Tag Archives: Jeffrey Epstein

Epstein’s Girlfriend Could Have Everything Needed to Destroy Trump.

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Like you I am shocked by the claims made in Mary Trump’s book. By stories that her uncle, currently the POTUS, cheated in high school, cheated to get in to college, blew hundreds of millions of his father’s money on failed … casinos … is regarded by his sister as a “clown”, revoked medical coverage for his brother’s son suffering from cerebral palsy and instead of being at that same brother’s bedside when he died … went to the movies.

I mean, how after all these years, could we even begin imagine such behavior?

It’s easy. Way too easy.

Ms. Trump’s book arrives like so much other news of uncle Don’s unprecedented sociopathy and corruption that it’ll have a hard time maintaining a lifespan longer than a week. Amid a near-apocalyptic botch of response to an international pandemic, resulting in the worst economic crash since The Great Depression, throwing gasoline on the fires of racial tensions, ignoring Russian bounties on American soldiers and still holding children and families in corporate prisons in the deserts of the Southwest, new proof that Donald Trump is morally degenerate doesn’t come as a surprise or even news. Like COVID-19, it is what we’re living with.

But amid the new book and all the other horrors, I remain fascinated by what is going on with the Jeffrey Epstein case. Why? Because if there’s a coup de gras out there, one capable of delivering a fatal blow not just to Trump, but to Bill Barr and the Trump regime, it resides with — I believe — Epstein’s former girlfriend/teenage rape victim procurer, Ghislaine Maxwell, now in a Brooklyn jail cell.

Maxwell was arrested last week in New Hampshire, and I’m not alone in believing the imminence of her capture was what motivated Barr to make his ham-fisted move on Geoffrey Berman, U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York a week earlier. At the time, many were asking, “Why now?” Well, Ghislaine Maxwell is prima facie for “why.”

She knows all the players involved, including Donald Trump, Bill Clinton, Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew and on and on. And she knows where the money came from. And — if we’re to believe a story in Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post, she has — the videotapes.

Some of you may have watched the Netflix documentary series about Epstein, “Filthy Rich”. It’s a truly revolting tale of not just sexual depravity, but blatant, high-level legal corruption. (While I generally advise tempering most documentaries with heavy doses of sea salt, “Filthy Rich” has not yet taken any serious shots for factual inaccuracy. If anything, there’s frustration with it for not going further.)

Little too much ink on the eyebrows, Donny.

The Maxwell scenario that we know — and what we can sense — is straight out of countless pulp mystery crime dramas. Begin with the innocent victims and work you’re way up the ladder to the highest offices of power. And it’d be cheesy, melodramatic speculation if it weren’t for what we know about who Epstein consorted with, his absurdly over-the-top lifestyle and … the presence of Deutsche Bank, (yet again). The only bank in the world who would lend Donald Trump, he of five bankruptcies and 3500+ lawsuits, so much as a wooden nickel.

Simultaneous with Maxwell’s capture, at a luxury country home in New Hampshire of all places, (not exactly Walter White on the lam as “Mr. Lambert), Deutsche Bank was fined, again. This time $150 million for continuing to process Epstein’s enormous, mysterious cash flow despite knowing he was a convicted pedophile.

Even if she doesn’t have videotapes, Maxwell is in possession of enough data, hard evidence and testimony to make some — if not a lot — of prominent, influential people very uncomfortable.

I will speculate here that she can connect both Epstein and Trump to Russian “investors” in Deutsche Bank’s bank-within-the-bank lending desk, which as the feds have already asserted with Epstein was an unfiltered viaduct for criminal money laundering. If she’s also got tapes of Trump cavorting with impoverished teenage girls (my apologies for the imagery), all the better, although I should say “all the worse.”

None of this, not sex with 15 year-olds, a fake empire built on Russian gangster money, ignoring Russian bounties on U.S. GIs or crippling the U.S. economy for years through sheer incompetence, matters a whit to hard-core Trumpists. For them it’s enough he’s “owning the libtards”. Nothing else matters.

But the story Maxwell is able to tell, and prove, holds out the possibility of being the single most devastating link to all of Trump’s pathologies and to deciding who wins, as Bill Barr likes to say, the ability to write history.

Now all she has to do is live long enough in police custody to tell it.

The Grand Unifying Theory of Trump’s Demise

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Like the scene in “A Beautiful Mind” where the now fully-mad John Nash has diagrammed his Grand Unifing Theory of Everything with lengths of thread maniacally criss-crossing pins in calculations, photos and clippings, I have completed my life’s work. Or at least this past month’s work. I see where Trump is going with his full dive into reckless bigotry and corruption.

Follow this if you can.

