The right stalls; the left is easily distracted
The Hill contributor Chris Truax of the conservative Society for the Rule of Law on Friday predicted, “Come Monday, it’s going to be all Epstein all the time.” That was before some rogue president of some rogue, illiberal democracy attacked Venezuela and abducted its president on Saturday.
His reasoning at the time amounted to:
That’s because the Department of Justice has made a complete hash of releasing the Epstein files. A year ago, the department was the finest legal organization in the world. President Trump has forced out at least one-third of the Justice Department’s leadership, and the unprecedented brain drain is starting to show. The unattractive combination of willfulness and incompetence with which the department has handled these documents’ release ought to be a bigger story than the files themselves.
Written explanation of redactions as required by the Epstein Files Transparency Act for documents already released are still MIA. That’s on top of the “embarrassing” incompetence of remaining DOJ employees to properly redact the files so what’s hidden is not recoverable with a simple copy-and-paste.
Even worse, when the information was recovered, it was sometimes apparent that these failed redactions were themselves illegal. In one example, the Justice Department tried to redact an exhibit in a civil case from the Virgin Islands that discussed, among other things, how Epstein tried to cover up his crimes and where he paid property taxes. Since none of this has anything to do with the information that the law allows the government to redact, we can only assume that the remaining redactions are equally improper. Certainly, we have no reason to take the Justice Department at its word and assume that it is following the law.
Whether incompetence or malice (why not both?), AG Pam Bondi’s DOJ cannot be trusted with this task, Truax argues. He offers a solution:
If Republicans end up needing the Democrats to help them keep the government open at the end of January, and they will, one of the things Democrats should insist on is that every single unredacted page of the Epstein files should be turned over to a new House committee tasked with publicly releasing them. This might cause the release to drag out over a few extra months. But the litigation over the Justice Department’s handling of the files will drag on for years anyway. This way, at least people will have some trust in the process.
At this point, the Epstein files are bigger than Trump. As a country, we need to move past this, and the only way to do that is to get the information into the public domain. And one way or another, the information will come out, whether through a clean, quick document release or through death-by-a-thousand-cuts litigation. Let’s get this over with.
What was released by law on December 19, write Bruce Maiman of Just Asking Questions, “was a masterclass in bureaucratic contempt.” The DOJ treated its legal mandate “like a polite suggestion printed on tissue paper,” Maiman writes:
What makes the situation worse — far worse — is that the Justice Department has taken the extraordinary step of warning the public not to trust the very documents it has released. Some of the materials, DOJ officials note, include unverified claims, forged letters, fake videos, and FBI tip forms containing fantastical allegations. That is technically true. It is also beside the point.
The law requires the release of files related to the Epstein investigation, not the curation of a narrative. Dumping disorganized, context-free material into the public domain, while burying anything substantive under black ink, has predictable consequences. Confusion flourishes. Conspiracies metastasize. And the government, having created the chaos, shrugs and says: Don’t blame us if people draw the wrong conclusions.
This outcome was not an accident. It was inevitable.
The Guardian considers why “Epstein avoided serious and meaningful punishment for his crimes” for so many years. Prosecutorial culture may have played a role:
“The Epstein and Maxwell problem is twofold. First, law enforcement agencies, especially at the local level, do not communicate well with one another,” Neama Rahmani, founder of West Coast Trial Lawyers and a former federal prosecutor, said. “Second, prosecutors are risk-averse and do not want to prosecute difficult cases.”
More, authorities can see sexual abuse cases as risky propositions in terms of success.
“Sexual assault and sexual abuse prosecutions are often ‘he said, she said’ cases where the defense argues consent, or that the sexual contact never happened,” Rahmani said, explaining that prosecutors are expected to win every time. “They may hesitate taking difficult cases to trial, especially against defendants with significant resources.”
“Cynics may also argue that Epstein wasn’t prosecuted because of his friendships with powerful elected officials. Some of this case has changed with #MeToo, more victims coming forward and being willing to testify, and more resources and changes in philosophy when it comes to prosecuting sex crimes,” Rahmani said.
“But it’s still not enough and the victims were let down.”
Here is a particularly interesting analogy:
John Day, founder of John Day Law and a former prosecutor in New Mexico, pointed to seeming intelligence failures when it came to pursuing cases.
“Maybe the best explanation is rooted in why all the signals about Bin Laden were ignored until 9/11 – plenty of law enforcement [and] CIA analysts had him on their radar screens, but the information was never collated in a way that got understood until it was too late?” Day said. “Could this have been the equivalent for Epstein?”
The two cases are clearly not equivalent, Jay insists. Nonetheless, “these timeframes were roughly parallel.”
But, Day also said: “This is separate from understanding why Epstein got such a sweetheart deal in Florida from US attorney Alexander Acosta.”
Trump and his cronies are desperate enough to bury this story that he’s abducted the leader of Venezuela and plans a show trial to keep the press entertained. “Flood the zone with shit,” as Trump first term chief strategist Steve Bannon once advised. Sadly, the left lacks the discipline to flood the zone right back with all Epstein all the time.