Infrequently Asked Questions About Jeffrey Epstein, Part Four: For the Sexual Enjoyment of Defendant Trump
The fourth & final installment of a mammoth Epstein Q&A, in which we ask: Why won't Trump release the Epstein files? What's he so afraid of? What could possibly be worse than what we already know?
Previously on Infrequently Asked Questions About Jeffrey Epstein…
“Keaton always said, ‘I don’t believe in God, but I’m afraid of him.’ Well, I believe in God, and the only thing that scares me is Keyser Soze.”
—Verbal Kint, The Usual Suspects
Did you do that on purpose?
Do what?
For the epigraph, you used a movie line spoken by Kevin Spacey—the Hollywood actor most associated with Jeffrey Epstein.
Oh, wow. No, I didn’t even realize it. I just wanted a quote that expressed a deep-seated fear that most people can’t fully understand.
But while we’re on the subject: Spacey was with Epstein exactly once—on the highly publicized humanitarian mission to Africa, in 2002, with his friend Bill Clinton.
If you’re Kevin Spacey, and your pal who happens to be an ex-president asks you along for this sort of trip, you don’t respond with, “I’d love to go, but I’m not sure about this guy whose plane we’re flying on.”
Literally no one would do that. You trust that an actual ex-president would not outsource the vetting of Jeffrey Epstein to an actor who merely played a president on Netflix.
Because back then, no one knew who Jeffrey Epstein was.
If they knew who he was, they didn’t know what he was.
Let’s keep quoting Verbal Kint: “Nobody ever saw him or knew anybody that ever worked directly for him, but to hear Kobayashi tell it, anybody could have worked for Soze. You never knew. That was his power. The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.”
This is really important to understand: people—not just Spacey, but many other prominent people—trusted that Epstein was kosher because he was tight with Clinton and Larry Summers and Bill Gates and John Brockman and the list goes on. Epstein used those reputable men to trust-wash himself.
There are plenty of reasons not to like Kevin Spacey as a person. This is not one of them.
You’re stalling again.
You’re the one who brought up Kevin Spacey.
Answer the question! Why is Trump so afraid of releasing the Epstein Files?
Right, right. What could be worse than the rapes, the history of sexual assault, the Putin puppetry, the mob ties, the felony conviction, and the long relationship with the world’s most notorious child sex traffickers?
As I wrote back in Part Two:
We already know Trump is a serial sexual assailant. We know he’s an adjudicated rapist. We know he’s a felon, convicted on 34 counts. We know he’s a Kremlin stooge. We know he launders money for the Russian mob. We know he comes from the world of organized crime. We know he’s a rat.
We know he was best buddies with Epstein for at least a decade and a half—that he partied with him and shared an interest in underaged girls. We know he allowed Epstein and GMax to “steal”—his word—girls from Mar-a-Lago for them to traffic and rape.
We know all of that already. None of it has moved the needle. Part of the White House has fallen, but Trump remains.
We also know that whatever’s in the Epstein files is very very very bad—worse than any of the stuff we already know. That’s been trickling out in reporting by David Shuster and Allison Gill, among others.
We know there’s a push within the Bureau to disclose what’s in those files. We know this because Jason Leopold’s FOIA request about the FBI’s review and redaction of the Epstein files was cranked out in record time; it can take many months, and sometimes years, to get replies to FOIA requests, and many of them bring back little of value. Leopold got this one back in a matter of weeks, and it was enlightening.
Finally, we know that Donald Trump never wants the Epstein files to see the light of day. He’s genuinely terrified that what’s contained there will end his presidency. Why else would his lickspittle Kash Patel authorize $851,344 in overtime for FBI agents to redact Donald’s name from the documents?
So the question we have to ask ourselves is, hypothetically speaking, what could possibly be worse—I mean, like, orders of magnitude more damning—than what we already know? Because what we already know is awful.
And now that the legal deadline for releasing the files has come and gone—A comical number of redactions! A million more files found under the couch cushions! Five million more pages!—it’s more obvious than ever that Trump is hiding something very very very very bad.
Like, he kidnapped the president of Venezuela to get us to stop talking about Epstein. That’s how bad it is.
Out with it, then! What would be worse than the rapes, the history of sexual assault, the Putin puppetry, the mob ties, the felony conviction, and the long relationship with the world’s most notorious child sex traffickers?
[sighs]
Please understand that this is a thought experiment. I am not accusing Trump of doing any of these things. I am merely answering your question: what would be objectively worse—hypothetically speaking! hypothetically!—than the rapes, the history of sexual assault, the Putin puppetry, the mob ties, the felony conviction, and the long relationship with the world’s most notorious child sex traffickers.
Like, pretend I’m the new showrunner for this horrible TV show that CBS has extended for another season because Bari Weiss is now also in charge of programming, and we’re in the Writers Room with Matt Taibbi and Jack Posobiec, kicking ideas around.
This doesn’t even raise to the level of “speculation.” This is just brainstorming. That’s all it is.
I get it. I’m not a child.
Yeah, but the people running our government are. Have you seen the White House Twitter feed?
[beat]
I feel like there should be an affidavit—like I should sign something. So I get full immunity here.
Stop stalling, dammit.
Very well. But don’t say I didn’t warn you.
I won’t say you didn’t warn me. Now, please. Proceed. What would be worse?
Let’s begin with the one we’ve already heard about: Trump “blowing Bubba.”
By now, we’ve all seen the photo of Trump appearing to grab at Clinton’s junk:
I ask: How would MAGA react to a clip of their mighty alpha male on his knees with a mouth full of 42?
Oh, dear God.
Hey—you asked for this.
I know, I know.
And what if Clinton then made a public statement confirming it’s real? “I did have sexual relations with that man, Donald Trump…”
You think…?
No, of course not. Remember: thought experiment. Writers Room.
