I agree.
Cooperating witnesses are common in federal cases, and they all have this issue.
All he needs is a fig leaf. His entire political career has been telling outrageous lies and paying no consequences. Americans are a docile and defeated people, they won’t do anything about this anymore than they did about his many other crimes.
I suspect that there is an attempt ongoing to rewrite the files.
[haven’t read every reply]
IMHO, we should probably acknowledge a distinction, here. There’s the MAGA faithful, and then there are the social media MAGA influencers who seem to have at least as much sway over MAGA as Trump does, and maybe even more at the moment.
Totally agree about the possibility/likelihood of Maxwell being induced to say (only) the right things that ‘establish’ Trump’s innocence and point to the guilt of others – likely Democrats – in exchange for an Uber out. She came from money. I wonder if there’s any of it left.
But, to me, how the MAGA influencers react to that possible play determines how the MAGA faithful do.
And ISTM that the MAGA influencers are – collectively – quite the wild card right now. A few of the more prominent among them would ‘merely’ have to insist that the only way to corroborate or disprove anything that Maxwell had to say would be to see the totality of the DOJ’s files on Epstein.
Which, to me, doesn’t move the ball forward much, if at all.
This looks like a challenging bell to un-ring. Could this possibly be the MAGA “Come to Jesus” moment for a big swath of the red hats? No idea. Nothing has been, to date. But this one does seem to have legs.
At this point with even some in his base in open revolt I don’t see how pardoning Epstein’s accomplice is going to help him at all. Will some of his base instantly embrace this out? of course, but they weren’t turning on him no matter what to begin with. The people on the right still upset about Epstein would be even more upset after this. This is stoking the fire, not covering up the scandal.
I have no idea how the Maga crowds are feeling. My boss doesn’t seem to want to talk about politics at the moment. I may attempt to discuss this with him on Monday if he’s in the office. He’s not often there.
I can’t decide if trump and his bucket of deplorable people in positions of power, are actually going to continue trying to sell the idea that the left built these fake Epstein files that point to Republicans or if they are going to try to just implicate people on the left.
The first seems implausible to me. I mean, if the left built the fake files, why didn’t they release them?
They might have a more difficult time with the second idea, but I’m really not sure. Maybe the files will disappear.
I have this nagging thought that I need to do more than sit on the couch and doom scroll and a 3 hour no kings protest on a Saturday is just not going to do enough to stop the trajectory we’re on. I think we need a work stoppage revolt and that means we need a charismatic leader to make such a suggestion. But I fear things are going to get violent.
Wouldn’t also still be kind of rich? Whatever else he was, Epstein did make a shit ton of money off his financial career, and she would have been on the receiving end of some of that. Did they confiscate all her money?
Such contradictions are always a part of conspiracy theories. The CTists don’t even bat an eye at such flaws, then just nod knowingly, and act like it’s all part of the convoluted plot.
They would have lost some of their verisimilitude. The guy that made the Cardiff giant buried it so that others could “accidentally” find it. Lent it a little credibility.
As far as Maxwell going to court, she could just as easily lie as long as her pardon is secured. Why not? The President owes her a favor.
Wouldn’t it take a whole lot more than anything she says to “exonerate” him? Her picture is in the dictionary under “unreliable witness”.
If she says to Blanche that Trump is clean, the DOJ gets that out there, and Blanche is Trump’s hero. MAGA and typical Republicans parrot that just like they did with Barr’s bullshit interpretation of the Mueller report.
Then Trump pays her back.
(Meanwhile, all the people she fingered, pun unfortunate, bear the spotlight.)
We’ve seen this movie before, only this time the DOJ is even more corrupt.
There is a fundamental problem here. Would she testify for Trump on the basis of the latter’s promise to free her? She must know what a promise from Trump is worth. Especially if it would cause a furor as it would. On the other hand, since Trump double-crosses everybody, he assumes that nobody else would keep a promise, especially a slime-ball like Maxwell. Thus he will not pardon her (or commute her sentence) until after she testify. I really can’t see them coming to any agreement.
She also knows Trump is the only way she gets out of prison. She knows the Democrats won’t make her a deal like this, so she might as well take the shot. Even if Trump screws her over, she’s no worse off.
Any promise Trump might make in regards to freeing Maxwell is essentially worthless as he simply cannot be trusted. Though she might be desperate enough to take a chance no matter how slim it might be for Trump to keep his word. If someone wrote this as part of a plot for a political thriller nobody would believe it.
You may have misspelled führer.
She may be facing a no-win scenario at this point. She cooperates in hopes of a pardon or release, and can’t trust that Trump will hold up his end of the deal. She refuses to cooperate, and Trump has her life made even more miserable in prison: gets moved from the low-security prison she’s in now to a maximum-security prison, gets a violent offender as a cellmate, gets abused by the guards, etc.
She has the chance to do something heroic and get on that stand and absolutely fucking tell the world the truth about Trump. That’s how the movie version of this sequence of events would end. She has the chance to basically do as much damage to Trump as anyone could.
But of course she’d have to have moral courage (or perhaps incredible spite) to do such a thing and I’m guessing sex child traffickers are not high on the list of people with moral courage.
I’d assume that if she did that, though (claim Trump is guilty), then the pardon wouldn’t be granted. Presumably, the pardon won’t be given until after she has gone on the stand and given “satisfactory” testimony.
Oh absolutely, she would face retaliation and would probably get sent to some secret prison somewhere to be tortured. I’m not saying it’s a viable route for her, I’m just saying that she has a powerful chance to do the right thing. For her to turn on Trump in this way would probably be the most powerful blow anyone could strike against him right now. I don’t think it would actually happen, but it’s what I’d do if I was somehow in a similar position.
If he makes a deal with her, and she says Trump is an innocent little daisy, and then he pardons her, he’s likely to lose maga supporters. They still know she’s a scumbag child sex trafficker, and if Trump sets her free? Well, that might be the crack that breaks the dam.
The MAGAs already think Trump’s innocent of wrong doing, so if he frees this POS child abuser Maxwell for stating what they already believe to be true, he’ll lose them. He’ll have set the devil free for no good reason.