because the media remain afraid of confronting Trump.
Meanwhile, Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi have declared his absolute innocence.
But if the Democrats had their wits about them, there is a way to at least begin to expose Trump’s possible culpability. Instead of staging a counter State of the Union this evening with the usual line-up of ambitious pols vying for crumbs of attention, the Democrats should invite the Epstein accusers to an interview session, where they could tell their stories and denounce the DOJ for the inexcusable way it has treated them.
The Epstein accusers vs. our depraved President — head to head, TV broadcast to TV broadcast. Guess which would be likely to attract the most viewers? Guess which would be the more credible?