Also, Clinton’s statement, released through his spokesman right before Christmas, demands that Attorney General Pam Bondi release all the files relating to Clinton, and accuses the Trump Justice Department, so-called, of “insinuation—using selective releases to imply wrongdoing about individuals who have already been repeatedly cleared by the very same Department of Justice, over many years, under Presidents and Attorneys General of both parties."
I highly doubt that “no such protection” and “selective releases” were meant as doubles entendres. Although if the “blowing Bubba” bit it true…and Clinton knows there’s footage of that…and he then demands that Bondi put it out there? That might be the gangster move of the century.
Hmm. What if Bubba were not Bill Clinton, but another man named Bubba?
Or men—plural.
What if Bubba were a boy?
You’re catching on.
Or a dog?
Or a horse.
But you don’t really think…?
That there’s footage of Trump fellating the runner-up of the Belmont Stakes? Of course not. Again: brainstorming. Writers Room.
With that said, “Donald blowing Bubba,” where “Bubba” is another man, isn’t as far-fetched as it may seem at first blush. There have long been rumors of Trump engaging in sexual activity with Epstein.
Remember, Donald was the protégé of Roy Cohn, the “heterosexual who likes to have sex with men.” Cohn liked him because he thought Trump looked like a blonde Elvis. Donald was around Cohn all the time. So it’s not like he’d never encountered gay sex before.
Plus, and we don’t want to get into stereotypes here, but, I mean—he’s a fastidious dresser, fussy about his hair, wears a lot of makeup and (per Noel Casler) a girdle and a ladies’ watch (you can clock the watch in that photo with Clinton). He’s obsessed with interior design. He hates women, loves showtunes, and his greatest dream is to build a big beautiful ballroom. His theme song is “YMCA”! He was friends with Liberace!
Bullshit.
He was. Seriously. Liberace stayed at Trump Tower during his 1985 Radio City Musical Hall run. Michael Jackson—another Epstein associate—was their mutual friend. MJ even stayed in Liberace’s guest bedroom at Trump Tower for a few weeks, when he was in town recording.
Dude, I think you broke my brain.
[beat]
What is it?
I was just thinking about how, when Roy Cohn was dying of what he never admitted was complications due to HIV, Trump cut him out of his life completely. Wouldn’t go see him. Abandoned him. Ghosted him.
And?
He apparently did the same thing with Epstein. It’s sad. Those may well have been the two most important men in his life.
[pause]
Other than Bubba, of course.
You know, I’m not sure people would care if Trump was gay, or bi, or that he blew Bubba.
People shouldn’t care. More importantly, a man having consensual sexual relations with another man is not illegal, let alone objectively worse than…whatever Donald did with Jeffrey Epstein.
But if Trump was Bubba’s bottom, MAGA would care. And if there were boys involved, MAGA would definitely care. These are the same maniacs who almost shot up Comet Pong Pong because they thought it was the nexus of Hillary Clinton’s secret child sex trafficking operation.
True.
Hey, for all we know, Nicholas Maduro is Bubba.
That’s a joke, right?
I think so?
But let’s move into a far more likely possibility—Donald raping minors procured for him by his dear friends Jeffrey and Ghislaine.
Wait just a minute! The New York Times story says there have been no accusations involving Trump.
The same paper that dismissed Epstein’s obvious ties to various intelligence agencies as “conspiracy theories?” That New York Times? The one whose publisher’s name was among those on the list Epstein made for “Bannon Steve?” The one that employs Epstein apologist and serial bore David Brooks?
And that affront to journalism Maggie Duranty Haberman?
We’re talking about the same newspaper, yeah? The one that the editor they interview in the new Seymour Hersh documentary says—and I’m paraphrasing—“hates to be beaten but is very uncomfortable being first on a story, particularly one critical of the government?” That newspaper? The one I call the NYeT?
I guess?
Here’s the relevant paragraph:
Over the years, Mr. Epstein or his partner, Ghislaine Maxwell, introduced at least six women who have accused them of grooming or abuse to Mr. Trump, according to interviews, court testimony and other records. One was a minor at the time. None have accused Mr. Trump himself of inappropriate behavior.
That’s simply not true—unless the Times considers tying a 13-year-old girl to a bed and violently raping her to not be inappropriate.
That’s what was alleged in two lawsuits against both Trump and Epstein: one filed in California on April 26, 2016, under the name Katie Johnson; the second filed in the Southern District of New York on June 20, 2016, under the name Jane Doe. It’s the same woman filing both lawsuits.
So: trigger warning.
At the time of the alleged rapes, Katie/Jane was 13 years old. Another alleged victim, “Maria Doe,” was just 12. Epstein and Trump were (allegedly) well aware of how young they both were. (“May every day be another wonderful secret.”) She knew they knew because, as she explains in a video taken by her attorney (see below), Trump kept telling her, lecherously, that she reminded him of his daughter.
Katie/Jane was brought to Epstein’s stately New York residence—known then as “the Wexner mansion,” incidentally—by a woman named Tiffany, whose declaration is included in the second lawsuit and corroborates the allegations.
On four separate occasions, Trump allegedly sexually abused Katie/Jane—with the violence and depravity escalating with each encounter. The first time, she gave him a handjob; the second time, oral sex. The last two incidents are detailed in the California lawsuit:
On the third occasion involving the Defendant, Donald J. Trump, the Plaintiff, Katie Johnson was forced to engage in an unnatural lesbian sex act with her fellow minor and sex slave, Maria Doe, age 12, for the sexual enjoyment of Defendant Trump. After this sex act, both minors were forced to orally copulate Defendant Trump by placing their mouths simultaneously on his erect penis until he achieved sexual orgasm. After zipping up his pants, Defendant Trump physically pushed both minors away while angrily berating them for the “poor” quality of their sexual performance….
