EPSTEIN – THE WHOLE ENCHILADA

 

As the tip of the Epstein iceberg is gradually being revealed, something appears to become clearer and clearer. The Epstein files aren’t a distraction. They aren’t just a thorn in the side of Donald Trump. They aren’t even “just” a horrific chronicle of the suffering of the hundreds of victims of the worst sex-trafficker in memory. They are, rather, the core evidence of perhaps the deepest-reaching conspiracy and the worst elite network of corruption and perversion in history. An international conspiracy with direct ties to some of the most powerful and corrupt men on earth.

The Epstein files aren’t an isolated debility in the Trump regime. They are looking more and more like the key to everything in an international network of power, money and corruption, in which the currency that binds its members is the stolen innocence of children, and in which, it seems, just about everyone gets dirty in order to “keep each other honest” and loyal to the cult.

What we are witnessing is the slow-motion revelation of an international clandestine organization, the secret lodge of the rich and powerful, an underground society that reflects, perhaps more than any other, the hegemony of the One Percent elite. Considering that the name of the current president of the United States—himself one of the billionaire oligarchs—is mentioned directly or indirectly some 38,000 times in some 5,300 of the Epstein Files released to date—only perhaps half of the total—is it any wonder that key figures involved in carrying out the investigation have been purged by Donald Trump’s DOJ (headed up by the same defense team that was with him fending off the multiple federal felony indictments against him until he quashed (but didn’t disprove) them by managing to rise to office again, despite being a 34-count convicted felon? Or does it come as a surprise that many other DOJ legal professionals have resigned in protest due to regime interference in their probes?

It is not surprising either that only the most naïve of observers actually believe that Epstein committed suicide. Independent public opinion polls underscore just how few people believe the suicide story. One such poll published by Yahoo News showed that only 16% of those polled bought suicide as Epstein’s cause of death. The same poll showed that 39% were unsure what to believe, but 45% firmly believed the convicted sex-offender was murdered to keep him from talking.

It is interesting to note that despite ample evidence that Epstein was a serial rapist, child-sex predator and trafficker, and perhaps the most elite and prolific pimp in history, he was never convicted (due to his untimely death) on federal charges surrounding these crimes—charges on which he was indicted during Trump’s first term, when there was still some semblance of a working DOJ. He was being held at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York awaiting trial at the time of his mysterious demise, which happened on August 10, 2019, again, during Donald Trump’s first term as president, a little more than a month after Epstein’s arrest and indictment.

It is hard not to speculate, since Epstein’s sex-trafficking enterprise was very apparently based on catering to the perversions of very wealthy men, that he would have been unwilling to take his secrets to the grave if he wasn’t promised a mere slap on the wrist for the federal rap, the way he had been when he was convicted on ridiculously reduced plea-bargained state charges—procuring a minor for prostitution and soliciting a prostitute —in Florida in 2008, while he was already reported to be the head of a vast sexual slavery network. After all, his entire sex empire—in which as many as 1200 girls and young women were duped, exploited, raped and enslaved—orbited around what was basically a protection racket, in which Epstein’s currency was the minors he trafficked, and his silence was his collateral. His supposed suicide is, then, a hard sell.

And the speculation grows when naked light is shined on the hard facts surrounding his death. Despite the claim that he was under 24-hour surveillance while in custody at the MCC—a high-security pre-trial detention center run by the Federal Bureau of Prisons—at the time of his supposed suicide, two cameras that should have been surveilling his cell failed to operate. This meant that the suicide story was only witness-corroborated by the two guards who were reported to have found him “hanging off the side of his bed” at 6:30am. They claimed to have performed CPR and then arranged for Epstein to be taken to a hospital where he was declared deceased. The violations of what were reported to be strict normal security procedures have greatly reduced the suicide story’s ability to pass the smell test.

And Jeffrey Epstein’s death has not been the only one that the case surrounds.

Virginia Giuffre - They called it suicide.

Perhaps the second most prominent one was the death last year of Virginia Guiffre. She was a key witness in the cases against Epstein and his enabler, Ghislaine Maxwell.  But Virginia was so much more, as founder of a highly active victim advocacy group known as SOAR (Speak Out, Act, Reclaim).

