No doubt. The man is supernaturally slippery.
I’m just saying. If he’s actually brought down, this is the funniest possible scenario.
Anything that actually proves any particular person was involved. Not sure exactly what it would be, but we’ve heard rumors of videos, and flight logs and such.
And they do have good reason to leak. This isn’t a case about Joe the Guy in Iowa, that maybe doesn’t get prosecuted. This is about people who have been, are, and probably aspire to be, the President of the United States of America. Passing the buck on POTUS being a child-raping criminal is a bit more important. Aside from the moral issues of letting him get away with it, there’s the national security issues to think about. Anyone out there who knows what’s really in that evidence has a huge amount of leverage over the president, and that can’t possibly be good.
At this point, you’re making a lot of assumptions that there is a magic bullet about particular people rather than evidence spread out over hundreds of pages of documents. And that there was sufficient reason, now that the target of the investigation was dead, to dig through the files anyway to determine if charges could potentially be filed against anybody else. And that this was deliberately suppressed. That’s toeing over the line into conspiracy theory.
Do I think there’s probably evidence in there that implicates some powerful people? Sure. Do I think in the context of the time with the evidence they had evaluated to that point that DOJ staffers had sufficient reason to continue digging through the evidence to target additional individuals? Maybe. You seem to be jumping to “yes” automatically, and it’s not clear to me the legal justification was actually there to do that.
That’s one reason to shut people up - to stop investigations before they get to the point they implicate other people. There’s no prima facie evidence this case was handled in a way different from any other case that might involve powerful people (and hence why a leak would be odd, if so). Whether or not that should be the way we handle such cases is a separate debate.
Which is exactly what I said in my first post above. No matter what angle I come at it from, it feels like I’m falling down a rabbit hole of conspiracist thinking.
I mean, let’s take the example: There’s no there there. All the rumours of evidence are false.
But they were a major factor in one of the most contentious elections the US has ever had. If there was no evidence, why didn’t someone in the Biden administration even try to make that clear? Why let Trump and MAGAs run wild with claims about Democratic Pedophiles, when you could easily show there’s nothing to support that?
But again, this isn’t just one case amongst hundreds, where it could get lost in the shuffle. It was a major factor in the election, and was in the news and Twittersphere all the time. Someone with access to the evidence would likely have thought, “I wonder?” and taken a look. It beggars belief that no one with access ever took a look at what could be one of the biggest criminal cases in US history.
The only way “no leaks at all” makes sense is if there’s nothing there, but again, “There’s nothing there” doesn’t make any sense either.
Hence the Rabbit Hole Problem.
You say this, but there have long been a number of credible accusations of this POTUS being an adult-raping criminal, and of course the “criminal” part is factual since his conviction, and that hasn’t seemed to be a moral issue or national security concern in the same way as these allegations.
To what end? It would only be tooted as proof, proof I tell you! that they were implicated in a coverup by the usual suspects.
There was nothing to gain by calling attention to the Epstein files if there was nothing there.
Yes, but those are known about. Hard to blackmail Trump with stuff that was shown in open court.
The whole point here is that nothing has been shown. And we see Trump melting down over the possibility of something being shown. That’s a man who’s ripe for blackmail.
The Epstein files were already being paid attention to. Releasing everything they have, if there’s really nothing in them, shuts up at least some people, and the rest will be the Alex Jones types who never believe anything anyways, but those people used to be on the margins.
By not debunking this (if that were possible), they let this become mainstream among a lot of voters, even ones who weren’t inclined to the Alex Jones mindset.
Ok, that might be where there’s a misunderstanding.
There’s almost no way any evidence they collected would ever have been released publicly, ESPECIALLY if there was nothing there. Those aren’t public records and to the extent they would have been made directly available to the public, it would have been in the context of a criminal investigation.
At best, somebody would have released a summary stating they found nothing actionable. And that’s the worst of all worlds - unsatisfying to conspiracy theorists and voyeurs and anybody else.
But they couldn’t debunk it, anything they did was going to be interpreted by the MAGAts in the worst possible light, and considered not terribly important by sane people, so better to do nothing.
