The Epstein Circus Will Shatter Our Last Delusions

From the Washington Post:

The newly released documents from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate show that the convicted sex offender texted with a Democratic member of Congress, Del. Stacey Plaskett of the U.S. Virgin Islands, during a congressional hearing with Michael Cohen, and that those text messages may have influenced the congresswoman’s questions of Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer.

The Post story went on to describe exchanges from February 2019 in which Virgin Islands delegate Stacey Plaskett asked for guidance on questioning in the middle of the Cohen hearing. When Cohen mentioned Donald Trump's executive assistant Rhona Graff, Epstein texted the quasi-congressperson. “Cohen brought up RONA - keeper of the secrets,” he wrote, to which Plaskett replied, “RONA??” and, “Quick I’m up next is that an acronym.” YouTube is already flooded with videos, some darkly funny, like the Washington Post’s own effort at time-coding the puppetry act. Note the “Miss Rhona” dance around the unknown last name:

The list of high-ranking politicians from both parties who traveled with or took money from Epstein — Donald Trump and Bill Clinton included (what was the latter’s “humanitarian” visit to Siberia with him about?) — boggles the mind. A character like Epstein can only thrive in a world where law enforcement and intelligence are fully intertwined with financial and sexual corruption, to the point where one has to entertain the idea that significant numbers of politicians are compromised, perhaps even in a form of systemic blackmail. That isn’t an easy thing to believe. In the words of the disgraced and disgraceful writer Michael Wolff, whose ostentatious presence at the middle of this story casts doubt on all of it, Epstein represents “the kind of insiderism that is mostly just a figment in outsiders’ fantasies.”

Except, as Wolff accurately notes, “Epstein is real.” This is certainly a momentous story about something. For a long list of reasons that includes Wolff’s insistence that it’s true, I find it difficult to believe “the central issue is Trump’s relationship with this monster.” More likely, full exposure of the Epstein saga would tune the public into a generation of indefensible official bargains and power plays, which is why the Trump administration’s summer turnaround on releases has justifiably come at big political cost. Trump campaigning last year compared Epstein to the Kennedy assassination. “Kennedy’s interesting because it’s so many years ago. They do that for danger too, because it endangers certain people,” he said, adding, “But I’d be inclined to do the Epstein. I’d have no problem with it.”

With his own Director and Deputy Director of the FBI on record questioning Epstein’s cause of death, and Trump’s daughter on record calling for “more transparency,” the sudden about-face had to involve heavy leverage somewhere. That doesn’t mean the Democrats’ braying about this issue hasn’t been ridiculous and hypocritical. If the Epstein rabbit holes are as deep for other members as they are just for Plaskett, we may have to put the whole system on suicide watch. It’s that bad:

“Release all of the Epstein Files” was a siren call for the MSNOW set as recently as this weekend, but now that Trump has issued a statement calling for House Republicans to vote for their release because “we have nothing to hide,” everything is in play. The House Oversight Committee already started the avalanche with a series of releases that over the weekend had me answering TextEdit prompts like, “Are you sure you want to open 897 files?”

If you’re a Democrat, you’ve already seen the Trump lowlights: a 2011 email from Epstein saying of former Mar-a-Lago spa attendant Virginia Giuffre, “VICTIM spent hours at my house with him,” and this 2019 note to author Michael Wolff: “Of course [Trump] knew about the girls.” There are mitigating docs with both issues (Giuffre, another suicide from earlier this year, wrote Trump “couldn’t have been friendlier” in a posthumously published memoir). Still, Pam Bondi’s Epstein files pirouette earlier this year never made sense and has been driving intramural MAGA turmoil since, with Marjorie Taylor Greene now railing against the idea that “rich, powerful people should be protected.” For an administration that’s done well sending roaches scurrying in the FBI, CIA, and DHS via Russiagate and Covid investigations, Epstein stands out as an unforced error. If it’s not dirt on Trump himself, and administration sources insist it isn’t, what’s the holdup?

