The outstanding question about Epstein and Trump

For those of us who have an honest, nonpartisan (I swear) interest in the scandal Jeffrey EpsteinIt’s been a good week: First, Democrats, with intent to attack Donald Trumppublished some of Epstein’s emails containing redacted information, in which the president’s name appeared prominently; Then Republicans, supposedly intent on covering up the Democratic leak, released thousands more of Epstein’s documents.

With this kind of teamwork, we’ll have the whole story finished by Christmas!

Still, it’s worth warning those liberals approaching the Epstein saga for the first time, which has long been a topic of primarily conservative interest.

There is a dark, conspiratorial fascination in discovering that many American elites were quite comfortable forming close friendships with a teenage trafficker.

And as both the right and the left have moved away from the neoliberal center under Clinton, the fact that Epstein had (in the words of leftist writer Jeet Heer) a deeply banal centrist politics, with the same essence as 90% of the American elite since the 1990s, makes him a perfect symbol of elite perfidy, for progressives and populists alike.

But it is important not to let the fascination with conspiracy theories overshadow the real facts.

The new body of information confirms, once again, the moral decadence of many powerful Americans.

However, it still leaves us without definitive answers to the outstanding questions about Epstein:

Did other powerful men have sexual relations with the minors he trafficked?

What connections, if any, did she have with the intelligence world?

What are the hidden details that prompted Trump to insist on preventing the publication of further information?

I thought we’d be closer to finding answers to the latter question when I read the first email released by Democrats, a 2011 memo from Epstein to Ghislaine Maxwell Shortly after his release from prison:

“I want you to realize that the dog that didn’t bark was Trump… (the victim) spent hours in my house with him, and was never mentioned. The police chief, etc. I’m 75 percent.”

With the name redacted, this email suggested there may have been an as-yet-unknown victim with whom Epstein assumed Trump had a sexual encounter.

But it turned out that the hidden name was the name of the deceased Virginia GiuffreEpstein’s most high-profile victim, who worked for Trump at Mar-a-Lago and who has specifically and repeatedly denied that the future president had sexual relations with her or any other woman, even as he made accusations against several other powerful figures.

A skeptical reader might argue that just because she denies it doesn’t mean it didn’t happen, which is true.

There are reasons to doubt the veracity of some of Giuffre’s claims, so it is also possible that she was not reliable in her unaccused statements.

However, these non-accusatory statements imply that this email does not constitute conclusive evidence of Trump’s complicity in sex crimes.

This could also be interpreted as Epstein speculating that Trump might rat him out to Palm Beach police, which fits perfectly with the narrative some Trump defenders have tried to spread.

Meanwhile, the document release also includes a much later email from Epstein, a rant of consciousness he sent to himself shortly before his latest arrest in 2019, in which the financier appears to describe his operation (“$200 massage…no sex…most of them are in their 20s…”) and then says Trump “came to my house a few times in that period” but “never received a massage,” before moving on to a lengthy complaint about how Trump took advantage of him in a business deal. Real estate.

This email suggests, firstly, that It was normal that Epstein’s friends had sexual encounters, if not sexual relationships; Second, Epstein at least wanted people to believe that the girls in question were not minors; And third, Epstein had an old grudge against Trump, but probably didn’t have any secret tapes of Trump getting a massage or anything.

In this case, the ultimate truth can be sordid (powerful men receiving sexual favors from masseuses who they believe are over 18) without being a horrific conspiracy (powerful men intentionally trafficking minors to facilitate a kind of “eyes wide shut” scenario).

Something similar could happen with issues in the intelligence world:

There is evidence that Epstein used his connections to help… Israeli intelligence In various projects, but there is no indication that he ran a sex and blackmail operation in his name.

But then the big question remains:

Why doesn’t Trump want more transparency?

He probably doesn’t like the embarrassment of everyone remembering that he was one of the wealthy scoundrels in Epstein’s circle.

Or there might be something Really sensitive related to Epstein and the intelligence services that have not yet been disclosed.

Or maybe there’s still some thread left here, not necessarily the most obvious thread, that the president doesn’t really want to pull.

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