The Firestorm Over Trump’s Refusal to Release the Epstein Files
Several months ago, the Trump Administration fulfilled one of its campaign pledges and declassified a large batch of JFK Assassination files, finally making them publicly available after sixty-odd years.
Few of these unredacted documents seemed to contain anything new or interesting, with the most dramatic memo being the report that longtime CIA Counter-Intelligence Chief James Jesus Angleton had a very close relationship with the Israeli Mossad, and was believed by some to have assisted Israel in developing its nuclear weapons program. That item quickly went viral on Twitter and was heavily emphasized by those bloggers discussing the document-dump.
While these facts were certainly interesting, I hardly regarded them as shocking discoveries. For example, renowned investigative journalist Seymour Hersh had revealed Angleton’s extremely close relationship with Israeli intelligence in his 1991 bestseller The Samson Option, while Michael Collins Piper’s seminal 1994 book Final Judgment had fingered Angleton as a likely Israeli asset who had greatly abetted that country’s nuclear weapons development effort. Indeed, shortly after Angleton’s death more than 37 years ago, an article in the Washington Post revealed that he had “reportedly aided Israel in obtaining nuclear data.” So if certain facts had already been widely known or suspected for more than 37 years, their apparent confirmation in a declassified government document could hardly be regarded as revolutionary.
But the huge wave of renewed public interest in the JFK Assassination prompted Mike Whitney to interview me about that subject. This provided me an opportunity to summarize my previous half-dozen years of investigation in a lengthy piece that soon received quite a lot of readership and attention.
Then earlier this month, Trump reversed himself on his pledge to declassify and release all the government files related to a different high-profile criminal case, and this surprising U-turn provoked an even larger storm of public controversy.
Back in 2019, a mysterious wealthy financier named Jeffrey Epstein had been arrested on charges of molesting minors and sex-trafficking them to many dozens of America’s richest and most powerful individuals, amid widespread suspicions that he had been running a sexual blackmail ring on behalf of a foreign intelligence agency. According to media reports, an enormous trove of sexually-incriminating photographs and videos had been found in the safe of his huge New York City mansion.
Six years ago this Tuesday, soon after Epstein’s arrest, I’d published a long article on the case, placing it in the broader context of the crucial role that blackmail seemed to play in secretly controlling many of America’s top political leaders.
In that piece, I’d explained that I’d never paid any attention to the wild Epstein stories circulating on the Internet, dismissing them as just too bizarre to possibly be true.
For many years, reports about Epstein and his illegal sex-ring had regularly circulated on the fringes of the Internet, with agitated commenters citing the case as proof of the dark and malevolent forces that secretly controlled our corrupted political system. But I almost entirely ignored these discussions, and I’m not sure that I ever once clicked on a single link.
Probably one reason I paid so little attention to the topic was the exceptionally lurid nature of the claims being made. Epstein was supposedly an enormously wealthy Wall Street financier of rather mysterious personal background and source of funds, who owned a private island and an immense New York City mansion, both regularly stocked with harems of underage girls provided for sexual purposes. He allegedly hobnobbed on a regular basis with Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Harvard’s Alan Dershowitz, and numerous other figures in the international elite, as well as a gaggle of ordinary billionaires, frequently transporting those individuals on his personal jet known as “the Lolita Express” for the role it played in facilitating illegal secret orgies with young girls. When right-wing bloggers on obscure websites claimed that former President Clinton and the British Royals were being sexually serviced by the underage girls of a James Bond super-villain brought to life, I just naturally assumed those accusations were the wildest sort of Internet exaggeration.
Moreover, these angry writers did occasionally let slip that the fiendish target of their wrath had already been charged in a Florida courtroom, eventually pleading guilty to a single sexual offense and receiving a thirteen month jail sentence, mitigated by very generous work-release provisions. This hardly seemed like the sort of judicial punishment that would lend credence to the fantastical accusations against him. If Epstein had already been investigated by law enforcement authorities and given the sentence one might expect for writing a bad check, I found it quite unlikely that he was actually the Goldfinger or Dr. No that deluded Internet activists made him out to be.
But once Epstein’s arrest and the resulting media coverage confirmed the reality of those astonishing stories, a huge blizzard of political agitation erupted. This became far greater when Epstein was suddenly found dead in his maximum security prison cell, having allegedly committed suicide while the guards tasked with checking his safety had happened to fall asleep and the video cameras monitoring his cell had strangely malfunctioned. Many very powerful people surely breathed a huge sign of relief at Epstein’s sudden demise, so all but the most credulous became extremely suspicious at this strange turn of events.
During the half-dozen years since then, the Epstein case and its many conspiratorial elements had become a huge issue in political activist circles, especially those on the far right. Perhaps partly as a consequence, bizarre theories involving networks of elite pedophiles later became the heart of the wildly popular QAnon movement.
Most of the groups and individuals holding those views regarded Donald Trump as their great hero and paladin, the leader who would defeat those diabolical villains and bring them to justice if he somehow managed to regain the White House, and his promise to release all the Epstein files energized many of his supporters. Leading right-wing influencers in the Trump camp such as Dan Bongino had made the Epstein files one of their signature issues, so Bongino’s appointment as Deputy Director of the FBI seemed proof that Trump would soon honor that pledge.
