The Epsteen, Epstyne, Epstain Affair

Introduction

So last week, the Trump DOJ announced that somehow or other they had decided to get a lot of Epsteinian egg on their collective face. Official observers were divided as to what kind of egg it was, or how many eggs were involved, but egg on the face is most certainly what it was.

So over the weekend, on all things Epstein, the president chided some in his administration as though they were squabbling children in the back seat, and threw his full-tilt support behind Pam Bondi. He wanted to know why we were all still obsessing about Jeffrey Epstein, that dirt bag, when the file on him had actually been assembled by a number of other dirt bags. “Let’s get on with the crucial business of saving America” was his bottom line. One sees his point, of course, and it is not as though saving America is a trifle—and it is not even as though I am against saving America.

But there is still a crucial point that the president is missing.

How and Why This Matters

Whatever the issue is with the actual Epstein client list, which we will get back to in a minute, the central political problem that Trump has right now revolves around their maladroit mishandling of the whole situation—regardless of what the actual Epstein-truth is.

The fact is that the Trump administration way over-promised, and then way under-delivered. They hyped the coming revelations like the third angel was going to pour out his vial on the rivers and fountains of waters—don’t you remember the draaama about getting files from the New York FBI office, don’t you recall the kabuki theater surrounding the official nothing-burger “binders for influencers,” and don’t you recollect Pam Bondi saying the list was on her desk at the insistence of the president? This was not a set of expectations created by the previous administration.

During the campaign, and in the early days of the administration, nobody was saying what the president is now saying—”We need to remember that the file on Epstein was assembled by bad actors.” No, they were not saying anything like that. And then the president brought in men like Patel and Bongino, who were promising to keep the heat on, blow the lid off, and assorted other revelatory metaphors. In other words, the expectations that have now been disappointed were expectations that were pitched very high in the first place by Trump’s own team. Trump’s base wanted to be fed that particular kind of red meat, and they were in fact fed that red meat.

But then the administration managed to under-deliver in a way that made them look just like the kind of swamp-creatures that they had come to Washington to fight. Their brand had been to fight just the kind of thing that this now looks and smells like. The issue is not Epstein himself. He is dead. The issue is the brand.

If there is no list of bad guys, then they had no business promising what they did, in the way that they did. If there is a list of bad guys, then they have no business withholding it from us now. This is one of those binary things, and it is a big deal either way. And either way, the admin has to own the wrong, whatever it was, forthrightly and straight up the middle. Was it the over-promising? Or the under-delivering? Or both? What won’t cut it is anything like “this can’t be egg on our face because people drowned in Texas.”

The reason this is such a big deal is that a huge part of Trump’s victory was driven by a very large number of people who had had it up to their chinny chin chins with being lied to by all the officials in their lives. The ruling elites must think we are mushrooms . . . they keep us in the dark, and shovel manure over the tops of our heads. And at a certain point, you have to understand that all the lies start to merge in everyone’s mind. Each one simply becomes one more drop of falsehood in an ocean of mendacity.

The Trump brand has been to maintain a lot of daylight between themselves and that—to prevent being merged into that narrative. And this looks like a real lack of understanding how important that daylight has been for them.

The Cleft Stick

I would have no problem believing that a lot of the evidence is now gone because the previous AG destroyed it. Maybe they believed the Trump campaign rhetoric, and took precautionary measures. I would also have no problem believing that the list is less of a tidy list, and more of a messy pile. People who visited the island included victims, air conditioner repairmen, predators pretending to be victims, horny big shots, and all of that. But there was enough sorted out to convict Ghislaine Maxwell and to charge Jeffrey Epstein.

As it is, the administration has painted themselves into a pretty ridiculous corner. And they cannot fix it by making somebody the fall guy either. If everybody stays, or if Bongino quits, that fixes nothing unless some sort of list is then somehow released. And right now they cannot release anything without some version of “oh, look, we found it! There is one after all! It was under Pam’s stapler all this time!”

They are caught in a cleft stick. Not releasing anything is not going to work. And, because of how they have handled this to date, releasing something now is not going to work either. It is honestly hard to know what they can do at this point. At a bare minimum, they can stop making it worse. Stop trying to shush people who have perfectly reasonable questions. And always remember, as Mark Halperin puts it, “anything that is famous for not being released is going to be released.”

And in the meantime, stop trying to blow sunshine up our skirt.

Speaking of Which . . .

The fallacies of distraction aren’t helping either. When Pam Bondi talks as though the public is somehow looking for the release of sex tapes, that isn’t helping her case at all. No responsible person is asking for that. What people are interested in is whether or not powerful people who were guilty of really bad stuff are being protected. That’s it. You know, all the people who did things like what the royal family apparently believes that Prince Andrew did. Why does the royal family think that? What were they looking at? Was Prince Andrew really the only one that we know about?

