Let’s discuss this. There’s too little evidence here to support any clear theory. But given the current leadership of the Department of Justice, a hermeneutic of suspicion is called for. But consider these dates.
On Friday CNN reported that the US Attorneys Office in Manhattan appears to preparing to close its main investigation into the Trump Organization without filing any charges. Not every probe finds wrongdoing or chargeable offenses. But look at these two paragraphs …
One of the theories circulating about Jeffrey Epstein makes a certain logical sense on its face and yet, in practice – as something that really could be case as opposed to merely possible – it just seems too far-fetched. It goes like this. Running a procurement ring can’t make you billions or even hundreds of millions of dollars. Even an extortion ring couldn’t really put together those numbers. But maybe it worked something like this. Epstein does have some kind of money management fund. Maybe it’s not very successful. Maybe it’s just invested in an index fund or treasury bonds. But what if Epstein has the goods on a bunch of high rollers and for Epstein to stay silent they invest in his fund?
Oral arguments in DC Circuit Court of Appeals on House Oversight Committee’s subpoena of President Trump’s accounting firm for his financial records. Tierney Sneed is in the courtroom, and Josh Kovensky is live-blogging it via the streaming audio.
New NBC/WSJ Poll: Biden 26%, Warren 19%, Harris 13%, Sanders 13%, Buttigieg 7%. No one else over 2%.
This is turning out to be a quintessentially Trumpian day. The social media bias summit the White House is hosting today is made up of attendees best known as online pro-Trump hype men, pushing images, memes and videos portraying Trump as a sort of alternative reality he-man constantly stomping, vanquishing and owning his foes. And while all this has been going on the White House has been telling everyone Trump has some secret way to end-run the Supreme Court and get his census citizenship question on the census after all. And now, a couple hours before the announcement, we learn that this epic SCOTUS smackdown is actually a lot of don’t-look-behind-the-curtain razzmatazz to fuzz up what is actually Trump announcing he’s giving up, doing pretty much what his Justice Department announced a week ago but Trump apparently needed a week of hand holding and yessing to accept.
An overnight article from the Times is the first to press past questions about Jeffrey Epstein’s wealth to suggesting that – like Donald Trump – it may all simply be an illusion. No one disputes that he’s a very wealthy man by any normal standard. He appears to own almost a quarter of a billion in real estate alone. But the claims of being a billionaire or running a fund which manages tens of billions of dollars appears to be based on very little.
I watched the Acosta presser live all the way through and here’s my take.
Here’s Alex Acosta’s answer on that Daily Beast claim that he told Trump transition officials that he was told to lay off Epstein and that he was some sort of intelligence asset. That struck me as a pretty wild claim. But bizarrely Acosta non-denial denialed it with a claim about departmental policies which I don’t think adds up.
This was a pretty weird answer: "I can't address it directly because of our guidelines." pic.twitter.com/9SVi8HNKo2
— Josh Marshall (@joshtpm) July 10, 2019
In my earlier post I mentioned the reporting of Vicky Ward who did a lengthy piece on Epstein for Vanity Fair in 2003 and is now revisiting the story in The Daily Beast. (Ward had a detailed version of the underaged girls part of the story but Vanity Fair cut that from the 2003 story.) I wanted to flag your attention to a passage in her latest piece at The Daily Beast which reports that Acosta told Trump transition officials that he’d been told to back off the Epstein case at the time and that that was why he gave Epstein such a generous deal.
Here’s the passage …
We know the outlines of charges that Jeffrey Epstein for years had procurers recruiting underaged girls for sex. We know the suspicions that various wealthy and powerful men in his vast social circle may have been part of this organized system of statutory rape. But there’s another part of this emerging story I want to focus your attention on – one which is distinct but may not at all be separate.
No one seems to have a clear idea of where Jeffrey Epstein’s money comes from.