In the Cosby case, failure by the new DA to comply with the agreement the former DA reached with Cosby meant that the prosecution by the new DA was a breach of Cosby’s constitutional rights. The conviction was set aside on appeal.
You’re a US lawyer with criminal experience so I defer to you, but I have a question.
Suppose a husband and wife are both charged with some sort of fraud in relation to their mom & pop business. Could the husband offer to plead guilty on condition that the charges be dropped against his wife?
If the DA agrees to that and hubs pleads guilty, could the DA then change course and continue the prosecution of the wife?
Indeed this is a key question. Exactly what/who that we do not already know about are we expecting to find, and what will it take for us to accept it as true?
Epstein’s a pimp, many of the exploited girls are underaged, and influential people associate with the pimp and as stated we already have some lists of who they were. What else are we looking for?
(Besides that whole notion of “this will be the proof that finally destroys my enemy” is kind of amusing in this post-factual age…)
Possibly (though how binding it would be is not clear AFAIK the case @Northern_Piper cites above is about the defendant’s sentence not other things the DA might have agreed to in the plea deal) but that’s not what happened here.
This was not Epstein going “I’ll do my time but don’t go after my innocent friends Donald Trump and Bill Gates I dragged into this mess”. The plea deal was clearly about that (or rather Epstein getting away with horrible sex crimes against children so powerful people were not held accountable), but on paper it was just between Epstein and the DA.
If a non party to an agreement seeks to enforce it, they would need to be specifically named in the agreement as a third party beneficiary. Arguably, the wife could make the claim. A general reference to “all co-conspirators” isn’t such a reference.
(Of course, if there is a plea agreement that covers both husband and wife, it would probably be advisable that wife also execute the plea agreement)
Here, the surest sign that Epstein’s plea deal didn’t absolve any other participants is the presence of Ghislaine Maxwell in prison.
I don’t think Epstein having compromising material on powerful people is a conspiracy theory. His whole career (and his plea deal) make no sense unless he had at least some of that. Less believable is that there could be seriously damaging evidence about Donald Trump that has survived but kept secret for decades after Epsteins death and will now be released by congress.
The only evidence for this is Trump’s behavior. He’s always be good at telling his Maga base what they want hear, but exceptionally his position on this has actually gotten the Magasphere upset (not political Twitter, or the NYT opinion pages, or the usual people he delights in upsetting)
Of course one explanation is Trump is senile AF and losing it. He knows he did some sex crimes with Epstein and his addled brain is unable to accept the fact there isn’t anything particularly compromising in those files.
And why should it? He hasn’t ever been held accountable for anything he has ever done, dispite overwhelming evidence to support the alleagtions. He in fact gets rewarded for his bad behavior.
But thats what makes this exceptional. This is not Trump just flat out lying about what’s in the file. He didn’t release it and claim it was full of incriminating stuff on Democrats when it in fact contained more on him than anyone else. That would be Trump following the MO that’s worked for him all through years, and unless there was something super super incriminating he’d get away with it too.
By not releasing the file and telling everyone to shut up about it he’s actually upset his base. Something he’s never been able to do in the past.
Their brains are addled as well, give them a week and they will all fall in line like Fox News has done. Nothing to see here. Its a democratic hoax.
This country is sick.
What they are hoping for is not a friends and associates list. As noted above, that’s been released for a decade now.
What’s wanted is a logbook or diary, or better yet videos, detailing who did what to who when and where. With plenty of damning lurid details.
That’s what’s wanted now. Did such material ever exist? As to trump specifically does the part including him still exist? Hellifino.
Yeah this is the key question. IMO there is a significant chance it did exist at some point. Epstein’s career and plea bargain make no sense if he didn’t have compromising information about powerful figures.
Does it still exist and contain incriminating details on Trump? I have real trouble believing that, not that evidence of Trump (and other very high profile figures but Trump especially) abusing children with Epstein might have existed at some point. But that it could still exist and have successfully been kept secret for decades after Epsteins death through three presidential campaigns Trump was running in? That seems to stretch the bounds of credulity.
