It has become an iron tenet of contemporary politics that developments that would massively affect the standing in public opinion of most politicians have little or no effect, positively or negatively, on Donald Trump. He's the most galvanizing public figure in living memory, and his vast history of controversy and scandal appear to have made him as impervious to breaking news as a cockroach is impervious to radiation.
And as Nate Silver explains after looking at every bit of available public-opinion research, there just isn't much specific evidence that the Epstein files scandal and cover-up are moving the numbers. Indeed, when it comes to the more specific claim that the "crisis" over Epstein is wreaking havoc in Trump's MAGA base, the evidence suggests strongly otherwise...
Because heavy Epstein coverage is displacing other damaging-to-Trump stories, Nate is skeptical that more incessant coverage will start hurting Trump...
Nate Silver thinks the whole story may be remembered much like Russiagate, an obsessive elite liberal preoccupation that appeared to make voters simply confirm whatever they thought about Trump before. We have no way of knowing that until the loose threads are all tracked down and this chapter of the Epstein story has a beginning, a middle, and, at long last, an end.
Ed Morrissey floats the speculation that Ghislaine Maxwell told prosecutors about Bill and Hillary's trips to Pedo Island.
A Trump prosecutor spoke with Maxwell, and the DOJ is considering releasing a transcript. And then the GOP subpeonas the Clintons.
To be honest, I don't think that proves much of anything. The GOP is famous for subpoenas and Strongly Written Letters.
But, Trump's DOJ did move Maxwell from a bad prison to a better prison. Which is obviously something the state does when it likes your testimony.
Clearly, Maxwell told Blanche and investigators something that interested them. The move to a lower-security work camp clearly indicates a level of fruitful cooperation, although how reliable it might be would be another question entirely...
The sudden interest in the Clintons and other "top law enforcement officials" by the House Oversight Committee has to raise eyebrows, too. Subpoenaing a former president and a former presidential nominee for congressional testimony is unusual, to say the least, and it's not something done lightly as a fishing expedition. Coming as it does on the heels of the Maxwell interview, her transfer, and the suggestion that the Trump administration may make the Maxwell transcript public, it's extremely difficult to chalk all of this up as a coincidence.
Lee Smith, author of The Plot Against the President -- which I recently wrongly referred to as "The Hunting of the President," which I think was a book by a leftwing Bill Clinton Apologist -- warns the GOP to not buy into "EpsteinGate," which he says is just "RussiaGate 2.0."
And by "EpsteinGate" he means the claims by the left that Trump is "covering up" his dealings with Jeffrey Epstein.
Except that this time, EpsteinGate is calling from inside the house.
Perhaps the most senior former Obama official pushing Epsteingate is Susan Rice, the onetime national security adviser whose Jan. 5, 2017, email may implicate Obama in the anti-Trump conspiracy. In an X post over a New York Times op-ed by Brennan and Obama's director of national intelligence, James Clapper, she wrote that the Trump administration's Russiagate disclosures are a "shameless, dishonest, defamatory scheme to distract from EPSTEIN EPSTEIN EPSTEIN."
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The media has a substantial corporate interest in obfuscating the Trump administration's efforts to bring Russiagate to light, since it may also illuminate the role of the press in publishing leaks of classified intelligence to advance known falsehoods undergirding a criminal conspiracy. The specter of civil suits alone is enough to keep media executives up at night. And thus, according to The New York Times, the administration's release of documents showing the FBI supported a 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign plot to smear the president as a Russian agent comes "as the Trump team seeks to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein files."
The president says Democrats started what he calls the Epstein hoax, but that's not entirely right. They're using it to defend themselves from Russiagate, but it was a MAGA-aligned cohort led by Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon who weaponized the Epstein narrative, and now parts of the right are as giddy with anti-Trump animus as first-term Never Trumpers are.
"This Epstein thing is probably going to bring President Trump down," said Douglas Macgregor, a prominent figure on the MAGA podcast circuit who worked in the Pentagon during Trump's first term. The problem then isn't just that Russiagate revelations aren't breaking through to the rest of the electorate but also that podcasters ostensibly aligned with Trump are employing the ghost of a dead sex offender to fracture his base and hobble him, with help from Democrats, after the 2026 midterms, just as Russiagate hobbled Trump's first term.
After Trump ignored Bannon and Carlson's warnings against joining Israel in a campaign against Iran's nuclear weapons facilities, they seized on the White House's clumsy rollout of the Epstein case to target the president.
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The problem is that nothing the administration produces now will satisfy this faction of MAGA, because Bannon and Carlson are not interested in transparency or accountability. Rather, they've rigged the Epstein story to damage Trump. In their telling, Epstein wasn't just a predator; he was also a spy, an operative using American teenagers as bait to compromise powerful liberal elites on behalf of the Mossad. They've framed the affair so that only confirmation of their mad conspiracy theory will put Epstein's ghost to rest.
"It's extremely obvious to anyone who watches that [Epstein] had direct connections to a foreign government," Carlson told a Florida audience last month in one of his most public perorations unfolding the Epstein conspiracy theory. "No one's allowed to say that that foreign government is Israel because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that that's naughty." Bannon is also given to manful straight talk: "The Epstein story leads to the intelligence services of this country and of Israel," he told his podcast audience last month. "Let's be blunt. That's why all the Israel First guys say there's nothing to see."
The logic is that if Trump doesn't release the evidence that he's shielding Israel, it's evidence that he's owned by Israel. The setup is as crazy and destructive as Russiagate because it's the Russiagate playbook, except in this reboot, Netanyahu plays Putin's part, and it's not Moscow that controls Trump's brain, but the Jews.