May be that is an incorrect strategy but it’s not outside the realm of possibility that they thought it was a good one.
But then, why aren’t they coming out now to say anything?
As someone mentioned above, if there’s nothing there, but the Democrats act is if there is something there, they’re setting themselves up for the same complaints. “We got rid of Trump, and now Democratic President is also telling us there’s nothing there?!?!”
I mean really, the Democrats coming out and saying, “Okay guys, this one time, Trump is telling the truth” is about the only thing I could imagine that would make this finally go away.
Tell that to the Warren Commission and JFK conspiracy theorists. Nothing is ever going to make this go away. Not even full, high resolution copies of every single document collected.
The Democrats appear to be doing what they can without making stuff up - suggesting Trump should fulfill his promise (by releasing the documents) without stating that anything specific actually exists in them.
A case could be made that it’s not in the best interests of the Dems, the USA, or even the whole Homo Sapiens Sapiens species for this to go away.
But again, that’s in the context of a normal criminal investigation. This one isn’t normal, and there’s a vested public interest in seeing what they really have, even if all it shows is a big nothing. This, like “Hillary’s emails” or “Hunter’s laptop”, was being used to affect federal elections, and it’s in the public interest in such cases to at least try to give the voters the best information possible for them to base their votes on.
If they then turn around and vote for Trump anyways, well, at least we tried.
This is so odd to me. How could a man who has control of the FBI, CIA, Secret Service, and ICE be vulnerable to blackmail? How could a man whose lies are accepted by millions be vulnerable to blackmail? How could a man with no shame be vulnerable to blackmail? (I.e. couldn’t he just take out his blackmailer?) Most important, how can a man whose terrible nature, ignorance, and incompentence, and many crimes are well documented be vulnerable to blackmail?
I mean, you could tell me he rapes and murders vulnerable children in the Satanic temple at noon every Thursday, and I don’t think my own opinion could go much lower. My Trumpist cousins would just adjust their reality until either they refused to believe it, or thought it was fine.
I guess this is my real question. Why is the Epstein material different from all the other things we already know? Why are people who were willing to overlook rape, manslaughter-by-inept / cruel-policy, inappropriate behavior, any everything else, why is this thing suddenly a bridge too far?
Eh, if we’re just going to violate norms, policy, and laws in the “public interest” that’s just another way of saying we want to tip the scales whenever we consider it convenient to do so.
So, the question is really boiling down to “why didn’t they just violate the law in order to preserve the law?” And that’s not an easy thing to ask anybody to do.
Well, I mentioned somewhere, the actual crimes and other things are things they don’t actually believe. They bought the lie that it was all “Weaponization of government” against Trump, because those were lies they wanted to believe.
But this is different. “The Epstein Files prove the Democrats are evil, and Trump will release them Day One!” was foundational to a lot of their beliefs, and Trump now saying the files don’t exist, or are fakes, is a lie they don’t want to believe. So if someone were to finally publish this, it could damage Trump in ways nothing that came before could, because it strikes right at his base of support.
But is it illegal to publish this information? I mean, the House just voted on a resolution to do just that, and I don’t think anyone made the argument, “We can’t do that because it would be illegal!”
Plus, we see some evidence being published all the time. Police release photos and video evidence to help locate people of interest in a case, and news organizations often file Freedom of Information requests for such things. Some types of evidence may be protected by law, like financial or medical records, but there’s a lot more that isn’t so protected. It might be usual practice to keep that confidential, but again, none of this is “usual”.
Possible explanations:
There really is nothing in the files. It was all puffed-up bullshit.
-or-
Biden didn’t release the files because Bill Clinton is implicated; Trump won’t release the files because he’s implicated.
-or-
Trump assumed that the file was “Democrats top to bottom” and was shocked – shocked! – to find his name therein because he’s really that stupid.
The Mutually Assured Destruction scenario is plausible, but again, why has no one in the know leaked it? Are they all involved, or at least willing to be complicit in a cover-up of such magnitude?
Either way, we’re in Conspiracy Thinking Mode.