Epstein's web

Don't look away

I wrote earlier this week about how Epstein is key to understanding Trump, MAGA, and our current political crisis.

But this is much bigger than Trump. It’s bigger than MAGA, and it’s bigger than US politics.

Epstein’s networks were global.

Jeet Heer explains some of this at The Nation:

Trump richly deserves whatever reputational harm and possible legal retribution may come to him as a result of his ties to Epstein. But, at its heart, this has always been a scandal about the ruling class as a whole, not one individual or political party.

The Epstein e-mails document his ties to a wide swath of the US and global elite in ways that transcend partisan lines. Among those Epstein was on easy terms with were former treasury secretary Larry Summers (who held high office under both Bill Clinton and Barack Obama) as well as Trump adviser Steve Bannon and right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel. Even Noam Chomsky wrote glowingly of his “highly valued friend.”

The open question about Epstein was why he was allowed to flourish for so long when his crimes were for all intents and purposes an open secret for decades. For instance, why did he receive a sweetheart deal in 2008 that amounted to a slap on the wrist for sex crimes with underage girls? The man who negotiated that deal, former US prosecutor Alex Acosta, had previously been quoted as privately telling Steve Bannon that Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” But in congressional testimony released last month by the House Oversight Committee, Acosta said he had “no knowledge as to whether [Epstein] was or was not a member of the intelligence community.”

The ambiguity of the reporting around Acosta’s comments, coupled with the many mysteries surrounding Epstein’s wealth and social connections, has long fueled speculation that he had been an asset of the CIA or Mossad.

Thanks to diligent reporting from two independent outlets, Drop Site and Reason, we now have a much better sense of Epstein’s relationship with the foreign policy elite of the US and Israel. It seems that Epstein was not a CIA or Mossad asset—not because he didn’t have it in him, but because that was too lowly a role. Rather, he was a power broker, an American oligarch, who played a major role in shaping Western policy, which brought him in contact with spy agencies and diplomats.

Heer then quotes Reason’s Matthew Petti, who documented Epstein’s ties with Ehud Barak:

After his first arrest for sex crimes, Jeffrey Epstein tried to get into a new line of work: surveillance. In 2015, he partnered with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to invest in a security tech startup called Reporty Homeland Security, now known as Carbyne. Leaked emails show that Epstein was using Barak to seek out opportunities in the surveillance industry and build connections with powerful figures around the globe, including American businessman Peter Thiel, the former director of Israeli signals intelligence, and two people in Russian President Vladimir Putin’s circle.

…An astute analysis of Epstein’s unique position was provided by international relations scholar Van Jackson, who teaches at Victoria University of Wellington. Writing on his Un-Diplomatic Substack, Jackson noted that Epstein was

one of the world’s preeminent geopoliticians, which is why he entangled so many powerful people in his misdeeds. The human-trafficking sexcapades were not the main thing bringing him together with his pedo friends. It was money and power politics, forming a vital artery of US global hegemony.

The Jeffrey Epstein story makes no sense unless you realize that he was deeply entrenched in the foreign policy elite, a fact that gave him much of the impunity he enjoyed for most of his life. Powerful people felt comfortable around Epstein because he was one of them. He had the same neoliberal worldview that has dominated the US elite since the end of the Cold War. He was a believer in the Washington Consensus, US military hegemony bolstered in the Middle East by the alliance with Israel, globalization, the privatization of government functions, STEM-dominated education, and male-centered sexual hedonism—an ethos he took to sickening extremes.

President Trump has been flailing and lashing out in light of the growing attention to the Epstein files. He’s called for Democrats to be executed for the crime of defending the Constitution. He’s called for Jimmy Kimmel to be pulled off the air for joking about Epstein. When a female reporter brought up his connections to Epstein, he was visibly angry and shot back: “Quiet, piggy.”

He’s also tried to deflect, insisting that it’s Democrats who are trying to bury the files because there are Democrats in the files. When he finally signed to release the files, Trump said: “Perhaps the truth about these Democrats, and their associations with Jeffrey Epstein, will soon be revealed,” and added, “This latest Hoax will backfire on the Democrats just as all of the rest have!”

What Trump doesn’t comprehend is that American citizens who want those files released don’t care if there are Democrats caught up in the diabolical web. Or rather, we do care, and we want them exposed, too. Trump sees everything through partisan eyes, or more specifically, through the lens of his own interest. He is the party, and he has crafted the party into his own image. We want everything revealed. We want both parties cleansed of this plague, and if there’s no party or parties left at the end of the cleansing, so be it.

Unfortunately, those who have followed this saga and have an inkling of what’s in those files know that this sort of total cleanse is unlikely. It’s never happened before, not on this scale.

Even with the promised release, no one is holding their breath. There is too much there about too many people who have too much power. Key portions are expected to be redacted, and some of what is contained in the files may never see the light of day.

But there will be more clues in what is released. And now, more people will have eyes to see.

“This is a storyline that’s going to continue to dog the president into the second year of his presidency,” Alex Conant, a Republican operative told CNN. “The Epstein conspiracies have reached moon landing status. And we’ll never stop talking about it.”

But this isn’t just about the president. It explains Trump and it explains MAGA, but it’s much bigger. The scope and depth of what we are looking at is daunting. What happens next will depend on how many people refuse to look away, and whether those who do see have the will to take power back from those who have ruthlessly amassed power for themselves and fashioned intricate networks to protect that power—from men (and some women) who have everything to lose.

Never stop talking about it.