On the fourth and final sexual encounter with the Defendant, Donald J. Trump, the Plaintiff, Katie Johnson, was tied to a bed by Defendant Trump who then proceeded to forcibly rape Plaintiff Johnson. During the course of this savage sexual attack, Plaintiff Johnson loudly pleaded with Defendant Trump to “please wear a condom”. Defendant Trump responded by violently striking Plaintiff Johnson in the face with his open hand and screaming that “he would do whatever he wanted” as he refused to wear protection. After achieving sexual orgasm, the Defendant, Donald J. Trump put his suit back on and when the Plaintiff, Katie Johnson, in tears asked Defendant Trump what would happen if he had impregnated her, Defendant Trump grabbed his wallet and threw some money at her and screamed that she should use the money “to get a fucking abortion”.
Further details can be found in the first declaration attached to the New York lawsuit:
Immediately following this [final] rape, Defendant Trump threatened me that, were I ever to reveal any of the details of Defendant Trump’s sexual and physical abuse of me, my family and I would be physically harmed if not killed.
Immediately following [Epstein’s] rape, just like Defendant Trump, Defendant Epstein threatened me not to ever reveal any of the details of Defendant Epstein’s sexual and physical abuse of me or else my family and I would be physically harmed if not killed….
Both Defendants had let me know that each was a very wealthy, powerful man and indicated that they had the power, ability and means to carry out their threats. Indeed, Defendant Trump stated that I shouldn’t ever say anything if I didn’t want to disappear like Maria, a 12-year-old female that was forced to be involved in the third incident with Defendant Trump and that I had not seen since that third incident, and that he was capable of having my whole family killed.
Tiffany Doe, Epstein’s “party planner” and recruiter, who was in her mid 20s at the time of the alleged rapes, was a witness to all of this:
I personally witnessed four sexual encounters that the Plaintiff [Katie/Jane] was forced to have with Mr. Trump during this period, including the fourth of these encounters where Mr. Trump forcibly raped her despite her pleas to stop….
I personally witnessed the one occasion where Mr. Trump forced the Plaintiff and a 12-year-old female named Maria perform oral sex on Mr. Trump and witnessed his physical abuse of both minors when they finished the act….
I personally witnessed Defendant Trump telling the Plaintiff that she shouldn’t ever say anything if she didn’t want to disappear like the 12-year-old female Maria, and that he was capable of having her whole family killed.
If you’d rather watch and listen than read, here you go:
Note that this was recorded in February of 2016—before Epstein was a household name, before the Russian stuff started to come out, before Access Hollywood, before Trump even won the primary. Back then, most people assumed Donald Trump was no different than the guy that Putin-fluffing traitor Mark Burnett presented to us on The Apprentice.
At 17:00, Katie/Jane says:
The fact that Trump has a chance to be the next president makes me feel disgusting inside. I’ve always been proud to be an American. I think we live in a beautiful country. But I just see him ruining everything. He’s a horrible—what he portrays in the outside isn’t even that great, but people don’t even know the half of how evil, how sick and twisted that man is.
Welp, she sure got that right.
A prophetess, she is.
In the video, Katie/Jane recalls a scene Trump had her and Maria act out—a sexual fantasy he wanted them to indulge in. In Trump’s fantasy, the two girls are his maids, and he walks in on them making out. So the two girls did as they were told.
But Donald, she says, got all weird, and directed racial epithets at Maria, who was Latina. He threatened to call INS on her and have her deported. Which is, of course, what Trump now has his Obergruppenführers Stephen Miller and Kristi Noem, and that perjuring little shit Greg Bovino, doing to Latino Americans all across the country.
If Katie/Jane’s allegations are true, then ICE is Trump’s sexual fantasy writ large. He literally gets off on what they’re doing.
Again, Katie/Jane gave this testimony in February 2016—almost ten full years ago.
Also: these rapes allegedly happened at Epstein’s house—the one we know was wired up with surveillance equipment. We think, what, Captain Kompromat wasn’t using those cameras on the regular?
Why was this not given more attention by the media?
Like who? The poltroons at the New York Times?
But, to answer more specifically: because the lawsuits were subsequently withdrawn, ostensibly out of fear for Katie/Jane’s physical safety.
It’s also possible that Trump paid her off. We don’t know.
The reprehensible way our society treats the other survivors likely did not inspire much confidence that she would be protected from the wrath of a desperate criminal who is quite literally the most powerful man in the world.
Plus, Kash Patel is running the FBI now. He makes J. Edgar Hoover look like Atticus Finch.
Kash Patel is the titular Director of the FBI. He ain’t running shit—except for his perjuring mouth at Congressional hearings.
Ouch!
And now the Times forgets that Katie/Jane exists.
Here’s the thing: Just because the lawsuits were withdrawn doesn’t make the accusations false.
You think Katie/Jane is telling the truth?
Why would she make that up? And why would attorneys, who only get paid if they win the case, take her on as a client? Twice?
Put it this way: I don’t see Trump suing her for defamation.
Is there anything corroborating her allegations in the files?
Yes. In one of the documents they released by mistake, took back, redacted, and re-released, it talks about Trump having sex with a girl whose “pert nipples” he got off on sucking until they were raw:
Although apparently this is an old document, originally released during the Biden years.
Who is Natalie Malyshev?
Natalya is her given first name. She’s one of Epstein’s alleged “recruiters,” and a party to a lawsuit by Jane Doe 43, along with Epstein, GMax, Sarah Keller, and Lesley Groff. It’s CASE NO.: 1:17-CV-00616 in the Southern District of New York. Part of it is here.
The new document is, I believe, part of Jane Doe 43’s lawsuit. And Jane Doe 43 is NOT Katie/Jane.
So…
Pace the venerable and oh-so-esteemed New York Times, we have more than one allegation by an Epstein victim against Donald Trump.
Why is the legacy media so slow to connect the dots?
Please. They won’t even call a lie a lie—still, in twenty-fucking-twenty-six.
We’re running out of vowels to buy before we have to solve the puzzle—although the legacy media, almost exclusively owned and operated by his oligarch buddies, will continue to play dumb.
So you think the legacy media is…
Complicit. The word you’re looking for is complicit. Yes. Not the individual reporters, mind you—even at the NYeT, there are plenty of really good journalists doing really important work.