While those who tell him such things fear his spittle-flecked wrath, Trump, since giving up on any kind of plan to fight COVID-19, has by now processed if not accepted that he is going to lose in November. He understands that he is so deeply and intensely despised by such a substantial majority of voters there’s no way short of outrageously criminal voter suppression and election manipulation he can reassemble the 77,000-votes-in-six-counties Electoral College freak act he did in 2016. Put bluntly, it’s over.

But in the mind of Donald Trump accepting that it’s over doesn’t mean he has to, you know, lose.

There’s money, big money, to be made in a grand, vain glorious defeat. But there are steps that need to be taken to prepare the final battlefield.

1: He must re-engergize the hardest core of his base. Suburban women? College educated whites? Traditional Republicans? Screw ’em. They’re not the target consumer bloc, not that they ever have been. But now, in preparation for What Comes Next/The Big Cash Out, they’re fully expendable. The people Trump has to re-commit himself to is the rock solid 35%, or roughly 40 million maskless, MAGA-loving, AR-15 brandishing, cop-cuddling, immigrant-hating, QAnon-inhaling base. They must not only be fed the same toxic offal as always, but more of it, and more ferociously with less and less “Presidential” mealy-mouthedness. And this — as we see — he has begun doing with raw abandon. (And wait until he delivers his “acceptance” speech in Jacksonvile.)

2: He must clear away as many money-sucking legal obstacles to his post-presidency while he still has Bill Barr to do it. Many of us have been startled by the brazen nature of the moves Barr has already made, flagrantly lying about SDNY Geoffrey Berman’s “resignation”, as well as his greasy paw prints all over the cases of Michael Flynn, Roger Stone and Michael Cohen. There’s nothing remotely subtle about it. Plainly Barr has been instructed to “move on this now“. The long, long list of pardon-immune SDNY prosecutions in particular. This list represents potentially tremendous legal costs to post-presidency civilian Trump, assuming a Biden administration ignores tradition and allows SDNY to continue prosecuting rather than, um, “moving on for the good of the country.”

The “now” part of Barr’s act this last couple weeks continues to baffle legal experts. What’s so important that he’d do something this naked and clumsy …now? Suspicions are that Berman and SDNY had entered a new and more dangerous phase of investigation into — well, take your pick — cases involving Trump’s Russian-curated relationship with Deutsche Bank, his influence-peddling inauguration scam, his taxes, any or all of Trump Inc.’s real esatate deals, the squirrely $13 billion scandal with that Turkish bank or, maybe, his long, close bromance with Jeffrey Epstein and the case his former Secretary of Labor, Alex Acosta signed off on prohibiting indictment of others “known and unknown.”

Point being, whatever can be done to snuff out or mitigate damage coming out of New York needs to be done …now … to protect the revenue stream produced by a righteous martyr’s defeat in November.

3: There is no money be made betting against Trump and Barr shrieking and howling about a “rigged” election. Hell, it’s already begun. Mail-in ballots! Too many polling stations in black neighborhoods! The “rigging” is already happening. But — I predict — nothing today compares with the indignant rage that will explode on election night over “serious discrepancies”, “irregularities”, “alarming misconduct”, “clear examples of voter faud” and on and on and on and on.

Such sore-loser pissiness might strike you as pathetic, futile whining, which it would be — even in the event of a Biden landslide — if it weren’t for the fact Mitch McConnell, Barr and The Federalist Society have now stocked the courts, in particular the Appelate Courts with so many Trump-sympathetic judges, there’s a better than 50-50 chance they can get one or more of them to uphold a challenge to the election results for weeks if not months. Certainly long enough for Trump to close the deal on his next chapter.

4: Money. It’s all that matters. Everyone who has known him or worked for him understands the foundation of his only ethos. A “rigged” election, even what is clearly a blow-out, has the advantage of acting like an accelerant over all the festering greivances and whack-doodle conspiracy theories of Trump’s non-college educated, self-pitying white base. And as Trump fully understands, there’s money be made in them thar rube-covered hills.

Out of the White House, (which he clearly won’t miss … too much work …not enough Donald time), Trump’s move is to tap that raging 35% base, or hell, even 10% of it with some new media platform. An ad-based rival to FoxNews (which will happily replace their affection for louche and stupid Trump in exchange for a more devious and competent version, like Tom Cotton) is a distinct possibility. A buy-out of the nitwit One America Network (OAN) would not be a bad investment. Or there’s always a subscription-driven streaming platform. That might reduce the 35% to 5%, as paying customers, but 8-9 million at $10 a month … you do the math.

Once you factor all this together, drawing 50 or 60 different colored threads back and forth across the wall, you see how Trump could actually embrace defeat, even will it.