But Trump is behaving like there is something in there, thats the only thing that gives me pause. Of course the other explanation is Trump is just senile AF
Putin has the records with the lurid details. And so far Putin is holding it over trump. So trump’s trying (clumsily) to thread the needle of blustering Putin that he’s not afraid, while also doing Putin’s bidding so Putin won’t retaliate against trump by releasing the lurid details.
Meanwhile in public we see trump trying to minimize the possiblity such stuff ever existed. Which is him greasing the skids for crying “It’s all faked!” if / when it does leak out. And perhaps buying time while the corrupt toady faction within DoJ / FBI is combing the records trying to ensure any and all copies, official or otherwise, of trump-incriminating evidence have been disappeared. Along with all evidence of the disappearance.
Let’s try to get squared away with dates. Epstein was arrested on federal charges and died in custody in the summer of 2019. Maxwell was arrested in 2020.
It was his original Florida case of procuring child prostitution where he got a slap-on-the-wrist plea deal that was decades back, in 2005-2008. And between ‘08 and ‘19 there were numerous lawsuits over this sort of conduct. In spite of all that, many of the rich and influential still continued to associate with him.
It is entirely in the realm of the possible that a “diary, or better yet videos, detailing who did what to who when and where, with plenty of damning lurid details” (credit to LSLGuy) existed but was never actually in DOJ custody, that Maxwell got rid of it in the last months of 2019 or that it was obtained but was lost or destroyed or tainted beyond legal usefulness in the past 6 years. But again , the terse “nothing to see here” was one of the worst possible ways to communicate it. Followed by “it’s all a hoax”. They could have said “The Biden DOJ ruined the records” and then Jim Jordan would call committee meetings demanding that Biden Admin officials and former DOJ staff prove it was not so. But they chose the stupid way to do it.
Meanwhile DJT being an actual habitual conspirator in many other realms, is paranoid about what could still come out since his own mentality tells him somebody must be holding on to something (because that’s what HE would do).
The MAGA cult, as I mentioned earlier, would approve of any record being doctored to fit their prejudices, and is upset why wasn’t that done to begin with.
As to the last paragraph …
Heck, we know that when trump took office he summoned many of the billionaire class to the WH for individual meetings w somebody there. About which nobody said anything afterwards. He might well have used the Epstein records he had gotten ahold of as part of a threat to the fatcats to shut up and fall in line. Or else. Oh yeah, and to start tithing the trump org starting that very week.
Not that he didn’t have plenty of other ways to corruptly abuse them using federal power. But a lurid Epstein release would be much more of a wildcard as now public opinion gets involved. And if trump ever leaves the White House alive, you know he’ll be keeping the blackmail material even if he then surrenders control of DoJ, etc., to the next president.
So the threat to the billionaires exists to at least the end of trump’s life, if not beyond.
He really, really, doesn’t want to be on the receiving end of that same medicine.
Yeah memory of dates is crap it turns out (though my memory normally fails the other way, thinking stuff was a couple of years ago that was decades ago). But that is still two election cycles ago and any evidence on Trump etc. would have existed for decades at that point
I have really trouble believing it could have been around during all the events you describe (including the civil cases, at least one against Trump), and all that was going on during Trump’s rise to power, and no one would leak it to the public.
But Trump is behaving like that is the case
Stick with me through this.
Trump admits in his books that he served as an FBI informant. He says that he knew that he’d be dealing with Mafia elements as part of working in the casino industry so, to protect himself from trouble with the government, he’d just tell them everything that he observed that night be questionable. (Trump makes a point to claim this as his own idea and make note of how smart it is - which makes me suspect that it was really his dad or lawyer or someone that proposed it, but that’s besides the point.) He notes that he had a handler and that said handler spent significant time hanging around.
Trump also claimed (I forget where exactly, I think it was an interview) that as soon as he heard Epstein was under investigation, that he immediately called the authorities and offered to dish on Epstein (which, in a sense, would be admirable).
