Category Archives: Law and Justice

The eternal horror of things like the so-called Epstein files

I woke up thinking how the longtime operation of Jeffrey Epstein and his wing-woman Ghislaine Maxwell (including Epstein’s convenient death in federal detention during Trump 1.0) is the perfect illustration of how the powerful always prey, unaccountably, on the vulnerable. The privileged elites, rightfully hated by virtually everyone else, live by a different set of laws, rules and morality than the rest of us. They have always felt truly feel entitled to own everything and to make every decision for everybody else.

The rest of us are fungible, expendable pawns to be used to their best advantage. Their logic is impeccable, if self-serving. If 60,000 more poor people die preventable deaths, or 600,000 (estimated deaths so far from Musk canceling USAID) a million, or a hundred million, as the direct result of policies that ensure that the wealthiest can hoard even more wealth, how is that the fault of the super-wealthy? It’s simply democracy.

These rich powerful men saw the needy, cute 14 and 15 year-old girls Epstein and Maxwell collected from broken homes in working class neighborhoods as disposable receptacles for their desires. Most kids that age are insecure and easily seduced by praise and promises. Epstein literally groomed them, using his ultra sophisticated and charming procuress Ghislaine Maxwell to gain their trust. Epstein and Maxwell showered attention, praise, money, expensive gifts and the promise of a bright future on susceptible girls. They carefully screened the girls so they could be freely exploited without any fear of anything ever happening to Epstein and other the powerful men who used them. The girls were just objects of lust for them.

To the girls, the attraction was being made to feel special and the promise of money and class like the elegant Ghislaine Maxwell. Maxwell was a spoiled, entitled, self-hating, pathetic, deeply damaged exploiter who was drawn to Epstein because he was like her beloved father, the ultimate scumbag billionaire who ripped off the pension funds of his own workers because he somehow wasn’t rich enough. Never having really had her shady, preoccupied father’s love (he left her nothing in his will) and in desperate need of wealth, she found another rich monster to cling to and became an abuser herself in order to feel some kind of power and self-worth.

The wealthy, well-connected men who sexually used these girls probably got off as much on the fact that the girls were garbage they could do whatever they want to as any other aspect of it. They were powerful and untouchable and these girls were cute, safe and ready for use, otherwise disposable instruments for the gratification of the mens’ undeniable desires. 

A highly respectable older man I once knew, who was likely a pedophile, asked me once why pedophiles were so hated, why they were so often killed by rapists and murderers when they got to prison. I stated the obvious — it’s probably because they prey on the most vulnerable and defenseless among us and the harm they do to their innocent young victims scars them for the rest of their lives. Even a psychopathic serial killer with a life sentence can probably grasp the evil of this on some level. If anyone deserves a harsh, violent end it’s someone who takes advantage of a trusting young person, and inflicts lifelong damage, for their own twisted gratification.

Of course, because of the wealth and power of the men Epstein secretly videotaped having sex with girls, the essential ugliness of the issue becomes obscured. It turns into an abstraction, a 1,000,000 page file to be haggled over by politicians, like the JFK assassination files. 62 years later, the true story of how JFK was killed, and who arranged his murder, is still shrouded in officially sanctioned bullshit. Anyone who questions the highly unlikely official lone gunman version is called a conspiracy theorist, though the real conspiracy appears to involve the obfuscation of what actually happened in Dallas and which powerful, unaccountable men arranged it.

A group of survivors of Epstein’s empire of lifelong trauma has shown great courage and resolve and they deserve a measure of justice for the abuse they were forced to endure. Their suffering is the heart of the Epstein files, whatever the rich fucks who scramble to protect themselves from shameful revelations about themselves may have to say about it. And, of course, it’s not as if Trump, Epstein’s lustful running buddy for decades, is mentioned in the files thousands of times, more than any other powerful man associated with the late pervert. Why would he be? There was no reason for the FBI to reassign 1,000 agents to spend thousands of hours scrubbing his name from files that are a complete hoax and don’t actually contain anything incriminating about anyone, was there?

And besides, while Trump pardons, the day after two ceremonial turkeys, a felonious former president of Honduras, imprisoned for importing tons of cocaine into the US, he is illegally killing men on boats (86 to date, that we know of) he accuses, with all evidence of their theoretical crime at the bottom of the ocean, of being terrorists bringing deadly drugs into the USA.