A long-time victim of child sexual abuse who, by age 14 had long fallen into the hands of her first trafficker, Virginia eventually ended up at 17 working at Donald Trump’s Mar-a-Lago “spa”. She got that job through her father, a Mar-a-Lago employee, whom she later accused of sexually molesting her from age seven. It was there that she was poached by Ghislaine Maxwell as a personal masseuse for Jeffrey Epstein. She said that, at the time, she had confided to Maxwell and Epstein about her troubled young life to date and that it had been “the worst thing” she could do, because it allowed them to play on her vulnerabilities. From that point on she described her life as consisting of “being passed around like a plate of fruit.”

An underage Virginia with then-Prince Andrew
and trafficker/enabler Ghislaine Maxwell

A key accuser of both Epstein and Britain’s former Prince Andrew, to whom (among others) she was trafficked as a minor, Viginia was found dead at her home in Australia last year at age 41, in the midst of the Trump regime’s desperate attempts to cover up the Epstein files, and renewed international probes into their content. The death was ruled suicide, but suspicion continues to swirl around that ruling.

Three years before Epstein’s own death, Wendy Leigh, a biographer who was researching Epstein for a book, was found dead beneath the balcony of her home in London. A year later, in 2017, Leigh Skye Patrick, a woman identified as a former Epstein sex slave, was found dead of a drug overdose. Carolyn Adriano, another woman who identified herself as having been trafficked by Epstein in her youth, died the same way in 2023.  

Thomas Bowers

In 2019, the same year of Epstein’s death, Thomas Bowers, a former Deutsche Bank executive who managed Epstein's accounts, was found hanged in his California home. It is worthwhile recalling that there is reason to believe that Epstein was a powerful financier who, besides trafficking young girls to the rich and powerful, was also an apparent power broker in the world of high finance. It is also worth remembering that, for more than two decades, Deutsche Bank was the primary lender to Donald Trump’s organization, providing Trump with more than two billion dollars in loans despite his history of bankruptcies and red flags. Thomas Bowers was one of the officers who signed off on those loans. It wasn’t until after the January Sixth Insurrection that Trump fostered in 2021, that the bank cut all future public ties with the Trump organization, even though it was still holding more than 300 million dollars in outstanding loans with the then-former president.

In 2020, a year after Epstein’s death, Steve Bing, a film producer and investor with ties to Epstein, died after allegedly jumping from his apartment building.

Just three years after Epstein himself died in custody, one of his former associates met a similar end. Jean-Luc Brunel, a French modeling agent and suspected Epstein recruiter, was found dead in his cell in France, where he was awaiting trial on charges of rape and sex-trafficking. The cause of death, like that of Epstein, was “hanging”.

Mark Middleton

That same year (2022), Mark Middleton, a known Epstein associate and an advisor to former US President Bill Clinton, was found in Arkansas, not just hanged, but also shot. Oddly enough, that death was also ruled a suicide.

Even Trump’s former attorney general, William Barr, at the time expressed suspicion regarding the Epstein suicide story. But he would later walk these suspicions back, saying that he guessed the child sex-traffic kingpin’s death was merely “a perfect storm of screw-ups.” That said, however, the guards handling Epstein’s surveillance at the time of his death were later quietly charged with multiple federal counts of falsifying records. Meanwhile, amid accusations of negligence and Senate calls for prison reform, Barr also fired the head of the Federal Bureau of Prisons.

Epstein’s death led to dismissal of all trafficking-related charges against him. Focus was placed instead on the lower-profile figure of Ghislaine Maxwell, a British socialite and daughter of publishing tycoon Robert Maxwell. Ghislaine was convicted on five sex-trafficking counts and sentenced to prison for 20 years.

Maxwell has been smart enough to keep her mouth shut—it’s obviously healthier that way—while moving from a high security to a country club prison, and kowtowing to Trump for a possible presidential pardon. She is now saying the quiet part out loud, namely that she’ll testify that Trump is innocent of any involvement, either as a client (john) or partner in crime in Epstein’s trafficking of underage girls if he agrees to pardon her.  This is obviously transactional and raises a lot of obvious questions about Trump’s possible involvement with the sex-ring.