From everything that I know of the law enforcement world (police, FBI, etc.) they live and breath note taking. Every conversation that they have, that might be relevant to some future proceeding, goes into their notes. If someone calls in to give testimony on some subject, that’s going to get typed out and put in a folder.
We’ve never seen any FOIA release of government transcripts of Donald Trump dishing out on mafioso nor Jeffrey Epstein. I think we do have confirmation that he was serving as an informant to the FBI, but no further details.
We’ve been told that Epstein had worked with somewhere between a few dozen and a hundred different women, and that the FBI has interviewed them all. Again, that should be thousands of pages of interviews. To my awareness, we haven’t seen those. Only Virginia Giuffre’s interview has been released.
From what has been ferreted out by the press, the most well-supported case of potential blackmail would have been Leslie Wexner (founder of L Brands). Wexner appears (according to journalists) to have been the origin of Epstein’s wealth, giving him free houses and cash for unknown reasons, early in his career. If there was an investigation of blackmail, the FBI would probably have interviewed Wexner and those around him. We’d expect to see reports and transcripts on the subject. I don’t believe that we have.
In general, what has been provided are some top-level assessments and read-outs. But those all build on top of what - given the number of people involved - should be tens of thousands of pages of source materials. Pam Bondi, I believe, has admitted that the total quantity of information runs to at least that size.
Given that we haven’t seen some particular items that we know to exist, circumspect behavior by people involved - and those people being in charge of the information releases - it’s hard to have much faith in the top level assessments that have been publicly released. It might all be true and accurate. It could well be that, for as much smoke as there may be within all of the underlying interviews, there wasn’t enough to pinpoint more than one or two fires - Epstein and Maxwell. Plausibly, others could have been involved - but the girls weren’t able to positively identify them. Plausibly, blackmail might have been involved, but Epstein handled it all himself and never talked about it with anyone - and the subjects of blackmail didn’t let anything slip either.
Insufficient evidence isn’t the same thing as innocence, it’s just a lack of legal liability. Just because the FBI summaries rightly conclude that everyone’s not prosecutable, that doesn’t mean that there might not be smaller and greater levels of shade that could be cast in particular directions, if we had more of the underlying information.
In an ideal world, such shade wouldn’t be cast when there’s insufficient evidence to prosecute. In nearly all situations, it would be reasonable to keep all of this private and confidential. But, as said, the people controlling the information are themselves people who are related to and potentially complicit in some of what occurred. While it may be true that Trump was happy to turn on Epstein, we can imagine that he did so for other reasons - e.g. to swap in return for ending an Federal fraud investigation, or to avoid liability for some of the things that he did with Epstein. We see Trump having a close friendship with John Cassablancas and starting his presidency by working with George Nader. Good Christian, Republican girls that competed in Miss Teen America have accused the president of slipping into their changing rooms, to ogle.
In that particular case, it’s hard to hold much trust without full transparency.
It’s been nigh on ten years now and I have yet to see any of this cleverness, real or imagined. I mean, you’ve heard his jokes, right?
That’s not totally impossible. But that it could happen and all the details not be public knowledge, with everyone involved having lucrative book deals, by now is pretty much impossible. Even the most sensitive FBI cases of the past involving informants, mafia, spies etc. are now fully in the public domain.
FOIA requests can and are generally denied if the people being investigated and/or interviewed are still alive.
Records containing sensitive information about Fred Trump should be available. Donald Trump’s - even if he was not president - would generally not be. It’s quite plausible that James Comey knew more about Trump and his activities than was just in the Steele Memos, when they first met.
FBI and DOJ records are different than, say, an FDA study on wheat germ. The rules around release are much more strict.
Yup but that doesn’t stop it from leaking nonetheless. If you look at all the big sensitive FBI operations of the past (Donnie Brasco, Robert Hansen, John Gotti, the war on terror, etc.) all the details are in the public domain now. The idea something this explosive could be kept completely secret without any details leaking, is not plausible