PATRICK LAWRENCE: The Epstein Follies

There appears to be a good chance that Trump and his people have concluded that there is a fine line between attacking the Deep State and going along with it.

By Patrick Lawrence
Special to Consortium News 

Eleven days ago, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi hyped her office’s imminent release of files related to the apparently sprawling empire of vice that Jeffrey Epstein ran for many years — a scandal that has percolated at or just below public awareness for over a decade.

What followed Bondi’s considerable drum roll was 200 pages of nothing new. Amid her escalating embarrassment as her document release flopped, Bondi cited an F.B.I. whistleblower to claim that she had been misled by the agency’s New York field office.

The whistleblower asserted that the New York office had kept thousands of other Epstein-related documents from her. Bondi then vowed to obtain the hidden cache and fire those who had withheld them in defiance of her order.

Now there is more. On Monday Bondi announced triumphantly on Fox News that thousands of previously unreleased documents and other forms of evidence pertinent to the Epstein affair have at last been delivered to her office at the Justice Department.

At the same time, she admitted that these new files will be redacted before they are made public — for reasons including, she said a little ominously, reasons of “national security.”

What Went on Here?

It is important to consider this bizarre turn of events as more than internecine bureaucratic warfare. We may be looking at an honest attempt by the Trump administration to bring the Epstein case to light as part of its cleanup of the deeply corrupt F.B.I..

But we may instead be looking at the limits of the Trump regime’s commitment to disclosure and transparency.

Did Bondi run headlong into the still-resistant Deep State, undiminished in its determination to stonewall Trump and his people just as it did during his first term? Is President Trump now on notice — along with the rest of us — that the same organs of covert power that launched Russiagate against Trump all those years ago will now hold out, countering every order Trump or his senior officials issue?

So it seems. But what emerges from these recent events is a blurry picture. There appears to be a good chance that Trump and his people have concluded that there is a fine line between attacking the Deep State and going along with it.

To turn this messy affair another way, was all this a PR stunt gone wrong due to incompetence at the top of the Justice Department, saved at the last moment by a whistleblower? If Bondi knew the first round of documents was a 200–page nothingburger, why did she hype their disclosure during a national TV spot the night before their publication?

Why not complain that she had been given scraps, preparing the public for what was to come? Did she not yet know enough about the Epstein case to realize that these documents had been public for years? Or was she intentionally deceptive for some other reason?

A Mere Power Struggle?

It is possible Trump and his circle are using the Epstein affair to wrench control from the innards of the institutions that once opposed him — not for the sake of justice or transparency, but simply to exert administrative and bureaucratic authority.

Bondi’s acknowledgement to Hannity that any Epstein-related documents judged to compromise “national security” will be sanitized is a flashing yellow light of the kind that should blink whenever we hear invocations of “national security.”

It may turn out to be that Trump and his cabinet are committed, after all, to protecting — irony of ironies — the reputation of the intelligence apparatus, along with a wide array of plutocrats, and America’s greatest ally, according to Trump, Bondi, and the rest of the cabinet: Israel.

Let us consider: What issues of “national security” would require redaction in regard to a deceased sex-trafficker or his underage victims, unless our government or close allies had been involved in said sex-trafficking ring?

Sean Hannity’s interview with Bondi on Fox News appeared angled toward preparing the audience for heavy redactions, as he repeatedly returned to the topic. Indeed, he went so far as to introduce the prospect of national security redactions—a thought Bondi readily embraced. Green room rehearsals, anyone?

I do not, I will say at this point, like the smell of all this.

Bondi’s Monday night announcement that she had obtained new evidence coincided with the resignation of James Dennehy, head of the F.B.I.’s New York outpost. Dennehy’s resignation letter indicated he was forced to resign, but it of course included no suggestion that this was related to a coverup of pertinent Epstein files. It is nonetheless hard to miss the apparent implications of Dennehy’s timing.

Epstein died in custody at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City in August 2019, one month after he was arrested on federal charges of sex-trafficking minors. His partner-cum-pimp, Ghislaine Maxwell, was later convicted of sex trafficking minors and was eventually sentenced to twenty years in prison. Prior to his arrest Epstein had received a highly lenient, highly objectionable plea deal in 2008 for earlier charges of procuring a child for prostitution.