How great would be to be a martyred hero to millions of fee-paying acolytes if you not only didn’t have to be burned at the stake but got to live in an even grander style than before?

And with that I’ll breakfast on another couple peyote buttons and await my next vision.

Jeffrey Epstein, Poster Boy for the Exceptionalism of the 1%

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Of all the sleazy sideshow acts in our long-running carnival of fools and scoundrels, this business of Jeffrey Epstein is something I’d pay to see play out in all its lurid horror.

Epstein, a multi-millionaire financier, friend to the likes of Donald Trump. Bill Clinton and Alan Dershowitz is, I think we can agree, one colossal creep. He’s another example of dead-on perfect casting for the #MeToo era, besides playing like an over-the-top villain from that Showtime series, “Billions.”

What we know for certain is that the guy “frolicked” with girls “on the younger side”, to quote his buddy and repeat companion, Donnie Trump. And by “younger” we mean … well below legal age for naked rub downs and whatever else we can imagine, for which he compensated the children involved “hundreds of dollars”. In 1% jargon “hundreds of dollars” is also known as cash you don’t even stoop to pick off the pavement.

Last fall The Miami Herald sniffed out the rancid sweetheart con — orchestrated by Trump’s current Secretary of Labor, Alexander Acosta when he was doing the people’s business in south Florida. If you missed it, despite a stark and corroborated list of felonies involving said sex trafficking of minors, Acosta cut Epstein a 13-month work release sentence … without notifying the kids who he had molested. And … and! … clamped off any investigation into any pals of Epstein’s who might be involved.

Only “the best people”. (Rather than “calling” for Acosta’s resignation, Nancy Pelosi should drag him before Congress for public testimony.)

The Herald’s work on the case — fed by outraged sources in the Florida judicial system — failed to make any new waves under the state’s Trump-friendly new Governor, Ron DeSantis. But prosecutors in New York, where Epstein has one of his five homes, (a $70 million mansion just off Central Park), apparently failed to get their check in the mail from whoever bought off Acosta. (Okay, that’s not proven … yet.)

Along with thousands of pages in Florida’s files, which includes the feverish back and forth between Epstein’s lawyers and Acosta’s “prosecutors” to minimize any penalties, suspicion is running high that New York’s new information/evidence is so substantial, with so many new targets that bought-off MAGA hacks cannot dismiss it as “old news.”

This of course is where it could get (very) dicey for Bubba and Dershowitz and god knows who else. (Hell, there are even social connections — at least — to Britain’s royals. Imagine the dilemma for the royals-obsessed morning talk shows!.) Epstein’s alleged madam and procurer is the daughter of the British tycoon Rudy Perpich once wanted to cook a deal with right here in Minnesota.

So yeah, it’s a hot, juicy, perverted, disgusting mess. Very much in keeping with everything else about the Trump era. Plus, as they say on the infomercials, “there’s more!”. Bill Clinton! And, you gotta guess, other rich, pervy big shots.

Clinton’s office has issued a statement saying every time he consorted with Epstein he was accompanied by either staff or his security detail. Still, “frolicking” with underage girls on Epstein’s private jet or private island? Unfortunately it doesn’t strain credulity.

Here though is the thing I’d like to argue in the context of messaging for Campaign 2020. Anyone trying to exploit bona fide populist outrage could do worse than craft a campaign strategy on the nearly universal awareness and disgust with how routinely the 1%, (hell, make it the 5% just to round things out), slide off the back of felony justice in this grand democratic experiment of ours.

Democrats, Republicans, tinfoil hat Hannity dupes … all of them and everyone know this for a stone cold fact. The farce of “no one is above the law” is slapped across our faces every day.

Hell, Trump super-pal/NFL owner Robert Kraft of “happy ending” massage therapy in south Florida has so thoroughly gamed out the legal system down there, the only people facing serious punishment in his sleaze-and-squeeze are … the women who were trafficked in from Asia to yank on pudgy dirtballs rolling up in their Bentleys. They are the ones facing charges and crippling financial penalties.

Trump’s flagrantly bogus “drain the swamp” battle cry appealed to this deeply ingrained cynicism toward everything about D.C. politics. It was an obvious sham. But the essence of it had bi-partisan appeal. The trick to tapping the near universal disgust with how the rich and connected can game any system in which they play is in laying out the argument out in non-ideological terms.

Reality of course says that if you make an issue out of a “war” on every lizard in a Brioni suit gaming the system — be it the legal system, the tax system, the health insurance system, etc. — you’re eventually talking about new regulation, or at the very least, aggressive regulation/enforcement of laws already on the books.

And we know how the 1% – 5% feel about anything that sticks a wrench in their god-given right to exceptionalism.