Dem
47
GOP
53
The Jeffrey Epstein scandal faded for a while, mostly because Congress was away on recess, and maybe a little bit because the White House created a few distractions. But it's back, at least for now.
The biggest "news" from yesterday is that the House Oversight Committee, acting at the direction of Chair James Comer (R-KY), released a whole bunch of Epstein documents (about 33,000 of them) that the Committee received from the Department of Justice. Following the release, Comer noted that "As far as I can see, there's nothing new in the documents."
The documents were released fairly late in the afternoon yesterday, and undoubtedly cub reporters at various media outlets got stuck with the task of going through them, and are still at work. However, we are 99.9% certain Comer is telling the truth, and that there's nothing in the tranche that's particularly revelatory, much less a "client list" or other smoking gun. First, these documents came from the Department of Justice, and we don't believe that the DoJ would hand over to Congress anything even mildly incriminating. Second, Comer is a Trumper, and we don't believe that he would voluntarily hand over to the general public anything even mildly incriminating.
Note that our skepticism extends even to documents that might incriminate Bill Clinton, or some other prominent Democrat(s). If such material were in there, then Comer, followed by every other Republican politician and media outlet in the land, would be waving the document around and saying "We told you so!" That is not happening right now, obviously. We also believe that even if there is material somewhere (say, a file on "AG" Pam Bondi's desk) that incriminates Clinton or some other prominent Democrat(s), the administration and its allies would keep that in their back pockets to be deployed when a distraction is needed. You know, a "break glass in case of emergency" kind of thing.
Note that we said we are 99.9% certain that there's nothing in there. The 0.1% is because we allow for the (slight) possibility that everyone involved has decided that there is some document that is going to have to be released eventually, and they might be using the old lawyer trick of burying the one salient piece of evidence under tens of thousands of pieces of irrelevant evidence. We really don't think this is what is going on, but we allow that it's at least possible.
What's really going on, almost to a certainty, is that the MAGA Republicans are trying to get out ahead of what could be a big story today. Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) is about to file the discharge petition he has threatened, which, if adopted, would require the White House to turn over ALL documents related to Epstein, and would require Congress to release ALL those documents (after appropriate redactions). To accompany that, Massie and Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA), in today's episode of Politics Makes Strange Bedfellows, will jointly hold a press conference on the steps of the Capitol, where 10 victims of Epstein/Ghislaine Maxwell will speak, supported by another 90 or so victims who are expected to be in attendance.
It seems improbable that the victims' remarks will be limited to "yep, Epstein/Maxwell took advantage of us." Everyone already knows that. We presume they will get into some graphic detail about what Epstein/Maxwell did, so as to create maximum pressure to release everything, and so as to make anyone who opposes the release of the files look like a monster. It is at least slightly possible that one or more of them will specifically implicate Donald Trump. We doubt that, but if it does happen, it will instantly become the 1A story for the rest of the week, and maybe beyond. In that event, we very much hope that someone has made heavy-duty security arrangements for any woman who directly accuses Trump. Everyone knows what this administration does to its perceived enemies.
The bottom line is that Jeffrey Epstein is once again back from the dead. How long he'll remain, at least for this go-round, will probably be much clearer by about 2:00 p.m. ET today. (Z)