The 2008 deal was so astoundingly soft that Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who offered it to Epstein, subsequently had to defend himself while being confirmed as Trump’s labor secretary. Acosta said of the case: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”

Remember also that there is still zero discussion from Bondi, Hannity, or anyone from the Trump administration regarding prosecutions for Epstein’s clients or associates beyond the already-convicted Maxwell.

Interestingly enough, Bondi claimed in the Hannity interview that the DoJ was treating the release of both the Kennedy (John F.) and Martin Luther King, Jr., assassination files with the same dedication to transparency. Americans “have the right to know,” she (unoriginally) insisted.

In the context as we have it, we have to ask what this portends. And in this same connection, Bondi made no mention of the F.B.I.’s files on the murder of Seth Rich, the Democratic Party computer technician murdered shortly after the party’s mail was pilfered in 2016. The agency is still withholding those files, with a deadline from a court order to release them coming on Monday.

Bondi, Patel, and the Trump administration purport to be making every effort to clean house at Justice and the F.B.I. These developments in the Epstein case suggest — and no more at this point — this may be otherwise.

There appears little chance, to put this point another way, that those constituencies with an interest in keeping the Epstein case well-buried will simply roll over. Out of the question, in my view.

Who or What Are We Protecting?

If we were to see the publication of a massive trove of Epstein evidence and documentation, what might we find?

Assuming that a great deal of that documentation had not been destroyed or otherwise been made unavailable — and that it wouldn’t be curated dishonestly prior to being made public — there’s a broad spectrum of individuals, organizations and state agencies in multiple countries that could be implicated in sex trafficking of children, ultimately for the sake of blackmail.

There might also be the revelations regarding Epstein’s murky financial dealings.

We already know the names of many of the alleged perpetrators in Epstein’s abuses, thanks to Nick Bryant’s publication of Epstein’s “little black book” and the many flight logs of Epstein’s plane (the so-called “Lolita Express”)—these alongside numerous court documents regarding Epstein and his alleged victims. Bryant said:

“In a defamation lawsuit against Ghislaine Maxwell, Virginia Giuffre accused the following men of being among her perpetrators: Alan Dershowitz, Prince Andrew, former New Mexico Governor Bill Richardson, billionaire Glenn Dubin, former U.S. Senator George Mitchell, scientist Marvin Minsky, modelling agent Jean Luc Brunel, Les Wexner, and also the former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak.”

In other words, a true and full publication of the evidence could rewrite the history of the U.S. and Israeli intelligence apparatuses and some of our most respected institutions.

Although President Trump positions himself as opposed to the Deep State, especially those agencies responsible for subverting his first administration by way of the Russiagate hoax, he and his circle have long been ardent supporters of Israel by their own attestations and actions, and Israel has ties throughout the Epstein scandal.

As Elizabeth Vos pointed out in an article published Saturday on Consortium News, Trump has also supported the national security apparatus on some occasions, notably during the prosecution of WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange.

The C.I.A., during Trump’s first term, considered operations either to kidnap or assassinate Assange, let us not forget. In other words, it appears that Trump uses the Deep State when he sees fit, and opposes it when it crosses him.

As long-public flight logs reveal, Trump himself is documented to have flown on Epstein’s plane at least seven times. Even the files released by Bondi contain Trump’s name on flight logs. However, to date he has not been accused of illegal activity in relation to Epstein’s sex trafficking ring. Former President Bill Clinton also flew on the so-called Lolita Express at least 26 times, with his Secret Service detail absent on at least five flights.

Given the ardent support of Israel and the Zionist cause that Trump and his entire cabinet routinely express, it follows that one would not expect Trump or those in his administration fully to unmask Israel or U.S. intelligence’s relationship to a high-level child sex trafficking and blackmail operation.

And then it follows that it is also unlikely that corrupt special agents in an FBI field office fully explains the fiasco of a document release, and why we cannot expect real transparency or justice for Epstein’s victims any time soon.

When Bondi’s thousands of new documents are eventually published, they will most likely have been sanitized of anything implicating the involvement of the U.S. government or that of our “greatest ally.”

In my read, Bondi’s first major turn as Trump’s AG reflects a broad but submerged effort in behalf of the Deep State and its tentacles to protect itself. At this early moment, there seems little more to it.

Patrick Lawrence, a correspondent abroad for many years, chiefly for the International Herald Tribune, is a columnist, essayist, lecturer and author, most recently of Journalists and Their Shadows.   Other books include Time No Longer: Americans After the American Century. His Twitter account, @thefloutist, has been permanently censored. 

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