But the oligarchs that own the legacy media and the social media? Elon Musk and Zuck, Jeff Bezos and Rupert Murdoch? At this point, the ignorance can’t be written off as incompetence.
So it’s intentional?
It certainly appears that way. Almost like all the bloated plutocrats who lined up behind Trump at his second inaugural have a vested interest in keeping him in the White House or something.
We’re getting off track again.
Sorry.
Bottom line: It’s not difficult to picture Trump, with his long history of sexual assault, yen for young girls, and propensity for violence, doing exactly what is alleged in that lawsuit.
Now—what if what Katie/Jane says really happened, and there’s footage in the Epstein files of that rape scene, or the scene involving her and Maria, or both?
Yeah, that would be worse than what we know.
It would.
So would incest.
Wait—what?
I’m not going to spell this out. Use your imagination.
It’s not difficult to put two and two together here; there’s lots of examples, in public videos we’ve already seen, of Donald articulating his lustful desires for his eldest daughter.
True.
When Katie/Jane alleged that Donald told her she reminded him of his daughter, it didn’t make him want to take her out for ice cream.
Jesus Christ.
Keep the Prince of Peace out of this!
Besides, you have to go back farther than the Gospels to find the relevant Bible passage. Leviticus 18, which forbids incest, doesn’t explicitly prohibit father-daughter fucking—as I’m sure Paula White and the other Evangelicals who fawn over Trump well know.
Might Epstein’s files contain video proof?
I hate to ask but…what’s worse than incest?
Snuff.
My friend Cheri Jacobus has long speculated that there is a Trump snuff film.
Pardon my ignorance, but…what’s a snuff film?
A video of someone being killed.
I had to ask.
What if there were video evidence of Donald Trump violently murdering the 12-year-old Maria, whom he allegedly told Katie/Jane had “disappeared?” What if there’s more than one snuff film?
Wait—isn’t there an allegation in the latest tranche about Trump and Epstein throwing a newborn baby into Lake Michigan?
There is—and in that telling, Donald is the dead baby’s daddy. Personally, I think that’s bullshit—although with Trump, no atrocity would completely surprise me.
Remember, some of the material in the files is stuff that isn’t true.
Like the fake postcard from Epstein to Larry Nassar?
Like the fake postcard from Epstein to Larry Nassar.
Then why release it at all?
In the hopes that the media, which generally operates like cats with a laser pointer, will run with the easily disprovable Lake Michigan story, which, when it turns out to be “fake news,” would make every subsequent story seem like “fake news.”
That and to desensitize us for what’s coming.
What’s coming?
What if the reason there have been so few Epstein survivors publicly accusing Trump is because none of them lived to tell the tale?
Oh my God is that dark. Is that even a possibility? It can’t be.
Brainstorming! Writers Room! Remember, all I’m trying to do is suggest things that would be, in a vacuum, worse. Things that would end not only his presidency, but his freedom.
Murder of a child would do it.
Are we sure about that?
One would like to imagine that, despite his boasts to the contrary, if Trump did in fact shoot a man on Fifth Avenue, he would not get away with it.
Dude, you’ve got a twisted imagination.
Look, I’m not the mobbed-up Kremlin-owned elected official who’s scared shitless about being exposed for what he did with his buddy the child-sex-trafficking pedophile. I’d rather not think about this stuff at all, believe me.
Besides, there are possibilities that don’t involve rape and incest and murder. Namely: money, election fuckery, treason, contagion, terrorism.
Well, we can rule out election fuckery. Epstein was dead by 2020.
Not twenty twenty; twenty sixteen.
I don’t follow.
We already know that election was fishy. The Russians interfered. Volume 5 of the Senate Intelligence Committee’s Report says as much.
Paul Manafort, the chair of Trump’s campaign, shared polling data with a Russian intelligence operative who specializes in election fuckery. Jared Kushner proposed a backchannel to Moscow via the Russian embassy and met with the president of a sanctioned bank. Torshin and Butina infiltrated the NRA. There was the Trump Tower meeting. And then Donald himself more or less copped to all of it by calling it “the Russian hoax.”
I wrote a book about Trump/Russia in 2018, you may recall: Dirty Rubles.
You did. It has 217 ratings on Amazon. Four point five stars.
Indeed it does. Thanks to everyone who left a review!
Well, what if Trump really was a Manchurian candidate? I’m talking a deliberate, intentional op. What if it wasn’t ever about Hillary losing, as we’ve been told, but always about Donald winning—so he could begin the dismantling of Russia’s greatest adversary? What if Trump is even more of a Putin puppet than even I thought?
And what if Epstein helped facilitate the election scheme—and there was proof in the files? That would explain why he seemed so miffed, in his dealings with Steve Bannon, after Trump took the White House in 2017. It would also explain Mark Epstein’s implication, in the “Bubba” email, that Bannon knows what Putin has on Trump.
Well, among other things, that would make Trump’s presidency illegitimate.
Thus invalidating all his pardons—and his Supreme Court picks. Which would explain why the Leonard Leo crew have remained in his corner, and why the Republicans on the Hill are so reluctant to release the files. Maybe they don’t care about Trump as much as they want to make sure their radical Catholic fascists stay on the bench.
Speaking of the Supreme Court—what if the Epstein cover-up isn’t about protecting Trump at all, but rather one, or more than one, of the six Justices in Donald’s pocket? He needs all six of them, remember, to continue to grant him authoritarian power.
Huh. That would explain why Roberts, Thomas, Alito, Gorsuch, Kavanaugh, and ACB keep continuing to grant him authoritarian power.
It sure would.
But, as devoutly as I wish that that smug motherfucker John Roberts turns up in the Epstein files, I don’t think the #Trumpire’s a pedo.1 I think he’s just a garden-variety fascist white supremacist asshole.
How about the money? You mentioned the money. We should probably follow the money.
