Democrats’ Sudden Obsession With Epstein Is Opportunistic

Matt Taibbi recently flagged this choice tidbit from a New York Times story attempting to downplay damning new revelations about the Russiagate hoax from Trump’s first term: “The administration is trying to distract supporters who are angry about its broken promise to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.”

There’s no evidence whatsoever this is the reason why the Trump administration is trying to hold people accountable for falsely accusing the president of colluding with Russia. Trump is rightly angered that his first term was derailed by manufactured accusations of treasonous collusion. His current FBI director, Kash Patel, was involved in unraveling the bogus Russia claims as they were being made and has been warning of a conspiracy against Trump emanating from the FBI and CIA for years — and nearly all of Patel’s warnings have been subsequently validated.

Even without digging through the particulars of the latest Russiagate revelations, since when has it been a respectable journalistic practice to make unsupported assertions that are little more than Democrat Party talking points? Well, major media organizations have been behaving this way ever since I can remember, but the point about it being bad journalism still stands.

Fair or not, it’s hard not to concede that the Trump White House brought this attack on itself. A month ago, Trump’s DOJ issued a memo bluntly refuting the existence of an Epstein “client list,” downplaying conspiracies surrounding Epstein’s death in jail and the blackmailing of wealthy powerbrokers, and announcing that, due to privacy concerns and the court-ordered sealing of documents, the release of more Epstein files wasn’t forthcoming. These might be reasonable conclusions based on the evidence, but the Trump admin had swept into office all but guaranteeing dramatic Epstein revelations. This was overpromising and underachieving on a fairly grand scale, and lots of Trump supporters weren’t happy about it.

It’s worth noting that the recent round of Russiagate revelations began on July 2 when CIA Director John Ratcliffe issued a report on the faulty Intelligence Community Assessment process in 2016. That was five days before the DOJ memo on Epstein that spurred the recent controversy; if anything, the facts support the notion Democrats are seizing on the Epstein memo to distract from very serious new allegations that implicate President Obama in weaponizing the CIA to go after a political rival. On that point, Lee Smith has a lot of eye-opening things to say about how the sudden Democrat interest Epstein is an attempt to obscure the new Russia revelations.

However, it’s not all strategic. At a base level, Democrats are simply trying to exploit a rift in Trump’s base to drag his approval down by tarring him with Epstein. This why you now have even the most milquetoast figures in the Democrat Party — Quick, what’s the name of the senator from Arizona again? Wasn’t he an astronaut or something? — gleefully intimating Trump is covering up and/or implicated in a dark pedophile conspiracy.

If they were so alarmed by this pedophile conspiracy and convinced it implicated Trump, you’d think they would have done something about this last year when Democrats controlled the DOJ and Trump was running for president. You’d think releasing concrete evidence of his unsavory involvement with Epstein would have put a damper on his reelection chances. After all, it has been reported that Trump’s name pops up numerous times in the Epstein files.

The problem is that, as we’ve noted, Trump has already been victim of a major conspiracy emanating from the Justice Department. Even Trump’s tax returns were leaked. New York state combed through his real estate docs to invent a charge against him and fine him $400 million for the crime of receiving a loan and paying it back with interest. It’s entirely possible Trump’s name appearing in the Epstein files is a reason why they haven’t been released; but it strains credibility to think that Democrats controlled the DOJ the last four years and didn’t bother splashing damaging information about Trump from those same files all over The New York Times.

What we do know is this: Trump and Epstein were friends throughout the 90s, but that the pair had a major falling out around 2004 when Trump supposedly banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago. The source of the feud is not clear, but one of Epstein’s most outspoken victims, Virginia Giuffre, had been working at Mar-a-Lago’s spa, and Epstein reportedly “stole” her from Trump’s employment. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt has said, “The fact remains that President Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his club for being a creep to his female employees.” The investigation into Epstein was opened a year later in 2005.

These facts, combined with the total lack of leaks of damaging info from a hostile DOJ, are pretty thin gruel. And yet, the media and Democrats, but I repeat myself ad nauseum, are really flooding the zone here.

The question is whether or not this might backfire, because Trump wasn’t Epstein’s only powerful friend. If Republicans really wanted to flip the script on Epstein, they might, say, subpoena the Clintons to testify about their involvement with the, uh, New York financier. And as of yesterday, that’s exactly what House Oversight committee has done. Giuffre alleged in a 2016 deposition that Clinton visited Epstein’s infamous island twice, where other young girls were present. Clinton strongly denies her allegations, but any way you look at it, the association between Clinton and Epstein is a lot more suspect than the Epstein-Trump relationship. And the same Democrats who are very suddenly pretending to be incensed by Trump’s mere alleged appearance in the Epstein files were cheering when Bill Clinton spoke in primetime at their convention last summer and urged everyone to vote against Trump.

Similarly, LinkedIn billionaire and Democrat megadonor Reid Hoffman has emerged as one of the most influential figures in the party; a Wall Street Journal report from 2023 confirmed that Hoffman visited Epstein’s island and was scheduled to stay at Epstein’s house in Manhattan — allegations Hoffman did not deny. Further, Hoffman was associating with Epstein long after his sex crimes were publicly known.

Given this fact and Hoffman’s lack of moral scruples in politics, it’s not really debatable whether his relationship with Epstein is more problematic than Trump’s. Hoffman has personally bankrolled E. Jean Carroll’s suspect sexual assault lawsuit against Trump; donated heavily to the legal defense fund for Fusion GPS, the outfit that created the bogus Steele Dossier Democrats and the intel agencies used to smear Trump; and he has apologized for funding “fake news” modeled after Russian propaganda to influence a senate election.

Democrats’ sudden interest in Epstein and Trump’s relationship is in no way sincere. If it was, they’d publicly denounce Hoffman and stop cashing his checks, as well as stop inviting Clinton to headline events. Putting the relationships of Epstein and prominent Democrats under the microscope may not work out well for Democrats, and this might be what the House Oversight committee is counting on.

Still, reducing the investigation into Epstein’s horrifying crimes to back and forth partisan accusations is counterproductive. The way to kill the Epstein conspiracies for good is to be as transparent as possible. (The DOJ does have a point about issues involving the privacy of underage victims and child pornography wrapped up in the case.) Transparency is what the American people are owed, and it’s the Trump administration’s responsibility to do what’s necessary to make the American people feel confident that any conspiracies surrounding Jeffrey Epstein aren’t true or have been dragged into the light and those involved face consequences.

Perhaps the Trump administration should take some political lumps until they start acting transparently, and the Trump administration, to its credit, is scrambling to do more here. But the lack of transparency is no excuse for what Democrats have been doing this last month. Crafting narratives divorced from the facts for political gain only makes transparency harder, when the expectation is that any new information will be immediately lied about and recontextualized to help one political party win elections. Whether it’s Russiagate or the Epstein files, this has been the Democrats’ playbook since 2016. It’s doubtful a credulous media will stop helping them, but it’s important for the rest of us to recognize what’s happening and condemn it loudly.

Mark Hemingway is the Book Editor at The Federalist, and was formerly a senior writer at The Weekly Standard. Follow him on Twitter at @heminator