Dem
47
GOP
53
The Great Epstein Saga continues. There are tapes. Shades of Richard Nixon. When Deputy AG Todd Blanche interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell, he brought along his trusty tape recorder (well, probably more like an iPhone, but still). Everything she said was recorded. The government is now busy transcribing the recordings. The next step will be to edit the transcripts to remove anything that might reflect badly on Donald Trump. Then comes dinner at Number One Observatory Circle (or not).
There, at the vice president's residence, Blanche, AG Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles were supposed to plot with J.D. Vance last night about how to use the edited transcripts most effectively to make the Epstein problem go away. Looks like John Nance "Texas Jack" Garner was wrong. This veep, at least, is a real power player.
As it turns out, the dinner may have been postponed, or possibly relocated, because of all the coverage the story got. It's not immediately clear why that would be necessary. Yes, this is an administration that is violently allergic to transparency, but it's not like reporters were going to be invited to take a seat at the table with the Hateful Five. Anyhow, maybe a dinner happened last night, and maybe not. Maybe a decision was made about the tapes, and maybe not. As of 3:00 a.m. PT Thursday, nobody in the press corps knows.
If we take a step back, it is very unusual, to say the least, for the deputy attorney general to spend 2 days in a prison talking to a convicted criminal who committed truly heinous crimes for the purpose of gaining testimony in the hope of making a political scandal bothering the president go away. We don't know what Maxwell said, but the fact that she just got moved from a high-security prison to a low-security prison is, er, interesting. If William of Occam were available to get his opinion on this, we suspect he'd say: "She said Trump is as pure as the driven snow." For extra credit, she might also have implicated a couple of Democrats.
Will releasing a (likely highly edited) transcript make the problem go away? We doubt it. It is even possible that releasing the transcripts will make the problem worse. People will then demand the raw audio files to make sure the transcripts are accurate. Maybe that would help—unless the metadata show that the audio files were edited in Adobe Audition this time (although Adobe Premiere Pro can also edit audio). Also, release of material clearing Trump would raise questions about whether Trump will pardon Maxwell. So far he hasn't ruled that out. Pardoning someone who has been convicted of crimes as horrible as hers would not go over well. Stay tuned for the next episode of our national reality show. (V)