On Friday, the Washington Post blew the lid off a major scandal involving influence from Jeffrey Epstein and a member of Congress. Had that member been a Republican, it might have dominated the weekend headlines, the Sunday talk shows, and social media to this very moment ... assuming that social media hadn't been derailed by the Cloudflare outage, of course. And even a little bit of digging would have exposed far more meaty connections between the Representative and the ephebophilic sex trafficker.
Instead, the Stacey Plaskett scandal could've been called The Dog That Mostly Didn't Bark.
Let's start with the WaPo's devastating article and work our way forward through the silence. Bear in mind that Epstein's sex-trafficking crimes had once again popped up on the national radar in early February 2019, thanks to a Miami Herald exposé on the slimy plea deal he got from Alex Acosta – a new look prompted by criticism from then-Senate Republican Ben Sasse in November 2018. Epstein had become toxic already, but not to Larry Summers and not to Plaskett, as the WaPo reported to their readers:
The newly released documents from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate show that the convicted sex offender texted with a Democratic member of Congress, Del. Stacey Plaskett of the U.S. Virgin Islands, during a congressional hearing with Michael Cohen, and that those text messages may have influenced the congresswoman’s questions of Cohen, President Donald Trump’s former personal attorney and fixer.
In the texts, Epstein appeared to be watching the February 2019 hearing in real time and at one point informed Plaskett — whose name is redacted from the documents — that Cohen had brought up former Trump executive assistant Rhona Graff in his testimony. At the time, Cohen was testifying before the House Oversight Committee against his former boss, alleging that Trump was racist, manipulated financial records and directed hush money payments to cover up his extramarital affairs — allegations Trump denied. The president said on social media that Cohen was “lying” before testimony began.
“Cohen brought up RONA - keeper of the secrets,” Epstein texted, misspelling Graff’s first name.
“RONA??” Plaskett responded. “Quick I’m up next is that an acronym,” she added, suggesting she would question Cohen soon.
Plaskett's name was redacted, but it didn't take Sherlock Holmes to figure out who was engaging with Epstein during the hearing:
Though the name of Epstein’s texting partner is redacted in the documents, time-stamps on the text messages matched up with video from the hearing, as well as the messages’ contents, indicated that Epstein was texting with Plaskett, who represents the U.S. Virgin Islands as its nonvoting delegate in the House of Representatives.
The hearing in which Plaskett questioned Cohen took place on February 27. That was three weeks after the Miami Herald reported that the DoJ had begun an investigation of Epstein's plea deal, with an eye toward trying to find a way to prosecute Epstein and his co-conspirators for their unaddressed crimes. More importantly, it was eleven years after Epstein pled guilty to sex-trafficking crimes involving girls as young as 13 years old.
And Plaskett had Epstein as her consultant for grilling Michael Cohen anyway.
One would expect that such a story would dominate the headlines and the talk shows, especially given the Democrats' months-long, full-court press on the Epstein Files. The Protection Racket Media has other ideas about what makes news in the Epstein case, as Jorge Bonilla discovered watching the Sunday news shows:
The Plaskett story early enough for pre-production of This Week, and yet there was no mention whatsoever of what would otherwise be a scandal. There was likewise no mention of Plaskett on NBC’s Meet the Press, CBS’s Face the Nation, or CNN’s State of the Union.
As is the case with “news” in the Trump Era, the durability of a story is directly proportional to its ability to (a) cast aspersions on Donald Trump, and/or (b) cover up some other, more nefarious scandal. ...
Epstein coaching a Member of Congress as to what questions to ask of a committee witness isn’t notable? Does this not warrant prominence on the Sunday shows? For an Elitist Media intent on mining the “Epstein Files” for revelations, this is a huge omission. But not surprising, because this does not directly implicate President Donald Trump in any crime.
The wagons didn't just circle around Plaskett on television. Straight Arrow News did some research on the coverage of the story, and found that – with a handful of exceptions – the Protection Racket Media did its best to shut the story down:
A quick Google News search for "Epstein email" stories published in the seven days ending Monday gives hundreds of headlines. News that Stacey Plaskett, a sitting delegate member of the U.S. House of Representatives, was texting the convicted sex offender just before she questioned President Donald Trump's personal attorney didn't get much attention by comparison. ...
Ground News, a service that analyzes news coverage of given topics and separates the outlets that do so based on political lean, found 57 articles on the topic. Large news outlets like CNN, Newsweek, the New York Post and other smaller outlets covered the story. Coverage was mostly from right-leaning outlets, with 57% of the articles the service found coming from outlets deemed right-leaning. Notably, Fox News decided against a story on the topic despite covering the politician for years. Counting the Post's initial story, just six outlets deemed left-leaning gave the matter a headline.
The comparison to the larger coverage of the Epstein files is particularly valuable. It's not that the Protection Racket Media is ignoring the story; it's that they are ignoring the parts of the story that implicate Democrats.
Matt Taibbi reminds us that the Plaskett-Epstein connection is worse than even the Washington Post report suggests:
Plaskett was a listed recipient of campaign contributions from Epstein, and briefly also a defendant in a lawsuit filed by five alleged Jane Doe victims of Epstein. The action against Plaskett was voluntarily dismissed after her lawyers filed a motion to be removed from the suit, but the original complaint remains ugly public record. It accuses Plaskett and a long list of other figures of having “facilitated Epstein in his ongoing sex trafficking operation” by ensuring he “received preferential treatment and unfettered, unmonitored freedom” while in U.S. Virgin Islands.
Financial records of “substantial payments” to some of those defendants do appear in the exhibits of another damning lawsuit, U.S. Virgin Islands v. JPMorgan Chase Bank, to the point where it’s clear government officials in the Virgin Islands and significant Wall Street players were deeply compromised when it came to the operation of Epstein’s empire. ...
Plaskett was the general counsel for the aforementioned Virgin Islands Economic Development Commission for five years between 2007 and 2012, listed as leaving just before the deal outlined above. She was an attorney at Kellerhals Ferguson Kroblin PLLC, the firm that handled Epstein’s taxes and helped him purchase Little St. James Island. It appears that’s where she worked during an unaccounted-for LinkedIn gap of a few years between 2012 and her election in 2015.
The Plaskett-Epstein link is precisely the kind of political connection that victims allege, and in the years after Epstein's plea deal and conviction. Plaskett helped Epstein protect himself from accountability and allowed him to flex his financial and political muscle, in part for her own benefit. It's the kind of meaty scandal that the news media usually loooooves to cover.
When the scandal involves Republicans, that is.
Editor's note: If we thought our job in pushing back against the Academia/media/Democrat censorship complex was over with the election, think again. This is going to be a long fight.
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