Welcome again to the Age of Incoherence. This is what happens when billionaires promote a power-crazed, vain, incurious, grandiose, crazy, manipulable, infinitely covetous idiot to power and age and genetics add dementia to the mix. What could go wrong?

Pam Bondi on the guilt of all Trump enemies, real or imagined

During a press conference after the dismissal of the cases against James Comey and Leticia James, AG Pam Bondi, who makes Bill Barr look like a straight shooter, was asked:

If I could just get your reaction to the James Comey and Leticia James cases being dropped today back in Washington.   James Comey put out a video, he said this matters most because a message has to be sent — the president of the United States could not use the Department of Justice to target his political enemies.  Your reaction to the cases being dropped and to that specific investigation.

“Sure, we’ll be taking all available legal actions including an immediate appeal to hold Leticia James and James Comey accountable for their unlawful conduct. I’m going to keep going on this, I’m not worried about someone who has been charged with a very serious crime. His alleged actions were a betrayal of public trust.”

Betrayal of public trust? 

The sitting attorney general, for the time being, anyway, stating “held accountable for their unlawful conduct” of two people hated by Trump who she was instructed to prosecute whether or not there was a likelihood of conviction in either case. She’s not worried about the feelings of someone she’s charged with a “very serious crime”.  She’s not worried about the fact the attorneys who work for her already wrote memos about all the good reasons to decline prosecution of these two. She’s not worried that her boss was credibly charged with very, very, very serious crimes he clearly committed, which would have been proved at trial with a mountain of evidence.  His crimes were especially heinous, like his ongoing mass murder of people on boats,  compared to the contrived “very serious crimes” that these two were vindictively charged with, at Trump’s command. Compared to Tom Homan taking a $50,000 cash bribe on videotape from the FBI? Commie talking point.

The presumption of innocence?  Not for people Trump tells me are evil! 

No wonder the Qataris used to pay Pamela Jo Bondi $115,000 a month for her lobbying and legal expertise…

Quickly forgotten atrocity by the deadly dotard in chief

Trump rage posted this in response to a viral short video in which elected veterans of the armed forces and intelligence services reminded serving members of their oath not to follow illegal orders.

The video was difficult to find on the YouTube search engine or any other search engine I tried.  Fortunately I had it in my history from viewing it the other day:

In fairness to the NY Times, a paper that regularly publishes important investigative pieces and blurs crucial lines with equal frequency, it ran this article yesterday.

Here are a few recent favorites of mine from the front page of the journal of record for the United States of America, but first:

You go, girl.

Jeffery Epstein — blackmail billionaire

There were as many as 1,000 girls, in a pyramid scheme (get some of your junior high school classmates, bring ’em to Epstein’s, earn $400 each) who were sexually exploited, and harmed for life, by “financier” Jeffery Epstein over several decades. These abuse survivors are calling for release of the Epstein information the Department of Justice is hoarding. This material most likely includes the videotapes master blackmailer Epstein compiled as kompromat for shakedowns of wealthy, public men, as well as compromising photographs of adult men (Trump for one, mentioned by Michael Wolff who was shown the Polaroids by Epstein) with topless teenagers confiscated from his safe.

It could all be released today, of course, if Trump ordered it. Even after the Trump DOJ closed down the Biden DOJ’s investigation claiming there was nothing in the files to predicate further investigation. This was right after Trump’s weaponized DOJ flagged Trump’s own name thousands of times in an emergency FBI audit involving 1,000 agents working 24 hour shifts to comb through the entire file. A parliamentary trick, a discharge petition, worked, once the House was back in session, and, after months of shut downs by Trump and MAGA Mike, the House voted 427-1 yesterday, and the Senate, by unanimous consent, to release the files that Trump could order released today, without votes in the House, Senate, a veto, an override of the president’s veto, a claim that the files about the Democrat [sic] “hoax” are part of an ongoing criminal investigation into Bill Clinton and Rosie O’Donnell, and yet another emergency application to the Supreme Court.

Something I’ve been thinking about every time I hear how rich and influential “financier” Jeffrey Epstein was. You never hear about the source of Epstein’s fabulous wealth and influence. He was a high school graduate with a head for numbers, first hired as a teacher by Bill Barr’s father who ran an exclusive Manhattan private school, after Epstein lied about his education — and the charmer was kept on after the lie was exposed. Epstein’s genius appears to have been gaining access to and influence over very wealthy and influential white men, and getting large sums of money from them.