Ghislaine Maxwell with Trump

That kind of transactional proposal wouldn’t even be up for consideration under a normal, law-abiding administration, but under the Trump regime, anything is possible, as witnessed by the 1500 convicted felons he pardoned for their part in the January Sixth Insurrection of 2021, or the pardons he issued to his cronies in the effort to defraud American voters in the 2020 election.

Conservative writer and syndicated columnist George Will has provided, in my opinion, the best description so far of Donald Trump and his cabinet. He calls it, “a sickening moral slum of an administration.” We were “treated” once again this week to yet another disgusting performance by one of the two most immoral and unethical Trump sycophants in the government. I’m talking about Pamela Bondi, the person loosely known as the attorney general of the United States, but who, for the past year, has continued along with her assistant attorney general Todd Blanche, to head up the Trump criminal defense team, the same job they were doing before Trump invited them to become key figures in the criminal association that passes for the US administration.

Will: A sickening moral slum

I make no apology for calling this regime a criminal association. From its very beginning in January of 2025, the president and his cohorts have not even maintained the pretense of lawfulness that they did—with different, somewhat more ethical players—during his first term. This time around, Trump and his henchmen (and women) have blatantly and grossly violated the Constitution and broken federal law again, and again, and again. Both domestic and foreign policy under Trump 2.0 are based on an apparent standing order to simply break the law “and let them sue.” And this criminal organization has been able to make this method work, up to now, because the corrupt Republican Party leadership has allowed itself to be infiltrated and usurped, turning a blind eye and deaf ears toward the worse violations of the rule of law, and of the Bill of Rights, in the history of the Republic.

Normally, this sort of criminal behavior, even if espoused by the ruling party, would have been halted in its tracks by an unbiased Supreme Court. But in the Era of Trump, that once august pantheon of American law, has also been infected with Trump’s authoritarian designs. It now seems clear that this was Trump’s strategy—and his stroke of luck—when three seats out of nine on the Court came up for renewal on his watch during his first term, and he and his party made sure that the candidates chosen and approved were representatives of the radical far right, thus narrowing to just three the liberal democratic members of that body. This played perfectly into his autocratic strategy for a second no-holds-barred regime he hoped to establish in 2020—when American voters were wise enough to hand him a resounding defeat—and which he managed to procure in 2024—when American voters were not.

Analysts of all stripes warned that a second Trump term (in which he would have nothing to lose) would be disastrous for American democracy and the rule of law. We weren’t wrong. And the devastating results are on full display.

So this week, the so-called “attorney general” Pamela Bondi, (I used the term advisedly because her job description is to “enforce laws related to consumer protection, civil rights, and criminal justice”—or in other words, to be the officer in charge of ensuring the rule of law, none of which she is doing), was called before the House Judiciary Committee to testify on her purposely botched handling of the Epstein Files, which she was bound by law to turn over in full and unredacted to Congress more than 50 days ago. A law that she has blithely defied.

Faux Attorney General Pamela Bondi

But typical of the Trump regime and of Bondi’s sycophantic conduct up to now, instead of answering opposition politicians’ questions fully and professionally, she went off on a defensive tangent and staged a grotesquely obsequious vindication of her boss, and of her own involvement in what is clearly shaping up as a massive cover-up. Her entire appearance before the committee was performative, and the performance was aimed at an audience of one.

The ranking member of the committee—whose chairman is another unapologetic Trump sycophant, Republican Representative Jim Jordan of Ohio—Maryland Democrat Jamie Raskin, was witheringly honest in his opening remarks, saying that Bondi was “running a massive Epstein cover-up right out of the Department of Justice.”

Raskin pointed to Bondi’s failure to release millions of files that she is legally obliged to disclose under the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump signed into law in November after reversing his opposition to the bill, apparently due to his plummeting ratings in opinion polls, where even his own MAGA base is demanding transparency and justice.

Rep. Jamie Raskin

The lawmaker also slammed the DOJ for redacting the names of alleged Epstein co-conspirators and enablers, while failing to black out information and even underage images specifically identifying Epstein’s victims. Summarizing Bondi’s intent, Raskin said, “So you ignored the law, and even with over 100,000 employees at your disposal, you acted with some mixture of staggering incompetence, cold indifference and jaded cruelty towards more than a thousand victims, raped, abused and trafficked. This performance screams cover-up.”