And so then, on top of this box of fruit, somebody decided to place a couple of extra clusters of grapes. “Let’s calm the conspiracy bros down by releasing a jail surveillance tape with a missing minute!” And then, changing the metaphor, because I am already done with grapes, somebody brought even more oxygen to the fire with this business.

If you wanted to have a calming effect, you should not have done anything that would get all the chimps jumping.

Some Options & Possibilities

Now here are some of the possible logical options, just some basic ones. I am just laying everything out on the table, and so we are not really evaluating them yet. I certainly don’t believe all of these are even likely, and some of them are laugh-out-loud ridonkulous. But here they are, arranged in ascending order, from the most friendly to Trump to the least friendly. I am afraid that I am going to have to ask you to limit yourself to just one. This is not an all-you-can-eat buffet.

Option 1: Trump has taken to playing chess in the seventeenth dimension again. He has the list in his possession, and has decided to use it to blackmail all those evil deep state actors, making them help him advance his agenda. My, how the turn tables. If the deep state plays dirty, then MAGA can play dirty back.

Option 2: There is in fact a list but Trump discovered that the corruption it reveals was so massive and so widespread, and on both sides of the aisle, that to release it would introduce absolute chaos into the halls of Congress. This absolute chaos would make it impossible for him to accomplish what he intends to accomplish. Since his policies are so important to him, for the good of the country, he believes the list needs to be smothered with a pillow.

Option 3: There is in fact a list, but to release it would reveal the whole thing was a honey pot operation run by some foreign government for purposes of lobbying and pressuring powerful people through blackmail. The nation most often mentioned as a possibility in this regard would be Israel, which would be a real stinker, but there are other possibilities as well. To release the list would set off an international uproar that could spiral into something far worse. Epstein was a Mossad agent, or working with them, and Israel is the bad guy in this version of the story.

Option 4: There is in fact a list, but Epstein was a CIA operative. The nation that was using this honey pot/blackmail operation was us, as it turns out. But if Epstein was an operative—and please remember that he got a sweetheart prosecution deal back in 2008 because of his supposed intelligence connections—then that would immediately raise questions about all his dealings everywhere and with everybody. Not just the sex stuff. If Epstein was CIA, then we are the bad guy in the story, and there would be lots and lots of connected stories, most of them having to do with rogue intelligence agencies and various dirty deeds.

Option 5: There is in fact a list, and Trump is on it. This is not really plausible—because if that were the case, the Biden administration would most certainly have used it against Trump instead of all those ridiculous prosecutions.

Option 6: There is no list, but the Trump campaign bought into conspiracy theories hard, or did not buy into them, but nevertheless cynically used them to advance the goals of the campaign. So during the campaign, they talked as though the list were both hot property and releasing it would be a done deal. But once elected, they went to the vault, opened it, and like Geraldo that one time, found nothing there. To their credit, they then came out and said that this is what they had discovered. This is more or less Eric Erickson’s take.

This is one of the logical options, but one of the things that makes it seem so implausible to me and to so many is the apparent reluctance to own up to the Trump team’s complicity in feeding the hype in the first place. Another thing that makes it seem implausible is that the Bongino and Patel statements on all this come off like some kind of hostage video. Whether they stick by the president or not, they both of them look like really uncomfortable men.

Option 7: There is no list, but there were so many bad actors doing so many bad deeds, and there were so many cover ups, and so much confusion, and the whole thing was swathed in so many lies, that the previous administration sure made it seem like the Epstein files contained an almost infinite amount of dirt. And there really are mounds of dirt to be gone through, but no organized list, and it is all very confusing. They would need a thousand special prosecutors to produce a list.

Comment 1: Some of these options could be combined, like #3 and #4. And then some of #2. This would mean that the back room pressures to keep everything under wraps could be coming from a combination of compromised donors and political allies, on the one hand, and national security guys on the other. There is a broad vista here for those who like to mix and match.

Comment 2: For the anti-Israel contingent, they need to be limbering up because they might have to engage in some interesting contortions. If it turns out to be #3, then they will have to ignore which Israeli admin it started under, which Israeli agency ran it, who authorized it, and so on. It will just have to be “the Jews.” But if it is #4, they will have to do the reverse, saying that some renegade, suitably pinpointed, betrayed the noble American ideal. They will have to deal in specifics. But for Prince Andrew, it will just be “those dirty Americans.”

Make America Gullible Again

It has been well said that you shouldn’t believe anything coming out of Washington until it has been officially denied. That may be an adage worth remembering here. And keep in mind, as you ponder all the foregoing, that this is a story that changes every fifteen minutes or so.

So where do I land when it comes to all the options mentioned above? If you ask me directly, as I guess you just did, I would say that I think Option #4 is the most plausible. A few others are possibilities in my mind (e.g. #2 and #6). But the options I don’t believe would be any account that assumes that the government has come clean on the whole thing, and that we now know everything that they know.

I may have been born at night, but it wasn’t last night.