Wow, Erec figured this out all by himself (or hemself)? Anyone who needs to have it explained to them why all reparations schemes are “misguided, divisive and likely constitutional” is either a recent product of the American school system, hoping to land a windfall, or Ibram X. Kendri. I place this essay in the “Water is wet” category. By now, there is nothing more to say. On Fox News, it is just clickbait.
Worse than obvious and insulting, however, is a former federal prosecutor’s “The Epstein Files Should Never Have Been Released” on our #1 Axis of Unethical Conduct print propaganda organ, The New York Times. (Gift link, though it is not much of a gift.) This click bait really fooled me. I expected an interesting discourse about the bi-partisan witch hunt that is currently our second most useless news media obsession, #1 being Savannah Guthrie’s mother who is still missing!!!
But no. The former federal prosecutor is a Trump Deranged, ex-Deep State operative. His argument is that the files only had to be released because the public no longer trusts the Justice Department to make a fair determination regarding whom it should prosecute and why, and that this is all the fault of Donald Trump and Pam Bondi. “[W]e should recognize the release of millions of pages of the Epstein files as both a sign of institutional failure and a cause for concern. If our justice system were working properly, the public would never have such access,” he says.
Right. The public has always cared so much about the rotten, rapey billionaire who died almost six years ago that they were always going to demand to see every email he ever wrote or received. No, this is a story that the press hyped for oogie sensationalism, tied it in to the earlier #MeToo freakout, and turned into a political football, a choice that both parties embraced with gusto. Now the files has placed us in a Joe McCarthy “guilt by association” dystopian hell where people are losing their jobs or being “cancelled” based on evidence of no criminal activity whatsoever. Daniel Richmond, the ex-prosecutor, is upset because his party’s boomerang is taking out Democrats as well as Republicans.
Get this:
“Epstein files’ release predate the Trump administration. But they are now online and searchable because too many Americans didn’t trust the Justice Department’s leadership with control of them. In the past, departmental leaders could limit suspicions about their motives by conspicuously leaving a matter such as this to career subordinates, rather than political appointees. Seen by so many as having fired or driven out prosecutors and agents who refused to become tools of President Trump’s will, Attorney General Pam Bondi lacked credibility. She couldn’t get away with asking the public to rely on the apolitical and independent judgment of those who remained. The eventual result was the Epstein Files Transparency Act.”
Again, riiight. It’s all because Trump’s Justice Department is uniquely political. Late in his rant we learn that the writer also has a personal beef…
“These coercive investigative tools can and have been misused, as when prosecutors and F.B.I. agents illegally rummaged through my emails and computer files in an effort to come up with a case against James Comey, the former F.B.I. director…”
The former F.B.I. director who leaked classified information and who lied to Congress. There is a case and has been for years. In the very last paragraph we read, “At a time when the Justice Department seems intent on filling the criminal docket with baseless prosecutions of its perceived enemies…”
And there it is.
Of course the Trump Justice Department is political and greatly influenced by the President. But only a partisan hack who thinks the public is blind and stupid would dare to maintain that the public’s distrust of the Justice Department doesn’t have roots that go back decades, and Richmond’s pal Comey’s botching of the Hillary Clinton secret server scandal was a significant part of it. The public also saw how Biden’s Justice Department persecuted the rioters of January 6th, 2021, but treated the Black Lives Matters rioters as sacred rioting cows. Trump’s Justice Department is going after “perceived enemies” after Biden’s Justice Department broke with all precedent and staged an armed raid on a former President’s residence and indicted him in an election year. Before that, we saw the Obama Attorney General having a mystery chat withBill Clinton while his wife’s problematic conduct was allegedly being investigated.
The theme that somehow the Trump administration is crossing political lines administrations have never breached before is a Big Lie. Naturally, the Times is broadcasting it. I agree: it would be great if there was reason to trust the Justice Department in such matters as the Epstein files. However, the Justice Department has been used by Presidents as a political tool at least as far back as Richard Nixon, with Reagan, Clinton, Obama and Biden all playing roles in this anti-trust drama. Trump is at least open about it.
Ethics Alarms 
“The public has always cared so much about the rotten, rapey billionaire who died almost six years ago that they were always going to demand to see every email he ever wrote or received.”
The public is interested in knowing who among our elected officials, former elected officials or otherwise elitist population abused these young women and girls. I don’t think that’s unreasonable. The only reason they’re reading the emails now is because no one can produce a list of names – perhaps one never existed.
The Democrats only wanted to see one name in Epstein’s documents. Their interest began and ended there.
AM…there have been many, many, MANY terrible, abusive people who had close ties with celebrities and politicians. Harvey Weinstein is the most obvious example. The public was briefly interested in his victims, but there was no interest in his enablers once Harvey was caught and prosecuted. That’s because the news media and the political parties didn’t try to play the guilt-by-association game, mostly because Weinstein’s best pals were Democrats like Hillary Clinton and David Bois. An earlier example was Frank Sinatra. If the news media (and the Kennedeys) hadn’t protected him but instead kept bringing up his pals in the Mob, the public might have demanded a reckoning. It didn’t. Then there was the Kennedy family itself, which was tied to the Mafia through Sinatra. The focus isn’t on the victims, it is on whose members, funders and allies get slimed by the documents.
Whether they should or not, the public doesn’t care at this point about the victims, just the “gotcha!’s.
I am suffering from an existetnial fugue. It seems everyone is in the epstein file, or visited the island except me. I never got an invitation so my ego has been permantly bruised.
I am not worthy!
Oprah Winfrey was listed, saw a random before and after clip of the View hens. Hilarious whiplash going from “Anybody in there is guilty!” to “Being connected doesn’t necessarily mean criminal activity.”