Recent media reports claimed that FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino was livid over a memo issued by the Justice Department last week stating that there was no Jeffrey Epstein “client list” and no further records from the Epstein file would be released. Nothing to see here. Move on. Bongino was reportedly threatening to resign if Attorney General Pam Bondi didn’t resign over her seeming incompetence.
If accurate, I think Bongino was right to take a hard line on this. For reasons I don’t understand, Bondi has really botched this Epstein thing, which is visceral for most of Trump’s base in terms of bringing real accountability and transparency to government. I laid out months ago in a column that Trump’s people needed to take the Epstein case and transparency related to it very seriously, or he risked permanently damaging his presidency.
The Epstein case is much more than one bad guy. Or even his victims and fellow abusers. It’s become a symbol of the much larger issue of trust by the American people in their own government. And President Trump himself had been fanning that flame for years, including a promise to deliver the goods on the Epstein case. For him now to try to tell us to “move on” is complete tone-deafness. Bongino, who also beat that drum, can read the room. He knows how enormous the issue is for the MAGA base, as do Steve Bannon, Tucker Carlson, Charlie Kirk, et al.
I think it’s too late for Bondi to be saved on this. he made repeated, emphatic claims on Fox News, promising to deliver the goods and claiming the “client list” was sitting on her desk, waiting to be reviewed. Her ham-handed attempt to gaslight us into believing she was misinterpreted is just incompetence.
Trump needs to get a handle on this situation quickly. I’m not sure if that means using a special counsel, as Wayne Allyn Root and others have suggested, but it requires immediate attention, and if persons are prosecutable for having been customers of Epstein, then those prosecutions should be initiated.
If Epstein was running an intelligence honeytrap operation for Israel’s Mossad, the CIA, MI6, or some combination, which I would lay better than even odds is the case, then Trump is in a real bind. He would risk endangering/discrediting our own intel services, those of allies, or both if this were exposed. Some big brains need to solve the enigma in the case of how this gets addressed in a way that satisfies Trump’s base without damaging national security.
But address it he must. And dumping on his own allies for rightly questioning the handling of this is assuredly NOT a good approach to take. Hubris and intimidation will absolutely NOT help him in this particular case and, in fact, will only worsen the situation.
The distrust that Americans have in their government is more than warranted. Recent revelations about the real cause of the 1996 midair explosion of TWA Flight 800 off the coast of Long Island and the government’s role in the disaster and its cover-up only serve to justify that distrust.
Due to the decades-long stalwart efforts of researchers, like physicist Tom Stalcup, we now have definitive proof that a missile took down that aircraft. Many researchers, including myself, recognized that the official government explanation of that crash and an accompanying CIA-created animation of it were preposterous. We sought to extract records from the government—in my case, primarily from the Defense Department—but were obstructed or fobbed off with a few useless documents. But thanks to the indefatigable efforts of Dr. Stalcup, the truth has come to light, with Navy radar tapes tracking the missile revealing the truth. As I wrote in 2018, the TWA disaster reeked of a US intelligence service cover-up.
US military exercises taking place to improve radar systems, which involved firing missiles with live warheads in crowded commercial airspace, were taking place in the area where TWA 800 exploded. Despite hundreds of eyewitnesses saying they saw a missile streak up and take down the aircraft, the government dismissed these accounts and concocted a ridiculous story about an unprecedented mysterious spark in a fuel tank of the plane causing its explosion.
Recall the timing of the incident. It was July 1996, and Bill Clinton was in the heat of his re-election campaign for president. There was no way on earth that he would admit that his own military had accidentally shot down a civilian airliner with 230 souls on board.
Thus began a three-decade-long cover-up operation. But we can trust our government, right? So, we’re now to believe that Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s right-hand woman in his child sex trafficking operation, was convicted and sent to prison, but there were no customers for this sex trade? Please.
President Trump should release the Epstein file while protecting Epstein’s victims, and while he is at it, he should have the TWA 800 disaster thoroughly reinvestigated.
William F. Marshall has been an intelligence analyst and investigator in the government, private, and non-profit sectors for 39 years. He is a senior investigator for Judicial Watch, Inc., and has been a contributor to Townhall, American Thinker, Epoch Times, The Federalist, American Greatness, and other publications. His work has been featured on CBS News 48 Hours Mysteries and NBC News Dateline. (The views expressed are the author’s alone, and not necessarily those of Judicial Watch.)