Right, because Mueller wasn’t allowed to.
Well, we know there were over a billion dollars in suspicious transactions on Epstein’s accounts with JPMorgan Chase. We know the bank didn’t disclose this until 2019. We know Trump was significantly in debt to Deutsche Bank when he took office in 2017. We know that, per the Steele Dossier, Trump was rumored to have been promised the commission on the sale of 19 percent of Rosneft—a sale that actually took place. And we know his son-in-law was also underwater on the office building at 666 Fifth Avenue that the Kushner Company unwisely purchased in 2007, right before the real estate market collapsed.
What if there’s evidence that the actual creditor was not Deutsche Bank at all, but the sanctioned Vnesheconombank (VEB)—the Russian bank known as Putin’s “slush fund?” And what if that loan was forgiven once Trump won the election? What if that’s why the head of VEB, Sergei Gorkov, met secretly with Kushner during the 2016 transition? What if this is what Putin has on Donald (and Jared)? And what if Epstein, who built his career on moving vast sums of money around secretly, facilitated the operation?
You’ve seen The Sopranos. You know what happens when a guy is in debt to the mob up to his eyeballs. There’s nothing he won’t do.
I’m not sure that’s worse, though. Treason, you also said. A broad term. What do you mean by that?
Leading a violent insurrection in which people died isn’t enough for you? We’re just gonna memory-hole J6, huh?
MAGA doesn’t care about J6. They all think the insurrectionists are heroes. Including that deranged banshee Ashli Babbit.
Okay, what about putting troops in harm’s way to benefit Putin? Or Bibi, or MBS, or Xi? Or some lesser foreign punk, like Orbán or Erdoğan?
Selling classified intelligence—which we already know he stole when he left the White House? Giving nuclear secrets to our enemies? (In December, Trump’s media company merged with TAE Technologies, a company that deals in plasma fusion—nuclear stuff.) Jack Smith seems pretty convinced Trump did something really horrible with the top secret material he stole.
Plus whatever happened at Helsinki. I mean, John O. Brennan said that Helsinki was tantamount to treason. I don’t think he was speaking out of turn.
Wait, who is Brennan again?
Oh, nobody who would know anything—just the former head of the Central Intelligence Agency. And a guy Trump has been trying desperately to discredit for years now, for reasons that have never been made clear.
Would that sway MAGA? The treason, I mean?
Probably not. For all their blather about America First, MAGA cares little about national security. Donald has already surrendered our foreign policy to the Kremlin, and our global soft power to China, and it’s crickets on that side of the aisle.
A lot of the MAGA demographic is old white guys who grew up worshipping Reagan and hating Commies. Why are they now supporting the Kremlin?
I think Trump/Russia is too “high concept” for your average FoxNews zombie to wrap his—it’s usually a “his”—feeble mind around.
Also, people hate to be wrong, and to have been made fools of. So rather than issue a mea culpa, they double down and pretend that Trump rolling out the red carpet for Putin in Alaska was a show of American strength.
That leaves us with two more of your suggested possibilities. “Contagion,” you said. What’s that?
You know how MAGA bends over backwards to get everyone to think covid-19 started with a lab leak in Wuhan?
I guess?
During the pandemic, there was a dot-gov website where you could go to order free tests: covidtests.gov. This is what you see when you go there now…a little Easter egg for the hard-core conspiracy nuts:2
Then you scroll down and there’s all this anti-Fauci stuff. And this:
What the…?
I know. Weird, right?
The only actually decent thing Trump ever did as our 45th president was Operation Warp Speed, which helped expedite research and rollout of the covid vaccine. True, that only happened after shadow president Jared Kushner authorized a Blue State Genocide that killed 300,000 Americans who might otherwise have survived. Even so, it was a huge win—a legitimate one.
Donald brags about everything. He was excited to get a “peace prize” invented by a corrupt soccer league, ffs! Why is he running away from his only genuine accomplishment?
Wait—you think Trump had something to do with kickstarting the pandemic?
I’m going to remind you yet again—we are just brainstorming here.
No, of course I don’t think that. Most likely, the weird website content is him continuing to sully the reputation of Dr. Fauci, to rile up the uneducated he loves so well.
But if Trump insists that the coronavirus was the result of a lab leak, intentional or otherwise…
…then we can safely say the “lab leak” conspiracy theory is bullshit.
Exactly.
And yet he continues to hammer it. Why?
Well, what if the truth was something truly horrifying—and had Trump’s tiny fingerprints all over it? What if covid-19 originated not in Wuhan, but here in the United States? And what if Donald not only knew, but was somehow responsible?
Seventy million people have gotten covid, worldwide. Over seven million have died of it. That’s not Stalin body-count numbers, but it’s in the Hitler neighborhood.
Holy shit!
Let me re-re-reiterate: I do not believe this. I think Fauci’s assessment is the correct one. Remember, I’m only writing about this to suggest things in the Epstein files that could be worse than what we already know.
Well, that would be worse.
Exactly. So much so that there’s only one thing I can think of that would be objectively worse than all of that—no ifs, ands or buts about it.
Terrorism?
Yes.
Specifically: 9/11.
9/11? What do you mean?
[sigh]
Let me repeat, for the fifty-eighth time: I am just throwing ideas out there to answer the “what could be worse” question. I’m not accusing, I’m not reporting, I’m not even speculating. I’m brainstorming. That’s all.
Yes, we know. Showrunner, Writers Room, Bari Weiss, CBS. You said it a thousand times.
And I’m going to keep saying it.
You said it. Do go on.
If, hypothetically, Epstein and Trump had something to do with Bin Laden, some association that has yet to be disclosed…and if that association revealed advanced knowledge of the attacks, complicity in the planning of the attacks, or both…
Oh, fuck. That would absolutely be worse.
Exactly.
But how—hypothetically—would Trump and Epstein be connected to Bin Laden?
