Good point.
Yes, this is worth giving some attention to, even in the face of all the other Epstein-related matters.
Melania undoubtedly has knowledge that no one in the Epstein Class wants revealed. And of course she’d need a powerful incentive to become willing to disclose any of it.
We likely will never know even a fraction of what she could say. And the Republican determination to make sure she’s never questioned under oath shouldn’t be swept under any rugs. At the very least, those responsible should be questioned by the electorate.
The NYT has an article about the scramble for damage control in the White House, most of which took place in the Situation Room. One of the things Trump’s team came up with was to have Tucker Carlson interview Ghislaine Maxwell so she could deny Trump ever did anything wrong. This idea seems to have morphed into having Todd Blanche interview her instead and the quid pro quo where she was transferred to the prison camp where she has access to puppies.
The NYT article is linked at the bottom of this Yahoo article but is most likely paywalled:
Another fun bit from today was on MSNOW where Nicolle Wallace speculated that the reason why they had these meetings in the morning in the Situation Room is because the cramped staircase and tiny elevator made it unlikely that Trump would wander in and interrupt them. JFC, can you imagine that? Not only does your job become to defend and protect a pedophile but also to tiptoe around him so you don’t accidentally piss him off with your ham-fisted coverup attempts.
I can’t tell you how much I feel sorry for them.
Because there’s no number small enough?
Perhaps we should define a Planck number for feeling sorry, a Quantum of commiseration.
But if they signed up for it - screw’em?
Shana, they bought their tickets, they knew what they were getting into. I say, let 'em crash.
Personally, I’d say that the article sort of reduces down to this line:
“Blondie fucked this whole thing up,” Bongino later told a confidant, echoing Loomer’s derisive nickname for the attorney general. “She was the one on TV saying over and over they had all this stuff. There was never anything. We were always clear about that. But now everyone thinks we did something wrong. And I gave up everything.” Bongino complained that he had given up his high-rated show and millions of dollars, “and now it’s all disappeared, because people think we screwed something up with Epstein.”
That is to say (and no, I’m not saying what you think I’m saying, keep reading past this sentence) that Trump is completely innocent in the whole Epstein affair and thus this sort of thinking is reasonable:
And, thus, they withheld the document.
The information was already out there, the President is innocent, why force the guy to get hammered again over an issue that has been deemed a “made up story”?
To a MAGA reader, Bongino’s statement is the key to the article. Ultimately, what people want when they read a story a is a straight up and down, “Did he do it?” They don’t want a bunch of evidence to this side, a bunch of evidence to that side, and, “Hey, make of that what you will.” If there’s a clear cut answer that allows you to sidestep all of that - like the Deputy Director of the FBI and member of the inner circle, privy to all the dirt, being quoted candidly that the accusation has no merit - then that’s as good as done and everything will be read in that light.
To be clear, I’m not saying that the NYT should deny Trump the chance of being acquitted in the public consciousness, and suppress any details that might exonerate him. Again, keep reading because let’s ignore the whole Epstein part of the article.
If we ignore Epstein, what is this article about? Well, it’s about the selective engagement with the press, coordinating leaks, deciding how to contextualize, what to withhold, who to pardon, etc. to get the mass media to move the ball in the direction that the team wants them to move
So then… What’s the sourcing for the details in this story? When we read about the fight between Bongino and Susan Wiles, with precise quotes that the NYT legal department has signed off on at risk of defamation and libel claims, how are they confident that none of the participants will file suit or that, otherwise, there’s no legal risk?
Is it more likely that the NYT has an invisible, undetectable drone that flies around recording the conversations of Susan Wiles or that their reporters sat down with Dan Bongino and reported to the world what he put down on the record for them?
What’s the sourcing for the details of this story? Is it from the group who you’re quoting about working professionally to coordinate manipulating the media?
To my mind, when we look at the Epstein files, you’ve got articles like this one that quote the sources complaining that they don’t have time to redact the millions of documents by the unreasonable deadline given by Congress - but ignore that the same individuals had already committed to doing what Congress demanded a year earlier and claimed to have had people working around the clock six months earlier, redacting documents so that the release could be made.
They’re people who, like above, evaluate freeing a predatory sex offender on the basis of optics versus protecting the president.
While it may be that it was during the earlier period that they were lying, and not the later one, it remains that Bondi, Patel and Bongino at the FBI, etc. claimed on the record to be doing the work that they then pretended was new work, several months later.
We know from inventory counts that 10-20% of the interviews with subjects/witnesses are still being withheld. Trump illegally took confidential government documents home with him after his first term and, plausibly, was able to keep a cache of those hidden despite Smith’s searches of Mar-a-Lago. There’s many reports going back decades about Trump destroying and refusing to divulge advice. How can we know that, even if Bongino was telling the truth about not knowing anything damning about Trump, that he would have access to the information needed to assess the question, given what we know about the President’s practices.
Again, that doesn’t necessarily mean that the President is guilty of anything. Hiding FBI 302s, in violation of the law, certainly doesn’t scream “innocence”, granted, but it’s not definitive and I’m not trying to imply otherwise.
The point is simply that the NYT and most of the media outlets keep forgetting that, while Trump is not the most brilliant man in the world of economics, science, etc. he is a master of leading media outlets by the nose and that every time you’re getting front row seat access to the details from the inner circle, it’s probably more likely that you’re part of the problem than part of the solution.
I guess I haven’t been following closely enough, what are the “nipple-related documents?”
In general, it’s not clear from her history with the courts how to interpret Ransome’s various releases over the years. I wrote a blog entry about it a while ago:
Many thanks to @pseudograph for the NYT link.
I haven’t finished reading the longish article, but: what a tribute to the determination to retain POWER, no matter what they had to ignore and sweep under the rug.
So that’s why he has that anus mouth. I see myself out. Sorry.
=1 thought+2prayers?
Feels like too many prayers, but there’s no alternative, you have to conserve the plural in “thoughts and players”, so 2 thoughts and 2 prayers I guess.
Their thoughts are pretty miniscule so that fits.
Loaves and fishes available as part of a premium package, presumably
I’ve gotten lost in this thread… What are you all actually talking about right now?
Moderating:
I agree with @Atamasama. Time to get back on topic.