Occam’s razor — the simplest explanation is usually correct — suggests that the source of this super wealth was blackmail. Epstein was a psychopath with a well-known sexual preference for “barely legal” (in the hideous phrase of former Trump antagonist Megyn Kelly) girls around 14-15 years old, but who looked younger than their years. Every room in his various mansions was wired for sound and video. Many rich and influential men, and a few women, were his guests, friends and shot the shit with him via text, phone and while enjoying his hospitality. You connect the dots.

Cooperation with Nazi types never goes well for anybody

third in a series of consecutive daily texts to Chuck Chuck BoBuck

Senator Schumer:

Some still find it hyperbolic to compare MAGA to the Nazi party.  This critique is made by people unfamiliar with the Nazi seizure of power, the cast of characters involved and Germany’s lawless, violent lurch to Nazism.  A longtime student of the history of the Nazi rise to power (Mr. Hitler and company killed almost my entire family back in Europe) I can point to a number of reasons the comparison of the Trump administration to Hitler’s is directly on point.  

Understanding what we are facing in “MAGA” (aka GOP, John Birch Society, Kochtopus, Project 2025) demonstrates the abject futility of trying to negotiate with this type.  Only organized, unified resistance, without fractures, or compromises by ‘moderates’, the ruptures that made Weimar liberal opposition fail, can overcome the plans these hyper-motivated American fascists have been carrying out for decades.

“The Leader’s word has the force of law” (Fuhrerworte haben Gesetzenkraft) — Trump claims Article II as the complete justification for virtually all of his unlawful actions including his usurpation of Congressional powers delegated by Article I.   He has a doctrinaire 6-3 “Unitary Executive” Supreme Court that agrees with him, on an emergency basis, almost every time one of his unconstitutional, abusive assertions of power is challenged.

Trump has purged the government and civil service, replacing qualified long serving officials and experts with those who publicly profess complete loyalty to his every lie.  The Nazis made membership in the party, and proof of “Aryan blood”, requirements for practicing all professions in Germany.   A personal oath of loyalty to Hitler replaced the standard military oath.

Trump had a volume of Hitler’s collected speeches at his bedside when he was married to Ivana.  He refers to enemies as illegals, vermin, dangerously sick people, blood poisoners.   He is a racist demagogue with a thirst for killing.   Recall the lame duck rash of executions of federal death row inmates he ordered before he was dragged out of the White House kicking, screaming and stealing classified documents, after fomenting a violent attack on the Capitol to overturn the certification of an election he lost.  Consider his ongoing war crimes in the Caribbean and Pacific, extrajudicially executing “drug dealers” to provoke a war with Venezuela, his bombing of Iran, his willingness to starve millions of Americans to advance his “agenda”.  

There is also Trump’s Sprachregelung (“rules for how to properly refer to unpopular things”).   Hitler’s government prescribed what words could be used, always anodyne terms for things like “killing” “liquidation” and so on.  Here we have “efficiency”, “anti-corruption”,  “patriotism,” “drain the swamp.” “transparency,” “Democrat traitors” and so on.  These framings cover the deliberate destruction of careers, further immiserating the already challenged, increasing homelessness, desperation, violence, allowing starvation and increasing preventable medical deaths.  All desirable and useful outcomes for President Project 2025 and his dream of a rebellion by poor people and the imposition of a police state.

Project 2025 has unleashed a massive force of heavily armed ICE agents, masked, out of uniform, executing SA (Brown Shirt) street tactics against non-violent civilians.  He is spoiling for forceful reactions from protesters of these abuses, and the general precarity he has raised to almost unbearable levels, to justify a police state he controls completely.  Your vote, and a few other Democratic votes, allowed him the obscenely massive budget for this unaccountable paramilitary arm of MAGA, in the name of keeping the government open.

He is building an immense bunker under the Epstein/Marie Antoinette Ballroom after illegally demolishing the East Wing.  It’s hard not to imagine what will take place down there if democracy, we all hope, prevails over American fascism — a remake of the final scenes of that great German movie Downfall.   Hopefully he won’t set off a nuclear holocaust before he exits the scene, an option Hitler didn’t have but surely would have taken.