Bondi’s lack of decorum would have been astounding had she not been mimicking her own boss’s way of talking to people. Failing all known protocol, she addressed the ranking member simply as “Raskin” and said that he was “a washed-up loser lawyer…not even a lawyer.” It was a phrase right out of the Trump lexicon.

She also clashed with New York Democrat Jerry Nadler and with Washington Democrat Pramila Jayapal.

Rep. Jerry Nadler

It was in her clash with Nadler that she revealed the callous nature of her Trump-defensive stance. Nadler said he only had one question for her: “How many of Epstein’s co-conspirators have you indicted? How many perpetrators are you even investigating?”

Bondi wagged an admonishing finger like a mother correcting a child, and sputtered, “First, you showed a…I find it…”

And Nadler repeated his simple question: “How many have you indicted?”

Bondi snapped, “I…excuse me! I’m going to answer the question!”

To which Nadler replied, “Answer my question.”

A defiant Bondi said, “No! I’m going to answer the question the way I want to answer the question. Your theatrics are ridiculous.”

“No,” said Nadler, “You’re going to answer the question the way I asked it.”

A flustered Bondi appealed to fellow sycophant and committee chairman Jim Jordan for help, but Nadler repeated the question again: “How many have you indicted?”

Then she launched into a windy diatribe (and complete non sequitur), first about how “transparent” Donald Trump was, and then about how nobody had asked Merrick Garland about Epstein, and finally waded into a totally unrelated and unsolicited stock market report: “This administration released over 3 million pages of documents, over 3 million,” she said—conveniently obviating the other estimated millions of documents she is still hiding in violation of the law. “And Donald Trump signed that law to release all of those documents.” (Which Bondi didn’t do). “He is the most transparent president in the nation’s history. And none of them — none of them — asked Merrick Garland over the last four years one word about Jeffrey Epstein. How ironic is that? You know why? Because Donald Trump…the Dow…the Dow right now is over…the Dow is over 50,000…” This sudden change of subject caused opposition committee members to laugh. “I don’t know why you’re laughing,” she snapped. “You’re a great stock trader, as I hear, Raskin. The Dow is over 50,000 right now, the S&P at almost 7,000, and the Nasdaq smashing records. Americans’ 401(k)s and retirement savings are booming. That’s what we should be talking about.”

I think the significance of this pronouncement may have been lost on many people. But what she was basically saying was, if business is booming, who cares what happened with a thousand-plus Epstein victims? Who cares how tight Trump’s ties were to Epstein? Who cares that Trump called Epstein “a great guy” who shared his taste for women “on the younger side”? Who cares that many of the gazillionaires named along with Trump in the Epstein files are some of the ones most benefiting from a bullish stock market? Who cares, as long as the oligarchy is getting richer and richer? Who cares about some little nobodies who have it tough in their teen years?

Lummis thought:
Who cares? What's the big deal?

This generalized GOP attitude was reflected by another woman this past week, namely Wyoming Republican representative Cynthia Lummis. As the tireless efforts of California Democrat Ro Khanna and Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie began to bear fruit, and started revealing the horrors of the files Bondi has been obstructing, Lummis stated in an interview with reporter Pablo Manríquez, “I’ve not been one of the members who has glommed on to this as an issue. I’ve sort of intentionally deferred to others to find out about it. But nine-year-old victims …Wow!”

Lummis admitted that “initially, my reaction to all this was, ‘I don’t care. I don’t know what the big deal is.’ But now I see what the big deal is, and it was worth investigating. And the members of Congress that have been pushing this were not wrong. So that’s really my only reaction.”

While it seems like way too little, way too late—she seems to have been fine with it when it was about girls 14 to 18 being raped and trafficked—at least she appears to have had something of an awakening, which is more than can be said for the vast majority of GOP politicians who still “don’t care and don’t know what the big deal is.” And so, we find ourselves wandering into that “sickening moral slum” George Will talks about, in which at least half the politicians in the country are apparently fine with the sexual slavery and trafficking of minors as long as it is carried out and consumed by their colleagues, friends and donors.