But then three weeks ago, the Trump Administration reversed its position and declared that no additional Epstein files would be released, even suggesting that much of the material didn’t actually exist. This naturally produced howls of outrage by Trump’s erstwhile supporters. Elon Musk ridiculed Trump in an insulting meme that was viewed more than 63 million times:
With no further Epstein files released, no new facts existed. So I fully stood by the analysis I’d originally presented in my 2019 article. But now that this enormous outpouring of public controversy has returned the issue to the center of national attention, I’ve decided to expand and extend what I had previously written.
Former FoxNews host Tucker Carlson is probably the biggest figure in today’s fragmented media landscape and a crucial supporter of Donald Trump. But he and many others like him have strongly denounced the administration’s reversal on the release of the Epstein files.
The largest youthful pro-Trump organization is called Turning Point USA, and Carlson happened to give a speech to the huge audience at their annual convention a few days after Trump’s decision. He dramatically declared that that not a single person he knew in DC doubted that Epstein had been running a blackmail operation on behalf of the Israeli Mossad, and despite that controversial statement his speech drew widespread cheers. This suggests that his remarks—and the positive reaction they attracted—may themselves mark “a turning point” in what had been decades of uniformly pro-Israel sentiments among American conservatives. So ideas once marginalized or considered entirely forbidden may now apparently be freely discussed, sometimes even attracting widespread support, and this may be the most important lasting legacy of the current political firestorm over the Epstein files.
Indeed, given Carlson’s words only the most willfully blind could fail to connect such Mossad operations with the unwavering levels of support that Israel has long enjoyed from our members of Congress. Over the last couple of years, nearly the entire rest of the world has come to regard Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu as one of modern history’s worst war-criminals, now under indictment by the International Court of Justice for his horrific ongoing massacre of Gaza’s helpless civilians. But when he has visited Congress, the trained barking seals of that political body have provided him endless standing ovations. Obviously the money and media deployed by the Israel Lobby explain most of this behavior, but the powerful role of blackmail has almost certainly supplemented those factors.
The notion that many of our own elected officials are being ruthlessly blackmailed by a foreign power must surely outrage most patriotic Americans, and the increasing circulation of these ideas may eventually have important consequences. Just a few days after Carlson’s remarkable speech, Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the fiercest MAGA partisans in Congress, surprisingly joined with Democrats Reps. Rashida Tlaib and Ilhan Omar, two of her most leftwing colleagues, in voting to cut U.S. funding for Israel. This resolution only attracted a handful of supporters, but small cracks in a dam sometimes presage much larger breaks.
Epstein’s operation has widely been described as a Mossad “honeytrap,” the term for intelligence projects that use women to ensnare prominent, unsuspecting men in sexual blackmail, but there seemed to be some puzzling aspects to this picture.
Given the enormous scale of Epstein’s operation and the decades that it had remained in place, it’s difficult to believe that so many wealthy, well-connected individuals could have naively fallen into his clutches. Surely the stories of all his underage girls and the rumors of his hidden cameras would have gotten around. And billionaires strongly interested in such illicit pleasures could easily have arranged these for themselves rather than risking Epstein’s blackmail demands.
The answer to this puzzle is an obvious one, though I’ve only seen it explained by Internet provocateur Andrew Anglin, whose key explanatory phrase was “voluntary blackmail.”
He pointed out that the dark, secret forces such as Mossad that control much of American politics would only lend their support to those persons whom they considered fully under their control, and powerful blackmail evidence was the surest means of establishing such control. In effect, those individuals who wanted to advance their careers or gain powerful hidden allies would knowingly use Epstein’s services to create a blackmail tape of their illegal sexual activity with underage girls, thereby marking themselves as “safe” recipients of support. He stated all of this in his usual crude, insulting style:
So, it’s definitely not a “conspiracy theory.” Let’s make sure we don’t get lost here. The government has a lot of information on what certainly and definitely appears to be a “Mossad blackmail ring,” which involved people, presumably voluntarily, allowing themselves to be recorded having sex with underage girls.
That’s another point to be clear on: you would have to be retarded to do it just because you were horny. Prince Andrew appears to have actually done that, but he also appears to clearly suffer from mental retardation. Normal people who we would be talking about here would knowingly have illicit sex on video for the Mossad to keep so that powerful Jews would know they were loyal and give them promotions…
However, whenever you’re talking about a “blackmail ring,” you’re talking pretty much exclusively about voluntary blackmail. Any kind of systematic blackmail is necessarily voluntary, as you are not going to set up a system of seducing people and tricking them into having sex on video. It has been a thing since forever that criminal gangs require someone to do some crime, such as murder, and then keep some evidence on them. It’s just common sense that if you have evidence of someone committing a serious crime, or something that would otherwise destroy their life, you’re going to trust them, because no such person is going to betray you.
Anglin may have regarded the point he was making as a totally obvious one, and perhaps that’s correct. But I hadn’t really considered it myself, nor had I seen anyone else make it in such explicit fashion.
Over the centuries, many secret societies have similarly inducted their members with extreme initiation rituals, and the traditional mafia supposedly required its candidates to commit a murder in order to become “a made man.” As Anglin later explained, the popular 1973 crime film Serpico was based upon real life events, and the corrupt NYC officers it portrayed required all of their colleagues to join them in taking bribes and payoffs, fearing that those who refused might eventually decide to report their illegal activities.
Ironically enough, a sentence I’d published a decade ago had made exactly that point, and I’d quoted it again in my 2019 Epstein article. But I’d never followed through on the idea nor considered its full implications:
I have sometimes joked with my friends that perhaps the best career move for an ambitious young politician would be to secretly commit some monstrous crime and then make sure that the hard evidence of his guilt ended up in the hands of certain powerful people, thereby assuring his rapid political rise.