Democratic Party hysteria over this issue is obviously absurd because “all of the Epstein files” could have been released over the last four years. There must be reasons why the last administration didn’t take that step, and there should be scandal in MAGA-world if those reasons overlap at all with the Trump administration’s. Between Epstein’s own hysterical rants about Trump in the newly released documents (he sounds like Kathy Griffin in some of the emails) and the blue party’s seeming entanglement with Epstein from the Clintons to Larry Summers to Reid Hoffman, it’s hard to imagine where that overlap might be, unless it involves major corporate names and/or overseas relationships. Some of that is suggested in Plaskett’s story.

Plaskett was a listed recipient of campaign contributions from Epstein, and briefly also a defendant in a lawsuit filed by five alleged Jane Doe victims of Epstein. The action against Plaskett was voluntarily dismissed after her lawyers filed a motion to be removed from the suit, but the original complaint remains ugly public record. It accuses Plaskett and a long list of other figures of having “facilitated Epstein in his ongoing sex trafficking operation” by ensuring he “received preferential treatment and unfettered, unmonitored freedom” while in U.S. Virgin Islands.

Financial records of “substantial payments” to some of those defendants do appear in the exhibits of another damning lawsuit, U.S. Virgin Islands v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, to the point where it’s clear government officials in the Virgin Islands and significant Wall Street players were deeply compromised when it came to the operation of Epstein’s empire. The depository records alone make a joke of, say, the anti-money-laundering (AML) controls that ostensibly obligate banks to press pause and investigate if any of dozens of red flags pop up in connection with an account (like “unusual transfers of funds”). One paragraph from the Chase complaint stood out:

In October 2012, the Southern Trust Company—one of the companies Epstein owned— applied for economic benefits from the Virgin Islands Economic Development Commission (“EDC”) so the company could provide “cutting edge consulting services” in the area of “biomedical and financial informatics.” Southern Trust Company received a 10-year package of economic incentives running from February 1, 2013 until January 31, 2023 that included a 90% exemption from income taxes and 100% exemptions from gross receipts, excise, and withholding taxes in the Virgin Islands.

Plaskett was the general counsel for the aforementioned Virgin Islands Economic Development Commission for five years between 2007 and 2012, listed as leaving just before the deal outlined above. She was an attorney at Kellerhals Ferguson Kroblin PLLC, the firm that handled Epstein’s taxes and helped him purchase Little St. James Island. It appears that’s where she worked during an unaccounted-for LinkedIn gap of a few years between 2012 and her election in 2015. In a 2023 deposition she was asked if she did any work for Epstein or “Epstein-related businesses” while at the firm. She answered, “I don’t recall.”

When asked what she did during a visit to Epstein’s home, she said she was raising money for the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee at that time, and that the possibility that she asked for $250,000 “does not sound unreasonable.” She also suggested she’d received around $30,000 in donations from him, but that he never asked anything of her. Apparently, suggesting questions in televised hearings doesn’t count.

Two years ago, Stacey Plaskett led a fusillade of surreal questions from Democrats when I testified in Congress for the first time about digital censorship. Epstein by then had long since been suicided, but the interrogation was both so hostile and half-assed that I wondered mid-hearing if members were being fed queries by tweet or text.

Now we learn this not only happens, but the voice spotting lines for an elected official on live TV might be the worst person in the world. Such realizations make for a wince-hard moment for the whole American population, which may have to adjust its estimation of our politicians down from totally corrupt if all these files are released. As was the case with the Russiagate documents, these releases continue an education in the rotten way things really work in this country that I suspect both parties will quickly regret voting to serve up.

Apart from the fact that there’s so much background (“It’s a lot,” is how one reporter friend put it), one of the reasons I previously hesitated to dig into Epstein is because it seemed like the kind of story where the key details would never see the light of day. Now we have a perfect storm of partisan wrangling that might change that equation. It’s always a good thing to know more, but prepare for this one to be particularly depressing if it actually pans out.