What the heck was that I just saw? Am I hallucinating after accidentally ingesting fly agaric mushrooms, or did I actually watch Attorney General Pam Bondi and her staff pose in a photo op outside the front door of the White House while holding the purported “Epstein files” in their hands? And all for this puny document? Ultra-MAGA Florida representative Anna Paulina Luna isn’t having any of it, to name but one:
I nor the task force were given or reviewed the Epstein documents being released today. . . . A NY Post story just revealed that the documents will simply be Epstein’s phonebook.
THIS IS NOT WHAT WE OR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ASKED FOR and a complete disappointment.
GET US THE INFORMATION WE ASKED FOR!
Very nice, Anna, very nice — but maybe in the next world. It is late at night so I will not bore you with a recounting of who Jeffrey Epstein is and what the so-called Epstein files are. Suffice it to say that every single thing released today — with a great public to-do, press releases, and that cringe photo op as well — has more or less already been public record for a long time. There are no great revelations. There are no pending prosecutions. No shocking photographs of famous people doing unspeakable things. It is, as Luna said, basically just a phone book.
If you head over to Twitter you will see Trump’s faithful partisans blaming “FBI obfuscation” and black ops from within the deepest of the deep state for the failure to produce anything of note. They are of course only taking after Bondi, who — after the stunt flopped on social media — turned around and fired off an angry public letter (for Fox News to dutifully report on) blaming the FBI’s New York office for “hiding the ball” and holding on to all the juicy bits.
And for once I’m happy to tell all the conspiracy theorists that, guess what? You’re probably right. Nobody enjoys sounding like a conspiracy theorist, so I will make my journey into this realm brief and reasonably informed: Epstein was almost certainly an intelligence asset — and a fairly useful one — for several countries (perhaps even some he was unaware he was serving), and no matter what MAGA wants or craves, information that might touch on that will not be coming to light anytime soon. It has nothing to do with “hiding crimes” — all of which would have long since passed the statute of limitations — or protecting scumbag celebrities and billionaires, and everything to do with simple tradecraft.
My prediction is that you’ll see naught of note from the Epstein files. If you ever do, then in my opinion that only means that somebody really screwed up.