After our post on this issue yesterday, you are going to find this one to be exactly in line with ours. Thank you very much for this article, MORNING JOLT with Jim Geraghty!
Making the click-through worthwhile: Seven-to-ten burning questions about the ever-worsening Jeffrey Epstein scandal, why Democrats have convinced themselves that they have yet another Great Southern Hope, and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez emphasizes how heavy her committee workload is.
Burning Questions about the Jeffrey Epstein Scandal
Even by the standards of stomach-turning celebrity criminal scandals, the bits of information about multi-millionare Jeffrey Epstein and allegations of an underage sex-trafficking ring are utterly bizarre, pointing to something perhaps even bigger and worse going on. Just the reports out this morning prompt at least ten big questions.
One: How did Jeffrey Epstein make his fortune in the first place? One claim is a massive Ponzi scheme.
Two: Could Epstein really have been connected to some sort of intelligence service? In yesterday’s press conference, labor secretary Alex Acosta offered a weird, vague, contradictory, meandering answer when asked about this. If Epstein was working for some sort of spy agency, which one? What was the aim, to collect blackmail on prominent figures? Who was being blackmailed, and what did they do?
Three: Why did the office Manhattan district attorney Cyrus Vance try to keep Epstein from being registered as a top-level sex offender? “A seasoned sex-crimes prosecutor from Mr. Vance’s office argued forcefully in court that Mr. Epstein, who had been convicted in Florida of soliciting an underage prostitute, should not be registered as a top-level sex offender in New York.” The judge denied the request and declared, “I have to tell you, I’m a little overwhelmed because I have never seen a prosecutor’s office do anything like this.”
Four: After Epstein was labeled a “Level 3 sex offender” — meaning the worst — Epstein was required by law to check in with the NYPD every 90 days. He never checked in at all over an eight-year span. How did that not generate any consequences?
Five: How did his private island off Saint Thomas get the nickname “Pedophile Island” and how does a rumor like that not get law enforcement to start snooping around?
Six: Bill Clinton’s public statement about his interactions with Epstein was laughably inaccurate, contracted by contemporaneous media accounts, never mind FAA flight logs. You would think Clinton and those around him would have a well-worn playbook for denying sexual impropriety and criminal behavior by now.
Seven: Doesn’t this paragraph in deep in a recent article of Vanity Fair seem to bury the lede, as they say in journalism?6
Pecker, he later told me, used to send him articles and issues before they were published so that he and Trump could read them. After the meeting Trump called in Sam Nunberg, then a Trump Organization employee, who saw Pecker leaving Trump’s office. “Michael was sitting in there when I came in, and the issue of the National Enquirer with the pictures of Prince Andrew was on his desk,” Nunberg recalled. “He said not to tell anyone, but that Pecker had just been there and had brought the issue with him. Trump said that Pecker had told him that the pictures of Clinton that Epstein had from his island were worse.” (Cohen, speaking by phone from the Federal Correctional Institution in Otisville, corroborated Nunberg’s version of the events, though he declined to add any additional information about the meeting.)
So the National Inquirer has pictures of Bill Clinton with Epstein and the women he was using?
If Trump knew about these photographs, why didn’t he at least leak or hype them during the 2016 campaign?
And if Clinton really did nothing inappropriate in all of his interactions with Epstein, why didn’t Hillary Clinton’s campaign make a stink about Trump’s past friendship with Epstein, during a campaign where Trump’s unsavory treatment of women was a big issue?
One aspect of Epstein that no longer has many questions: Is there anyone left who wants to argue that Alexandre Acosta handled the case the way he should have all those years ago?