Four times exonerated in 30 seconds
ICYMI, Donald Trump has been “totally exonerated on Epstein.”
The Ink observes that that Trump talking point sounds pretty familiar:
It’s not all that different from Trump’s reaction to the release of former Special Counsel Robert Mueller’s report on Russian interference in the 2016 election.
The reality, then, was somewhat different: “The president was not exculpated for the acts that he allegedly committed,” Mueller told Congress back in 2019 as he presented his report. Mueller hadn’t found the evidence most wanted — direct connections with Russian interference operations. He’d found compelling reasons not to dismiss the idea that Trump had obstructed justice — he’d simply left the decision to act up to the Department of Justice. A serious error (as journalists Carol Leonnig and Aaron C. Davis have told us), but the report was far from a “complete and total” exoneration.
And Trump’s claim of “exoneration” now is just as curious, even if it is simply a reflex. So far, this hasn’t, at the core, even been about him. There has been no public process of inquiry, no special counsel has been appointed to look into the questions surrounding Trump’s involvement with Epstein raised by the newly released documents, and nobody has had their day in court to speak to any issues that might be raised by those documents.
That’s not quite exoneration — and certainly not total.
Expect to hear more of it from Trump and his pet parrots.
Actually that Trump line is familiar, only from someone a few years older, maturity-wise: “I didn’t do it, nobody saw me do it, you can’t prove anything!”
The karmic imbalance with this guy is massive. At some point the universe has to come into balance. Please?