Joseph Goebbels (1943):   “We will go down in history as the greatest statesmen of all times or as their greatest criminals”    (Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem, p. 22)

You seem to believe that Democrats can find common ground, and bipartisanship, with American Nazis, their Congressional allies, and a dictatorial president who will not condemn praise of Hitler and “jokes” about gassing those who need killing.   As the kids used to say: WTF?

You’re in a supremely difficult no-win situation.   It is time for you to step aside as Senate minority leader and let new, bold, leadership take the reins to give us the best shot at defeating this “movement” before you and I meet in a cattle car, newly stateless and off for “resettlement” somewhere, treated with the most solicitous of sonderbehandlung in our final days.

Your constituent,

Eliot Widaen

The NY Times protects Trump, because… both sides

And, by the way, if Bill Clinton, or anyone else, got a “happy ending” massage from a fourteen year-old girl at Jeffery Epstein’s blackmail emporium, he should face the consequences. That Bubba was the greatest Republican president of the twentieth century doesn’t give him a pass for being a pervert.

But check out the NY Times, not reporting on a story that would have opened an ugly can of worms, a can recently reopened, as Trump was coming down that golden escalator or at any other time. First, a nice illustration of the Grey Lady in action.

Heather Cox Richardson:

In a 2015 email, Epstein gave tips on stories about Trump and girls to then–New York Times financial reporter Landon Thomas Jr. When others asked Thomas for stories, Epstein wrote: “Have them ask my houseman about donad [sic] almost walking through the door leaving his nose print on the glass as young women were swimming in the pool and he was so focused he walked straight into the door.” In another email, Epstein offered “photso [sic] of donald and girls in bikinis in my kitchen,” and Thomas urged: “I am serious man—for the good of the nation why not try to get some of this out there.”

But a story revealing this information did not appear in the New York Times before the 2016 presidential election or afterward. . .

. . . Despite how explosive these documents [a trove of creepy email] were, they do not appear to be the end of the story. They came from the Epstein estate, but the files from the FBI investigation into Trump have not yet been released. Whatever is still outstanding appears to be even worse than what we have seen, as evidenced by Trump’s frantic attempts to stop the discharge petition.

With the House back at work, Johnson had little choice but to swear in Grijalva. The ceremony was scheduled for 4:00.

In the hours before that deadline, the president tried to get one of the four Republican representatives who had signed the discharge petition to remove their signature. He appeared to focus on Nancy Mace (R-SC), with whom he tried to connect by phone, and Lauren Boebert (R-CO), whom he invited to meet with him in the White House Situation Room, which is equipped to prevent recording.

“CNN reported that Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI director Kash Patel joined Trump and Boebert at the meeting.”

When asked about the meeting, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters: “Doesn’t that show the level of transparency when we are willing to sit down with members of Congress and address their concerns?” For his part, Trump took to social media to call the released documents an attempt by Democrats to bring up the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” to deflect from “how badly they’ve done on the Shutdown, and so many other subjects.” He urged “any Republicans involved” to be “focused only on opening up our Country, and fixing the massive damage caused by the Democrats!”

source

Since then, of course, the criminally insane Dementor-in-Chief ordered his former lawyer and lobbyist for Qatar, Attorney General Pam Bondi, to open an investigation into DEMOCRATS who had connections to pedophile / sex trafficker/ blackmailer/ criminal mastermind Jefferey Epstein, who was found dead in federal detention during Trump’s first term. The loyal AG promptly obliged, appointing another Trump toady to head the investigation.

Now she can self-righteously claim that all the files that she decided didn’t sustain any further criminal investigation, according to her and FBI director Kashyap Patel, must now remain under seal because they are part of an ongoing criminal investigation of any Epstein associate not named Trump. That Trump’s name appears 2,000 times in the 20,000 pages of recently released emails? Hoax. The “Epstein hoax”, “created by Democrats”, according to MAGA-man, apparently was built around a kernel of truth that his DOJ is now determined to get to as they prepare to indict and prosecute the guilty parties.

This is transparent obstruction of justice by Trump, who had his DOJ comb through files that contained his name thousands of times and then close the investigation into Epstein that Biden’s DOJ had initiated. Obstruction of justice is a crime. Trump, as the Unitary Executive, may legally commit crimes as long as he does them in concert with other government officials — exercising his core duties as POTUS (see Trump v. US). As Trump himself famously said: God Bless these United Shayssssssh.

