That's the thing about eating nothingburgers. They taste useless at first, and then do little but generate heartburn and indigestion for much longer.
All I want for Christmas is this to be over with. Like some of my last-minute online orders for the holidays, however, delivery will not arrive with Santa, as Axios reports:
The Trump administration estimates it has about one week to go — and as many as 700,000 more pages to review — before it finishes releasing all the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Meanwhile, they'll lose the PR war, day after day.
Allow me to disagree in part with Marc Caputo's assertion. The necessarily slow release of these files certainly hasn't done Donald Trump or the administration any good. However, they're not the only people losing the PR war. In fact, no one is winning it, with the possible exception of the victims, who have belatedly realized that they're being exploited again by both parties with insatiable impulses to keep throwing mud at each other.
Regrets, the White House has a few, Caputo reports:
Behind the scenes: There's a palpable sense of exasperation and annoyance in the administration about all of the headlines pertaining to Trump and Epstein and the inability to explain everything and just get the disclosure done.
"It's a combination of extreme frustration at everything: at what Congress did, at our response to it, and a concern that it won't go away," an official said.
"There's also a little bit of indignation at the media — that this wasn't even a story for years and years. And now, not only is it a story, but the top of many news pages on a given day."
I'm not going to defend the media, which has also exploited the Epstein story for political purposes, and to which we'll return in a moment. However, Caputo's source should reflect for a moment on how this became a story after "years and years." Pam Bondi made it a story at the very beginning of her tenure at the Department of Justice. She raised expectations about releasing the files on her own, staged a PR stunt with "influencers" that turned out to deliver nothing new, and then suggested that full releases would be a problem. That left the door wide open to the media and Democrats to suggest that Bondi had discovered smoking guns about Trump and had reversed course to protect him, which leads us to ... today.
And what about the Protection Racket Media? Matt Taibbi calls the Epstein scandal "the worst-reported story of all time," and has launched a multi-installment analysis to explain why. This passage pretty well nails it:
Epstein supercharged the imaginations of conspiracy theorists because the worst-case scenarios of his tale appeal to a range of archetypal fears common to the left and the right (along with one big one that appeals to both). It’s adjacent to conservative fears about leftist child exploitation and internationalist cabals led by the Clintons, while the left sees #MeToo, Gaza, and the long-sought, finally disqualifying Crime of Trump. The stories merge in a theory not terribly dissimilar to the aforementioned Protocols, in which a network of Jewish financiers conspires in the shadows to obtain control of the levers of power, in this case through seduction, trafficking, and blackmail.
Except, there is no strong evidence of blackmail anywhere. There was a 2017 Wall Street Journal article that cited “people familiar with the matter” in suggesting that Epstein “appeared” to threaten Gates with exposure of an affair (not with a prostitute, but with Russian bridge player Mila Antonova) in a letter, but that story hasn’t exactly been proven out, and there’s never been any suggestion of political motive. There are people who’ve been quoted saying they believe Epstein blackmailed his key client Les Wexner, but that’s never been based on more than speculation.
As for “global trafficking,” there’s never been real evidence of that, a fact that is alternately ackowledged [sic] by whichever political party happens not to be in power and in possession of access to Epstein’s files.
Exactly. That explains perfectly what has happened ever since Trump's first-term DoJ finally circled back to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell for their crimes in 2019. Demagogues in both parties have leveraged the valuable practice of sealing records in the absence of indictments to speculate about cover-ups and conspiracies, not to get justice but because they want to damage their political opponents. And the Protection Racket Media has only paid attention when Democrats hold that leverage, as they do now.
The only good news is that we may have all the records released by New Year's Eve and can start 2026 fresh. If "fresh" is defined as the cessation of mud flying through the air, that is.
Editor’s Note: The mainstream media isn't interested in the facts; they're only interested in attacking the president. Help us continue to get to the bottom of stories like the Jeffrey Epstein files by supporting our truth-seeking journalism today.
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