I'm not definitively saying that going to war with Iran when there was no imminent threat is President Trump's way of distracting from the Jeffrey Epstein case and his voluminous, sordid, incriminating files.
On the other hand, I'm not No saying it.
We certainly know that Trump has mused in the past about invading Iran as a plausible response by an American president to his own domestic problems.
“Now that Obama's poll numbers are plummeting,” Trump tweeted on October 9, 2012, during President Obama's tight re-election campaign, “watch for him to launch an attack in Libya or Iran. He's desperate.”
“Remember what I said earlier,” Trump tweeted on September 25, 2013, “Obama will one day attack Iran to show how tough he is.”
As different members of the administration and their allies give changing accounts of why Trump now acted against Iran, the question arises: Has the president achieved his alleged goal of getting Epstein's files off the front page?
Not quite.
They may have moved down, as we say in the newspaper business, but the Epstein scandal is alive and well, overwhelming the courts, occupying congressional committees, sparking investigations in at least eight countries, and toppling several “important” people.
The Epstein case has spawned a whole journalistic genre of angles: how he paid elite doctors to provide VIP medical services to his victims, how university officials and scientists were hurt by their associations with him, the various bankers who enabled it, the famous summer music camp where he took advantage of victims.
Last week, U.S. District Judge Arun Subramanian tentatively approved a $35 million settlement for a lawsuit brought by survivors against Epstein's attorney, Darren Indyke, and his accountant Richard Kahn, co-executors of Epstein's estate. According to the lawsuit, the couple “helped structure Epstein's bank accounts and cash withdrawals to give Epstein and his associates access to large amounts of cash to promote sex trafficking.”
While only two people have been criminally charged in the United States (Epstein and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell), dozens of civil cases have been brought in relation to the financier's exploitation of young women and girls over decades. The total of the various agreements is estimated so far at a whopping $500 million.
On February 24, NPR reported that 65,000 pages of Epstein files, originally released as part of the Justice Department's 6 million-page dump, had somehow disappeared from publicly available documents.
The information in some of those files related to unverified allegations reported by a woman to the FBI that Trump sexually abused and physically assaulted her in 1983 when she was a minor. Trump has strongly disputed the claims. Some of those files were rereleased last week, but NPR reported Friday that 37 pages of records are still missing, including interview notes and a police report.
Meanwhile, former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, the couple Republicans love to hate, were dragged before the House Oversight Committee for hours-long depositions on separate days. They had requested public hearings and were denied. Both denied knowing anything about Epstein's crimes before his 2008 conviction in Florida for soliciting an underage girl for prostitution. Hillary Clinton did not remember ever meeting Epstein.
“I think you should talk to me,” Bill Clinton told the committee. “I think you should have called me. I took those plane trips with him and you have the right to ask those questions.”
Calling his wife was misleading, he said. The next day, Hillary Clinton accused the committee of engaging in “partisan political theater.” Oh really.
South Carolina Republican Rep. Nancy Mace asked Hillary how she felt when she saw a photo of her husband, fully clothed and sitting, while an unidentified woman massaged his shoulders.
“I'm not going to speculate,” was Hillary's clearly exasperated response.
If the committee included someone so clearly irrelevant to the investigation, why hasn't it subpoenaed first lady Melania Trump, a former Eastern European model who knew Epstein and was friends with Maxwell?
On Wednesday, the Oversight Committee voted to subpoena the lawyer. General Pam Bondi, a motion filed by the aforementioned Mace, who is a strong advocate for victims of sex trafficking. Bondi will testify (or point his well-manicured finger menacingly; we'll have to see) about why it has taken him so long to release the Epstein files.
The committee also approved a second motion introduced by Mace demanding that the Congressional Labor Rights Office release information about all taxpayer money settlements paid to victims of sexual misconduct by members of Congress by December 12, 2018, after which the settlements became public. (You can thank the #MeToo movement for that.) Members who behaved badly before that do not deserve anonymity.
Then on Thursday, Rhode Island Democratic Senator Sheldon Whitehouse gave a 48-minute speech on the Senate floor examining Epstein's tangled webs of connections to Russian government officials and oligarchs, his friendship with Ghislaine Maxwell, whose father, Robert, was believed to be a political and intelligence asset for the Soviet Union, and, of course, Trump.
Could all this have some bearing, Whitehouse wondered, on what he described as Trump's incomprehensibly complacent relationship with Russian President Vladimir Putin, whose name appears nearly 1,000 times in Epstein's files?
Whitehouse recalled that the Mueller Report concluded that Trump knew about and welcomed Russian interference in his 2016 campaign, despite its terrible mischaracterization by the then-prosecutor. Gen. Bill Barr and Trump’s continued insistence that it was a “hoax,” a word, Whitehouse noted, that Trump only uses “to describe things that are true, like climate change.”
A 2017 FBI report “based on a confidential human source” claims that Epstein was Putin’s “wealth manager,” Whitehouse said. In an email to Thorbjorn Jagland, the former prime minister of Norway who was then head of the Council of Europe, Epstein wrote, Whitehouse recounted, that he wanted to help Putin and Russia “reinvent the financial system.”
Last month, Jagland was charged with “aggravated corruption” in connection with his ties to Epstein.
As with our many misadventures in the Middle East, there is really no end in sight for the Epstein files.
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