Like a trailer park after a line of tornadoes, the landscape is littered with debris from awful presidencies. But few opportunities have been as wasted as the one Donald Trump is squandering. This shouldn’t be surprising.
Six months ago he re-entered office, bearing specific promises and broad support. The hope was that he’d learned lessons about the nature of the presidency, and about political enemies who use nefarious means to preserve their power.
What we’ve learned (again) is that Donald Trump isn’t capable of learning anything, and that many Americans aren’t either. Love him or loathe him, most insist on seeing Trump for what he isn’t.
In the minds of many, this shallow showman is either an unrivaled villain or unerring saint. Instead, he’s a fairly standard politician with boisterous style and overbearing flair.
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The PT Barnum of the last half century, Trump is among the great marketers and most brash self-promoters this country has seen. Fortunately for him, plenty of suckers are born every minute. But not enough for what he tried this week.
“Someone Got to Her”
Doug Casey often quips that the economic collapse he foresees will be even worse than he thinks it will be. After watching Trump’s attempt to stifle the Epstein story, I can say the same about my expectation of government corruption.
The FBI that identified every 55 year-old grandma who was invited into the Capitol can’t find one elite client of a powerful pedophile ring.
Worse, after assuring us it had ample evidence they were primed to reveal, the “Justice” Department now disavows any knowledge of Jeffery Epstein’s Intelligence connections, insists there’s no reason to think he was murdered, and denies his child-rape racket even existed.
The latest from Attorney General Pam Bondi – who in February said she had a list of Epstein clients sitting on her desk – is that Epstein was a lone pervert who wallowed in kiddie porn… which may make Ghislaine Maxwell wonder why she’s sitting in jail.
Tom Woods recalled an interview Bondi did with Jesse Watters. Regarding the Epstein case, she asserted:
“What you’re going to see, hopefully tomorrow, is a lot of flight logs, a lot of names, a lot of information. But, um, it’s pretty sick what that man did.”
Waters adds, “And he had help.” Bondi answers, “He sure did.”
As Woods rightly wonders, “So what happened to all that? Where are the flight logs and the names?”
In another interview, Bondi said the FBI had a “truckload of evidence”. She reiterated that “we believe in transparency and America has the right to know.”
Until, suddenly, they don’t.
In the movie, All The President’s Men, Carl Bernstein (played by Dustin Hoffman) is stunned that a librarian he called about CIA agent Howard Hunt checking out books completely reversed her story after she placed him on hold.
“Someone got to her”, he told Robert Redford’s Bob Woodward. Since Bondi’s confident assertions a couple months ago, that appears to have happened to the Attorney General.
Someone seems to have gotten to the president too.
Trump’s latest spin is that released files could “destroy [innocent] people”. Of course they could… if the release is done carelessly. Even if done right, it’ll bring a wave of defamation suits. But this is why the information should be vetted and verified before its unveiled.
Yet this isn’t news. It’s always been the case. Was Trump previously unaware of possible retribution, or that powerful pedophiles might disapprove being publicized? Destroying them is the whole point!
Why didn’t these scruples prevent the Administration from trumpeting its earlier assurances that it possessed flight logs and client lists, and promising to publicize them because “the American people have a right to know”?
What changed between Bondi saying the lists were on her desk and pledging to release them, to now assuring us no lists exist and acting as if only kooks would assume they did?
Lame and Pathetic
No one with an IQ above room temperature (Celsius) buys what the Administration is selling. And the people peddling it must know it elicits eye-rolls and anger. But they obviously don’t care, which is also illuminating.
How disgusting must the details be, and how serious the threats against anyone who’d expose them, for high-ranking members of the Administration to willingly crater their credibility and ravage their reputations?
Were the ridiculous stories they put out this week less to convince us that they were true than to inform the people they’re protecting that their secrets are safe with the US government? Possibly.
It’s also possible they decided this information couldn’t be revealed once they saw how bad it was. That wouldn’t be surprising.
Maybe the Administration determined, as Scott Adams surmised, that the information could jeopardize “national security” (never-mind the disturbing implications of that) or that the American people couldn’t handle the truth.
Perhaps. But then they shouldn’t have boldly promised what they weren’t prepared to deliver, while repeatedly claiming they’d seen the evidence they now say wasn’t there.
A few days ago, the president embarrassed himself by chastising a reporter who dared ask about disclosures Trump’s own team previously promised. It was a reasonable question (indeed, an obligatory one) to ask on the first opportunity since Trump’s team told us there was nothing to reveal. Aside from being lame and pathetic, Trump’s dismissive response contradicted accusatory comments he’d frequently made.
Good Guesses
During his question, the reporter asked about Epstein’s Intelligence connections. But he understated the case. He said that Trump’s former Labor Secretary, Alex Acosta, who was the US Attorney in Miami who cut Epstein a plea in 2008, “allegedly” claimed Epstein worked for Intelligence agencies.
But this isn’t “alleged”.
Acosta stated in Court documents that the CIA approached Acosta and told him to back off Epstein because of his connections. Pam Bondi was a Florida prosecutor at the time and elected to Florida AG soon after so… despite her feigned ignorance this week… it’s unlikely she didn’t know this.
The question isn’t whether this one-time math teacher – who became an exclusive “hedge-fund manager” who turned down $500M accounts while living in the largest residence in Manhattan – worked with Intelligence agencies. It’s how many and which ones.
The CIA is a good guess. But Mossad is a better one. It was likely both, and maybe more.
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Among Epstein’s mentors was media mogul Robert Maxwell, who had known connections to Mossad (among other intel agencies), and whose daughter now sits in prison for crimes apparently no one committed.
To borrow another famous quote from All the President’s Men, we should “follow the money”. Epstein invested in Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak’s defense intelligence start-up, and was funded by Zionist billionaire Les Wexner… who also has Mossad links.
Coincidentally, as Trump’s Epstein about-face was underway, the current Prime Minister of Israel paid his third visit to Washington since the president took office. For a tiny country halfway around the world, that seems like a lot.
During that time, at the behest of “our greatest ally”, the US has unleashed repeated attacks on Yemen, launched a reckless strikes on Iran, and keeps funding ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in Gaza. Aside from a few crony corporations and connected insiders, none of this benefits a single American.
So why does it happen? Do campaign contributions explain it? Or was there something more insidious, including “systematic blackmail” (which the Trump Administration also denies) of Epstein patrons who apparently never existed?
Maybe the “Justice” Department isn’t orchestrating a cover-up at at the behest of the Intelligence apparatus in the U.S. and Israel.
But if it were, it could hardly look any different.
This article was originally published on Premium Insights.
