A Voice From the Grave

     There was a point last summer when I was writing about Trump and Jeffrey Epstein every day. It almost got to the point where I was almost tired of writing about the whole sordid affair. But while blogging may be passe and my readership is only a fraction of what it used to be, I still consider myself a citizen journalist. As such, however limited my reach, I still feel a responsibility to write about these things.

     And, last summer I felt as if I had no choice as the sordid revelations were coming out virtually every day. Today, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee (Yes, the House is still a thing) came into possession of another tranche of documents, about 23,000 of them, from the Epstein estate. The most interesting of them is a trio of emails between Epstein and Michael Wolff and Ghislaine Maxwell.

     In them, Epstein said that Trump “knew about the girls” and that he “spent hours at my house with him... he has never once been mentioned.” with one of his victims. When Democrats got the emails, the name of the underage girl was redacted but the Trump administration released the name and it's the late Virginia Guiffre. Why would the White House do that? Because toward the end of her life, Guiffre claimed that Trump never acted untoward with any of the girls and knew nothing about Epstein's sex trafficking operation.

     Which doesn't explain why Trump spent hours with her and at Epstein's house.

     In that same email, Epstein told Maxwell, “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump.” It's notable that in a flat and understated tone, Epstein more than suggested that he knew that Trump knew about his criminal enterprise and was keeping mum about it. Months before his final arrest, Epstein also wrote to Wolff, "“Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”

     What he was asking Ghislaine Maxwell to "stop" doing was recruiting girls from Mar a Lago (like Guiffre) because Trump was fearful they could be traced back to him. Three years earlier, just before a Republican debate in 2015, Wolff gave Epstein a heads up and said CNN was “planning to ask Trump tonight about his relationship with you — either on air or in scrum afterwards.”

     Epstein replied, “If we were able to craft an answer for him, what do you think it should be?” Epstein added, “I think you should let him hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable P.R. and political currency.” Then, spoken like a master blackmailer, he added incriminating evidence could “hang him” later or “save him, generating a debt.”

     One takes away from this the uncomfortable realization that Guiffre was being less than honest at the end of her troubled life and that maybe she let Trump off the hook simply because he was in the White House.

     So at the exact moment that Karoline Leavitt was spitting sewage at the Democrats and laughably claiming that Trump has been completely transparent about the Epstein files, Trump was busy burning up his iPhone calling Republicans in Congress to take their names off the discharge petition co-sponsored by Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna. Specifically, he's called Marjorie Taylor Greene, Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert, who had all put their names on the petition. Trump's trying to pressure them them to remove their names, thereby lowering the number below the 218 votes needed.

     The discharge petition, of course, is the one that would force the Department of Justice to release the full Epstein files, some 300,000 documents. And with Adelita Grijalva getting sworn in today... Well, you get the picture. They're trying to move the goalposts again. So much for transparency.

     So far, all indications are that Boebert, Greene and Mace will not remove their names from the discharge petition. But these are three of the most rabid MAGA women and it's only a matter of time before Trump realizes their price or what their Achilles Heel is. That's what predators do.

     Trump is scared again and for good reason. The dog that hadn't barked is sure barking loudly now. It's damned difficult if not outright impossible to shut up a voice from the grave. If anything, it's even better than a deathbed confession. Trump is reverting back into the scared animal he was last summer and in 2020 after Ghislaine Maxwell's arrest and him asking, "Did she say anything about me?"

     However, this is Trump's Justice Department we're talking about and they have little more credibility than a mob law firm. Even when the House passes the discharge petition, who's to say they won't illegally hold back the most incriminating parts of the Epstein files?