As I mentioned in Part One, according to the book Robert Maxwell: Israel’s Superspy, Semion Mogilevich, the head of the Russian mob and Robert Maxwell’s business partner, sold a stolen copy of the PROMIS software to Osama Bin Laden. Twenty years later, Bin Laden was located by U.S. law enforcement with help from Felix Sater—a federal Confidential Informant and a guy who once had Trump Org business cards—who leveraged his contacts with the Russian mafiya to track UBL down. That implies an active connection between al-Qaeda and the Bratva.
Why would Mogilevich want 9/11 to happen?
As Balzac wrote, “Behind every great fortune there is a crime.”
You know who gained absolutely nothing from 9/11? Osama Bin Laden. It didn’t help his cause, it didn’t help his beef with the Saudi royals, it didn’t help him personally. It made all of that worse, in fact. And it ended with him being gunned down like a rabid dog in some hovel in Pakistan.
Mogilevich, on the other hand? After 9/11, the lion’s share of the FBI’s resources were diverted from investigating transnational organized crime—that is, the Russian mob—to “counterterrorism”—that is, a dozen guys in caves in Afghanistan. No one benefitted more from the attacks than the Russians.
So Mogilevich did 9/11?
Don’t put words in my mouth, Alex Jones.
To be clear: 9/11 happened exactly how the 9/11 Commission said it happened. Islamic terrorists hijacking airplanes. Bin Laden’s material support and planning. All of that.
With that said, those two things—that is, 1) Al-Qaeda planning and carrying out the acts of terrorism, and 2) the Russian mob helping out somehow—are not mutually exclusive. Because: how else would Mogilevich have known where Bin Laden was hiding?
Dude.
Furthermore: if there were some connection, and Bin Laden knew about that connection, then ratting Osama out also helped the Russians! No more worries about a captured terrorist spilling the beans. Instead of sending Sergei and Ivan to Abbottabad, they Jedi-mind-tricked Seal Team Six to do the wetwork for them.
Again—hypothetically.
And if Mogilevich knew where Bin Laden was holed up…
…so did Putin.
Putin has long had an uneasy relationship with terrorism in general and 9/11 specifically. I wrote about it five and a half years ago:
Early in his reign, Putin was keen to remove the Taliban in Afghanistan. The Taliban had put a stop to opium cultivation, which disrupted the heroin business for Semion Mogilevich and the Russian mob, Putin’s allies in his new government. Also, the Taliban was not down with the pipeline project, which the legitimate Russian economy needed. He pressured outgoing president Bill Clinton to move on them in 2000, to no avail.
In late June 2001, an Indian magazine reported that a joint force was being planned, with Russian, US, and Indian forces combining to oust the Taliban.
In July 2001, at the Slovenian Summit where he met face to face with Putin for the first time, new president George W. Bush “looked the man in the eye…found him very straightforward and trustworthy…[and] was able to get a sense of his soul.” I happen to think Bush is savvier than popular reports about him indicate, but even so, Putin manipulating him is like the Viscount de Valmont seducing Cécile de Volanges….Putin is a master manipulator, willing and able to convey whatever he wants to convey while never backing down on his commitment to defeating the United States; he showed Bush only what he wanted Bush to see.
A Fox News dispatch from 2002 reported that in August 2001, Putin had warned the Bush government of a plot involving suicidal hijackers planning to attack the U.S. This was likely a case of Putin spinning the story after the fact, but it’s not beyond the realm of possibility that he had some inkling of what was going down. Our intelligence services heard chatter, after all, which Bush famously ignored.
Putin managed to be the first world leader to call the president after the 9/11 attacks—pledging his total support, of course.
On 12 September 2001, a Russian newspaper claimed that Russian intelligence knew who was behind the attacks and who had implemented them, and that Putin had warned Bush a few weeks in advance.3 Again, this might have been nothing more than propaganda, portraying the new Russian leader as powerful and in the know, in stark contrast to the reeling Americans.
The birthday of Felix Dzerzhinsky—founder of the Cheka, and Putin’s hero—was September 11. This is probably a coincidence, although Russians, like American neo-Nazis, do enjoy this kind of symbolism.
Another Felix, Felix Sater, Donald John Trump’s erstwhile business partner, was a Confidential Informant for the FBI, and a good one: he helped the U.S. government track down Osama bin Laden. How would a guy known for solid Russian mob contacts be able to find UBL, presumably an enemy of the Russians? Further, if the Russians knew where bin Laden was hiding, why did Putin not just relay that intel to Bush or Obama directly, since he was so eager to offer his support? Is there any reality in which Felix Sater knew where bin Laden was holed up, but spymaster extraordinaire Putin did not?
In a 2018 New York Times piece about Bruce Ohr, one of the FBI’s top Russian mob experts, Ohr’s longtime deputy had this to say: “Until 9/11, organized crime was one of the main priority criminal programs at the Justice Department. Russian organized crime was a focus. Bruce knew a lot of the Russia stuff and traveled there.” In other words, 9/11 had the net result of taking the FBI’s focus away from the Russian mob. This means that the primary beneficiary of the worst terrorist attack on US soil was not Osama bin Laden or the forces of “radical Islam,” but rather the despotic leader of the same country that has been our greatest enemy since 1945—as well as his ruthless partners in the criminal underworld. In other words, the guy who came to power by covertly blowing up a few Moscow apartment buildings also benefited enormously when the towers fell.
You really think Putin knew about 9/11?
Who knows? There’s plenty of circumstantial evidence suggesting that he did. And he’s an evil, genocidal motherfucker who hates the United States. Although Dubya did look into his eyes and see his soul, or whatever. So maybe not? Anyway, it doesn’t really matter.
Do we know what Trump was up to on 9/11?
