Mikie Did His Best

     He really did. He proved himself a worthy little foot soldier in Trump's bitter fight to keep the Epstein files from coming out. Thanks largely to Mike Johnson, the House hasn't worked in three of the last four months. Even when Adelita Grijalva won her late father's seat in a special election two months ago, Johnson still hadn't sworn her in, an unprecedented delay. And, after gaveling the House back in order last Thursday to reopen the government, he immediately recessed the House for a long weekend. Yes, the House officially has worked exactly eight hours since mid September.

     The real reason was obvious- Grijalva had promised to be the 218th vote for the discharge petition co-authored by Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna. A discharge petition is a tool that does an end run around congressional leadership and forces a vote on a measure or bill. There's nothing that Mike Johnson can do about it.

     The discharge petition, obviously, was to force the Justice Department to hand over the entirety of the Epstein files. Since the House voted for it with the minimum 218 votes needed, this will force a vote in the House next week and it's expected they'll vote for the DOJ to release the files.

     While the House was preparing to vote on the discharge petition, Trump frantically began playing phone tag with several Republicans who'd said they would vote for it. Lauren Boebert got the full court press treatment and Trump had pressured her and others to take their names off the petition in the Situation Room.

     That's very notable. The White House has lots of conference rooms. The Situation Room is different. You would use that if you wanted to keep things secret. Why would Trump want to keep his pitch to Boebert secret? What did he offer her? How did he threaten her? Whatever it was, it didn't work. For one of the very few times in her congressional career, Boebert, as with Taylor-Greene and Nancy Mace, did something decent.

     The Epstein avalanche began when Congress was working on reopening the government. It should've been a huge victory for Trump, at least among the mouth-breathers who insisted the shutdown was all the fault of the Democrats. But while all this was going down, the Epstein estate which, for mysterious reasons, is working hand-in-hand with the House Oversight Committee, handed over 23,000 documents, which has been parceled out by Democrats on the Committee.

     They included emails written by Epstein, emails that immediately undercut Ghislaine Maxwell's statements to Todd Blanche last August that Trump was completely innocent of any wrong-doing. Epstein said that Trump "knew about the girls", meaning Epstein's underage victims. The world's most prolific pedophile called Trump, "unbelievably evil", said he's spent hours at Epstein's house with one of the victims (the late Virginia Guiffre) and even admitted that he'd spent Thanksgiving 2017 with Trump at Mar a Lago.

     Lord knows what we've yet to learn.

     Therefore, in true Trump fashion, when he realized he couldn't whip the votes, he began deflecting attention away from himself. Bill Clinton! Larry Summers!

     Well, again, if the files contained only the names of Democrats, then Trump would've ordered them released back in his first term. Otherwise, if Trump's name wasn't all over them, why did Pam Bondi order 1000 FBI agents to scour all 300,000 pages for a month or more to cherry-pick Trump's name? And why did he try to pressure House Republicans to remove their names from the discharge petition?

     In short, why is he throwing everything including the kitchen sink to prevent the files from coming out (assuming this lawless DOJ would be so forthcoming)?

     These are the acts of a guilty man. This is exactly why Trump is once again acting like a cornered animal. This was the way he acted during his two impeachments. This was the way he acted when he learned Robert Mueller was appointed as special counsel to investigate his collusion with the Russian government in 2016 ("I'm fucked, I'm fucked!" he yelled). This was the way he acted when Jack Smith investigated him on two fronts (stealing classified documents and inciting the January 6th riot). This was the way he acted when the FBI executed a search warrant of Mar a Lago to retrieve those stolen documents.

     This is the way a guilty man acts, period.

     And the irony is that it seems no one in the land of the living can or will bring Trump to justice no matter what he does. It's taking a dead man to do that. It's like something out of Poe.

     Also, we found out from Todd Blanche himself that he didn't have the relevant source material he would have needed before interviewing Ghislaine Maxwell last summer. Why not? He must have known the material existed. It's also notable, looking at the transcripts of the interviews, that Blanche didn't ask any followup questions whatsoever.

     As a result, Trump got what he wanted- A blanket exoneration from a convicted sexual predator who was also convicted of perjury. As a result of that, she got what she wanted- A transfer to a cushy minimum security prison in Texas in violation of BOP rules for sexual offenders. Now Maxwell is bragging about her special perks, including meals catered in since the prison staff is forbidden from cooking her food.

     As Watergate taught us over a half century ago, and continues to teach us, the coverup is much worse than the original crime. The coverup itself is tantamount to an admission of guilt. the coverup is proof that a crime had taken place.

     Or in Trump's case, countless crimes.