Bondi also bristled when Pramila Jayapal asked the Epstein victims present for the proceedings to stand and asked them to raise their hands if they had still never been able to talk to anyone at the DOJ. All of the women raised their hands.

Rep. Pramila Jayaypal

Jayapal then said, “Attorney General Bondi, you apologized to the survivors in your opening statement for what they went through at the hands of Jeffrey Epstein. Will you turn to them now and apologize for what your Department of Justice has put them through with the un…absolutely unacceptable release of the Epstein files and their information?”

Again Bondi sought to deflect: “Congresswoman, you sat before… Merrick Garland sat in this chair twice….”

“Attorney General Bondi…” Jayapal interrupted her.

And when Bondi persisted, Jayapal reclaimed her time. Jim Jordan tried to rescue Bondi saying that she should be able to answer the question as she wished, but Jayapal said no, that it was her time and she was waiting for an answer to her specific question on which Bondi was deflecting. Even as Jordan was telling Jayapal her time was up, she continued, accusing Bondi of an enormous cover-up and again appealing to her to, at least, on a “human level”, turn to the victims and apologize for what the DOJ has done to them on her watch.

Bondi continued to evade all questions, clashing with others including New York Democrat Daniel Goldman and Texas Democrat Gene Wu, at one point saying that those who impeached Trump twice and failed to get a Senate conviction should be apologizing instead of criticizing Trump. “You sit here and you attack the president,” she said, “and I am not going to have it. I’m not going to put up with it.” It was an odd, almost sad thing for her to say since it made her ridiculous, as if she thought she somehow had authority over the committee, when she was the one who had been called in to explain her disastrous performance as attorney general.

Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie

That was when Kentucky Republican Thomas Massie broke in and  lashed out at Bondi saying that the redaction issues she was being questioned about were a  “massive failure” on her part. He focused particularly on the blacking out of the name of Les Wexner, the former CEO of Victoria’s Secret, reminding her that Wexner was “a co-conspirator named in an FBI document.”

Wexner - alleged co-conspirator's name redacted

Bondi said that redaction was corrected “within 40 minutes.” Massie shot back, “(within) 40 minutes of me catching you red-handed.”

“Red-handed,” Bondi scoffed before accusing Massie of having “Trump derangement syndrome.”

In the coming days, I will be writing a lot more on the far-reaching influences of Jeffrey Epstein and his incredibly diverse empire, the core of which consisted of having something dark and ugly on a vast array of powerful men.

But for now, this is my conclusion regarding the role of Pamela Bondi. As attorney general of the United States, Bondi is in possession of the power to be an independent guarantor of the rule of law. But in a way, she is as controlled by the Epstein crime empire as any of Epstein’s other enslaved victims, because she has chosen to do Donald Trump’s bidding, and to let him subordinate her to his secret life. Trump, then, has “trafficked” Bondi to Epstein and his billionaire johns, making her the chief protector of men who, in many cases, have committed horrendous sex crimes, for which she would normally have the power to prosecute and put them away for the rest of their lives.

Instead, she has left the attorney general’s post vacant and has abandoned her duty to the American people, in order to protect the “dirty little secrets” of some of the most powerful men on earth, becoming their shill, and, instead of ensuring that justice is done, has sought to ensure that it will not. As such, there is only one big difference between Bondi and Ghislaine Maxwell. Both are enablers, both the keepers of terrible secrets, both the willing victimizers of hundreds upon hundreds of minor girls, both willingly doing the bidding of powerful men and, as women and as human beings, treacherously seeking to lead their victims to believe that they have their best interests in mind, while leading them to victimization.

But the big difference that I just mentioned is that Ghislaine, monster that she is, acted within the criminal organization of a very powerful man. Bondi’s crime is much worse, since she has made use of the awesome power of the Executive to not only protect the guilty, but also to convert the erstwhile autonomous department in charge of guaranteeing Americans’ rights and demanding that justice be served into a criminal enterprise whose aim is to do just the opposite, and has done so of her own volition, and in the name of her handler, Donald J. Trump.