The GOP’s Longest-Running Game of "Hide the Pedophile Evidence"

Seven years after the American president’s child-sex-trafficking friend died in a Manhattan jail cell, the most remarkable thing about the Epstein scandal is not that so many people on the right and the left finally believe the same conspiracy theory.

No, the most remarkable thing is that that this White House still seems to believe the public will eventually just get bored. Apparently the strategy is: release the files, gradually, slowly enough, until everyone gets old.

The Republican Senate had quite a weekend. They confirmed Todd Blanche as attorney general at 4:30 in the morning, 50–49, which is apparently the ideal hour for Republicans to decide on the next pedophile protector to run the Justice Department.

Nothing says rule of law like, “Everybody up? Let’s do the Attorney General before sunrise, when Stephen Miller returns from feeding.”

Blanche is, of course, the historically unfit and compromised Trump henchman; now at the center of the administration’s systemic policy of breaking their own law to protect powerful men who rape children. Blanche is also the first private presidential criminal defense attorney to ever be named the same president’s Attorney General, because no previous president ever needed to do that.

At this point, they’re not even hiding the corruption; they’re just dimming the lights a little. 50 of 52 GOP senators present voted for Todd Blanche to help Donald Trump protect wealthy men who put their dicks inside children.

One such supplicant would be the craven husk that is Louisiana Sen. Bill Cassidy, the deciding vote in favor of Blanche. Cassidy has already suffered years of derision and scorn, but only because he’s a damned doctor who gave the pivotal HHS Secretary confirmation vote to measles enthusiast Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Cassidy only agreed to that vote because RFK had promised he wouldn’t be anti-vaccine once confirmed. And like, oh, I don’t know, a tragic woman who trusts RFK Jr, Cassidy believed him.

Kennedy broke the promise, Trump gutted Cassidy in his primary, the crushed quisling’s career cut off. And then - because, presumably, a job somewhere? - Cassidy, on his way out the door and owing them nothing, confirmed the most unfit AG in history.

In his floor speech, Cassidy announced that one of the big reasons to confirm Blanche was so the DOJ could move forward, and prosecute more human traffickers.

And Senator Cassidy, it will not surprise you, never found the time to meet with any Epstein survivors.

So now, the man who visited convicted child rapist and sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell in her prison cell, before her subsequent transfer to a much nicer prison, is also the man who decides what the public is allowed to see, within those files, where his boss is mentioned, thousands of times.

That’s not a conflict of interest; that’s a violent attack on the concept of interest.

And of course, the files don't need protecting from the public. The public needs protecting from the people who think they own the files.

But now Judge Emmet Sullivan has ordered Blanche to produce a sample of the Epstein redactions and the evidence that justifies breaking Trump’s law to keep them hidden.

In other words: Show your work, Todd.

Meanwhile, Senator Ron Wyden has released a deeply disturbing account of Epstein’s banking relationships, alleging that JPMorgan, Deutsche Bank and Bank of America moved or facilitated massive sums connected to Epstein while failing to report these suspicious transactions for nearly two decades, even they all knew he was a convicted sex trafficker and all.

*JPMorgan filed only seven Suspicious Activity Reports, totaling $4.3 million, between 2002 and 2016,

*Then, after Epstein’s 2019 arrest, they retroactively remembered to flag over 5,000 wire transfers worth $1.3 billion - six years after the bank had already terminated him as a client in 2013, over money laundering concerns.

*Deutsche Bank took over as Epstein’s primary bank from 2013 until his death; and would you believe it? They also waited until after his arrest to flag some $250 million in suspicious transfers, that hadn’t been a problem before.

*And Bank of America didn’t much scrutinize some $170 million in wire transfers from billionaire Leon Black to Epstein for supposed “tax advice.” They waved it all through. Nearly eight months after Epstein’s arrest they got around to flagging them as having “no apparent economic, business or lawful purpose”

The numbers are staggering. But the deliberate blind eye for a felon is worse. And the response from this government has been the PR equivalent of putting a blanket over a corpse and announcing that everything is fine.

Obviously these banks had a very sophisticated compliance system: let the convicted child sex trafficker do whatever he wants, until the FBI arrests him.

And, unlike Trump’s last functioning artery, this scandal is not going away.

This White House keeps giving the same message: trust us, nothing to see here, there is no story, please stop asking questions.

But people are asking anyway: Senators like Wyden, journalists who refuse to drop the story, the Epstein survivors who have spent years demanding accountability, and all those lawyers digging through all those records.

The brave people in this story are not the ones sitting on the files. The brave people are the majority who keep demanding to see them.

And if the government has nothing to hide, there is an astonishingly simple way to prove it: stop hiding the damn files.

And somewhere in Hell, Jeff Epstein laughs.

And then Roy Cohn smacks him, and tells him to get back to setting up the “Welcome Home” party.