We do, because Donald called into a local news show, as one does, and gave a nine-and-a-half minute interview, in which he:
brags about how the building he owns at 40 Wall Street is, once again, the tallest structure in Lower Manhattan.
reveals a phone call with his “close friend” Larry Silverstein, the real estate developer who signed a lease on the WTC six weeks before the attacks.
talks at length about the peculiar structural properties of the Twin Towers.
expresses doubt that airplanes alone could have felled the buildings, and suggests that there had to have been bombs on the planes for them to have penetrated the exterior steel beams.
notes that Morgan Stanley lost a lot of office space, and also employees, as did an insurance company he uses—presumably Aon. “Some of those firms,” he says, “are just gone.”
recalls the time a structural engineer gave him a tour of the basement of the WTC after the 1993 bombing, demonstrating a deep familiarity with the complex’s architecture—including its vulnerabilities.
seems more put out that the skyline has changed than that so many people died.
opines that the attacks are “worse than Pearl Harbor.”
Wait—is Trump a Truther?
No, no, no.
Nowadays, of course, any deviation from the official explanation is denounced as tin-foil-hat conspiracy theory, on par with chem-trails and fake moon landings. On the actual day of 9/11, however, which is when that video was recorded, most people in New York were saying things similar to what Trump said—including expressing doubt that the planes alone could have felled the buildings.
I was in Manhattan that day, so I speak from experience. Once you were out of harm’s way, you were talking about what happened, trying to piece it all together. That’s what it was like on the ground.
Nothing that Trump says in that interview suggests prior knowledge. Even the bit about his building now being the tallest is not as callous as it might come off today. I remember on 9/11, as I walked past the Empire State Building on my way downtown, noting in my mind that it was once again the tallest structure in the city—and morbidly joking to myself that it had motive.
So Trump had nothing to do with 9/11.
I never said he did! Writers Room, remember? I only said that something involving 9/11 would be worse than what we already know.
Although…
Yes?
Trump keeps bringing it up. He says he “predicted” Bin Laden. Says he wrote about it in his book. Says his book came out a year before the attacks. Says he wrote that Bin Laden was “a bad guy who we have to take out.”
Is that claim true?
No. There’s no such passage in any of his books. The lone reference to Bin Laden in his 2000 tome, the uncomfortably-titled The America We Deserve, concerns the government’s alleged habit of manufacturing new enemies:
Instead of one looming crisis hanging over us, we face a bewildering series of smaller crises, flash points, standoffs, and hot spots. We’re not playing the chess game to end all chess games anymore. We’re playing tournament chess — one master against many rivals. One day we’re all assured that Iraq is under control, the UN inspectors have done their work, everything’s fine, not to worry. The next day the bombing begins. One day we’re told that a shadowy figure with no fixed address named Osama bin-Laden is public enemy number one, and U.S. jetfighters lay waste to his camp in Afghanistan. He escapes back under some rock, and a few news cycles later it’s on to a new enemy and new crisis.
His claim has been thoroughly debunked. It’s a lie.
And yet he keeps talking about it. Just two days ago, on Air Force One, Lindsey Graham brought up Bin Laden, and Trump launched into this tall tale again, telling the press corps:
Do you know I wrote about Bin Laden one year before the attack at the World Trade Center, and I said, ‘You gotta go after Bin Laden.’ It was in my book. Very few people want to say that, but it was in my book…If they would have listened to me, they would have taken out Bin Laden, and you wouldn’t have had the World Trade Center tragedy. Did you know that? I predicted Bin Laden….I wrote a book, it was one year before the attack that the book came out…and there’s a whole page, a whole section dedicated to—there’s a guy named Bin Laden, who’s a bad guy, who you have to take out.
What does Trump mean by “very few people want to say that?”
You tell me.
Now, this is almost certainly another one of the braggadocious bullshit narratives that Donald’s convinced himself is true. But “I predicted Bin Laden” can also be read as a confession.
A confession to what?
To knowing about the attacks in advance.
Hang on. This is a lot to process. My head is spinning.
Take your time.
So, how would Trump, or Epstein, or anyone, be “involved” with 9/11? Like, how would such an involvement manifest itself?
Foreknowledge.
Foreknowledge would ensure that, if you worked in the World Trade Center—like if you were, say, Howard Lutnick, now the gaslighting Commerce Secretary, then Jeffrey Epstein’s next-door neighbor and the CEO of Kantor Fitzgerald, a financial firm with offices on the upper floors of 1 World Trade Center, whose 658 New York-based employees all died when the towers fell—you would have found some excuse not to go in that day.
Wait—do you think Lutnick…?
Oh, God, no! Don’t get the wrong idea. Remember: I’m not making accusations. I’m not even speculating. I’m just doing hypotheticals. This is a thought experiment—nothing more.
People take days off all the time. And Lutnick didn’t even take the day off—he went in late because he was taking his son to his first day of kindergarten at Horace Mann.
Also: in terms of weather, September 11, 2001, in NYC was one of the nicest days I can ever remember. It was just gorgeous out. So if you were going to pick a day to call out—it would have been a great day to do so, for the sunshine alone.
Even now, after a year of Lutnick blithely lying his ass off for our fascist president, it’s hard for me not to admire him because of how he showed up in the aftermath of the attacks:
But Trump didn’t work at the World Trade Center.
Correct.
And neither did Epstein.
Also correct.
So how would they benefit from foreknowledge?
Mindy Kleinberg, the widow of Alan Kleinberg, a Kantor Fitzgerald employee who died on 9/11, provided this statement to the National Commission on Terrorist Attacks Upon the United States, aka the 9/11 Commission, on March 31, 2003:
On the Chicago Board Options Exchange during the week before September 11th, put options were purchased on American and United Airlines, the two airlines involved in the attacks. The investors who placed these orders were gambling that in the short term the stock prices of both Airlines would plummet. Never before on the Chicago Exchange were such large amounts of United and American Airlines options traded. These investors netted a profit of at least $5 million after the September 11th attacks.
Interestingly, the names of the investors remain undisclosed and the $5 million remains unclaimed in the Chicago Exchange account.
Why these aberrant trades were not discovered prior to 9/11? Who were the individuals who placed these trades? Have they been investigated? Who was responsible for monitoring these activities? Have those individuals been held responsible for their inaction?