What is your vision for the future of democracy, Chuck?

Senator Schumer:

The immutable vision of the far right goes back to the “Planters” and their genteel slave society, but its current enactment has more recent roots.  Seventy years ago the far-right was outraged by “judicial activists” on the Supreme Court who threatened to overturn centuries of social tradition when they found, 9-0, that “separate but equal” was unconstitutional.  Several wealthy reactionaries soon founded a political movement that eventually morphed into MAGA, funded by “Libertarian” billionaire money, today as it was then.  

These reactionaries have the same vision and aim today as when the then-fringe John Birch Society was launched by Charles Koch’s father and a few wealthy comrades in 1958 —  a return to a mythical golden age of society-wide freedom, unregulated oligarchy with a robust police state to deal with malcontents. 

They have always had the same set of self-serving, destructive policies they’re intent on enacting no matter what the vast majority of Americans need or want.   After polling 1% in the 1980 presidential election, they’ve doggedly connived through nonelectoral means to get their grimly unpopular vision for America enacted as law.  They’ve done this by any means necessary.   They created countless influential “think tanks” (like the prestigious Heritage Foundation, creator of Project 2025), networks of nefarious nonprofits, a vast public influence operation (aided by fellow travelers like Rupert Murdoch), as well as the doctrinaire far-right judicial fraternity and career ladder that trained and promoted most of their 6-3 Supreme Court majority.  

The law and Constitution have been swallowed time and again by 6-3 rulings, increasingly on the fast-tracked (for POTUS) shadow docket — no record, no debate, no signatures, no reasoning or explanation, except Article II and “The Unitary Executive”.   Issues the majority doesn’t want to touch are deemed “political questions” and the Supreme Court may not hear arguments about those.   We know very clearly what the values and vision of this group of six people is.  It perfectly reflects the values of their political party and its wealthiest donors.

The right has never made their vision for America clearer than under the current president, a vile man who brings out the worst in everyone and licenses his allies’ and followers’ lowest impulses.  As much as he might personally disgust many of our over 800 billionaires, nobody has been more useful to them than this crass, greedy, corrupt, criminal, violence loving, easily manipulable fellow billionaire.

What is your vision of America’s future, Charles Schumer?   

What is the democratic vision of the eight who fell on their swords for that bipartisan vision of what democracy requires?   Is there any common vision of our democratic future among corporate Democrats, outside of somehow retaining power?  

You don’t win elections by pointing to a party acting like actual Nazis — deliberately and defiantly starving your own citizens, children and other poor people, and rushing to the nation’s highest court to enforce the leader’s right to starve children —  and saying “we’re the good guys”.   You especially don’t cooperate with the party acting like actual Nazis.  Bipartisanship is a relic of a bygone age, by design of the party acting like actual Nazis.  There is no such thing as cooperation with Nazis, it never ends well for anybody involved.   In this regard I’ll mention only two names:  Jeff Sessions and Mike Pence. 

What is your vision for the future of our democracy?  I ask this seriously.

Should you and I find ourselves in the same cattle car, I’ll make sure to introduce myself to you.

Meantime, my question remains:  what is your “moderate” vision for American democracy going forward, and how do you square it with this recent Democratic betrayal of tens of millions of our fellow citizens, all of the most vulnerable among us?    I ask this sincerely and hope one of your staffers will write me a thoughtful answer.

Your constituent,

Eliot Widaen

Two visions of the Future

A word to my bold and beholden senator, Chuck Chuck Bobuck, a living case study of what went wrong with a two party system where virtually all old school politicians are bought and paid for by the same corporate interests (Schumer is also the poster child for cringing surrender, for those partisans out there):

Keep in mind, no matter what horrors they inflict on others, people like Trump (narcissistic psychopaths, demented or not) are ALWAYS the only victim. If 42,000,000 Americans legitimately fear hunger as their SNAP (supplemental nutrition assistance, averaging under $200 a month) money is taken from them, in the weeks before Thanksgiving, there is only one victim here — the poor Leader. What about the Leader’s feelings? He’s very, very sensitive! Much more sensitive than a crying baby who has to go without formula, with her parents’ rightfully freaking out, so the Big Guy can “win” a war to the death with his enemies. You see how this works? You see how this works, Chuck?