So you think Epstein was the guy who profited from those put options?
In 2004—two years after Kleinberg’s statement—the 9/11 Commission released a statement saying that the SEC’s investigation
did not develop any evidence suggesting that anyone who had advance knowledge of the September 11 attacks traded on the basis of that information. In the course of our investigation, we examined more than 9.5 million securities transactions that took place during the weeks preceding September 11. Along with the New York Stock Exchange, NASD, the American Stock Exchange, the Chicago Board Options Exchange, the Pacific Exchange, and the Philadelphia Stock Exchange, we reviewed trading in securities and derivative products of 103 companies in six industry groups with trading in seven markets. We also reviewed trading in 32 exchange traded funds and broad and narrow indices. In addition to working with the exchanges and NASD, we worked with criminal law enforcement authorities, including the Department of Justice and the FBI, as well as our regulatory counterparts in the U.S. and abroad. Finally, we sought and obtained information from the legal and compliance departments at securities firms and other financial institutions to determine whether any unusual trading activity had been observed by their staffs in the period prior to Sept. 11, 2001.
So it was just a false rumor?
Well, I mean, this is the same SEC that was, at the time, calling Bernie Madoff to ask for his sage wisdom on regulatory policy, so—grain of salt. But yes, as far as we can tell, it’s a false rumor. There were, and still are, a lot of false rumors swirling around about 9/11.
The point is, I’m sure that someone as sneaky and smart as Epstein could have figured out ways to make money off the attacks—if he had foreknowledge, which, as I keep saying, I don’t think he did.
Although if anyone did, Epstein did.
How do you mean?
There was chatter among various foreign intelligence services that such an attack might be on the horizon. Remember, President Bush himself ignored a Bin Laden warning by the CIA. Epstein was in deep with a lot of foreign intelligence agencies—including Saudi intelligence. It’s not inconceivable that he would have had an inkling.
And Trump?
Again: thought experiment. Writers Room.
But…
What if there was evidence in the files that Epstein knew 9/11 was coming, and told his buddy Trump, just on the off chance he might be going to the WTC that day—maybe to do another tour of the basement with his structural engineer. And Trump never said anything, never did anything, just hoarded the information for himself—and maybe tried somehow to profit from it?
Like, what if what Mindy Kleinberg alleged was actually true, and there really were million-dollar put options on the two airlines the day before 9/11? And what if there was evidence—irrefutable evidence—in the Epstein files that Donald Trump was the guy who, after being informed of the looming attacks, made those purchases?
Jesus.
Or…
Or?
Again: brainstorming. That’s all.
As no less an authority than Donald Trump informed us in his rambling 9/11 phone call to the local news station, the Twin Towers had peculiar architectural properties. It follows that the first thing Osama Bin Laden would need, in planning the attacks, were blueprints that showed those peculiar architectural properties.
Let’s think this through. Bin Laden has no way of getting the blueprints from his Tora Bora redoubt, so he asks his longtime associate Semion Mogilevich for help. Mogilevich in turn asks Epstein. And Epstein goes to his BFF, who is not only familiar with the architectural plans but has had a structural engineer give him a tour of the WTC basement—one Donald John Trump.
There are plenty of viable avenues through which Trump could have scored those blueprints, but I’m not comfortable listing them here, even in a hypothetical scenario. You can figure that part out yourself.
So Trump gives the blueprints to Epstein, who gives them to Mogilevich, who gives them to Bin Laden—thus unknowingly implicating himself in a terrorist attack that, in his own words, was “worse than Pearl Harbor.”
In this (again, and I stress: hypothetical!) scenario, Trump may not have known what Epstein needed the plans for. But he certainly would have figured it out once the first plane hit the WTC.
Or maybe he did know; after all, as he never tires of telling us, he did “predict Bin Laden.”
My God.
You ask for a (hypothetical) secret so terrible that Donald would move heaven and earth to keep it under wraps forever? There it is.
I have been thinking about this for months now, and that is the single worst thing I can possibly imagine.
You’re right. That would be worse. Holy shit.
But for the thousandth time: I’m just answering your question. I’m not accusing, not even speculating. Just brainstorming. That’s all. Please don’t come at me with Truther bullshit.
Understood.
What is most infuriating about all of this Epstein stuff is how it shouldn’t be necessary. We shouldn’t have to spend our holidays looking for a smoking gun in the FBI files or Jack Smith’s deposition. We shouldn’t need a smoking gun. As I wrote in Dirty Rubles, eight fucking years ago:
Trump once boasted that he could shoot someone on Fifth Avenue and not lose the support of his voters. I beg to differ. If he did that, there would be irrefutable evidence of a terrible crime, a literal smoking gun, and that would (I like to think) sway the minds of even the most obdurate #MAGA apologists.
Trump/Russia, however, is not bang-bang. There is no single smoking gun. Instead, there are thousands of them, firing simultaneously, and the result is a noxious fog that hangs over everything, clouding our view.
The boring, unsexy truth is that, in a just society, what we already know about Trump and Epstein is more than enough for the public to universally demand Donald’s impeachment, for his own party to turn on him, and for him to spend the rest of his miserable life in social exile, if not in prison.
But ours is not a just society. Not yet.
Not until we collectively decide to make it one.
Copyright Lisa Graves.
h/t Kaydee.
Research for this piece indicated by the asterisks is from two books: The War on Truth, by Nafeez Mosaddeq Ahmed (*) and The Terror Timeline, by Paul Thompson (**).
You broke my brain, Greg. Thanks.
Is the answer a or b or... or Q, all of the above. I pick Q. As horrible as sex with minors, indeed forced upon minors, trafficking minors and frankly anything horrid with children is, there is something lurking in those files that the felon never wants to be seen. However there must have been eyeballs on those gruesome details. The mouths connected to the eyeballs need to divulge as a matter of, frankly decency in the first instance and most importantly in the national interest what they saw.