As My Stomach Turns

[Thiệu Ngô]

Epstein and Trump and the wriggling, oily likes of Steve Bannon are part of a deeper rot in the soul of this nation. Money is at the heart of it. The more money these monsters accumulate, the worse things get for the rest of us.

By Lucian K. Truscott IV

The House voted 427 to one to order the release of the files kept by the Department of Justice on convicted sex-trafficker, well-known pedophile, and friend of Donald Trump and other powerful men, Jeffrey Epstein. It turns my stomach to write a sentence containing that vote count. Just two days ago, the vote on the discharge petition to force today’s vote was 218 to 217, with only four Republicans voting for the petition. That the rest of them, save for the execrable Clay Higgins, changed their vote after Trump essentially gave them permission, turns my stomach.

And the shit keeps flowing downhill, as usual. I picked up the New York Times at Walgreens, and my eye caught this headline—a subhed, actually: “Bondi rushes to investigate Democrats.”

This is just wrong on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to start. First, in my mind, is the normalization of this outrage by the Times in the manner the subhed is presented: flat, matter of fact, as if an Attorney General of the United States is ordered by the President of the United States to investigate members of a political party—and only members of that party—every day. This is not the way the system of law enforcement is supposed to work in this country. To my recollection, and I’ve been covering politics and government for a long, long time, this has never happened before.

Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

The House voted 427 to one to order the release of the files kept by the Department of Justice on convicted sex-trafficker, well-known pedophile, and friend of Donald Trump and other powerful men, Jeffrey Epstein. It turns my stomach to write a sentence containing that vote count. Just two days ago, the vote on the discharge petition to force today’s vote was 218 to 217, with only four Republicans voting for the petition. That the rest of them, save for the execrable Clay Higgins, changed their vote after Trump essentially gave them permission, turns my stomach.

And the shit keeps flowing downhill, as usual. I picked up the New York Times at Walgreens, and my eye caught this headline—a subhed, actually: “Bondi rushes to investigate Democrats.”

This is just wrong on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to start. First, in my mind, is the normalization of this outrage by the Times in the manner the subhed is presented: flat, matter of fact, as if an Attorney General of the United States is ordered by the President of the United States to investigate members of a political party—and only members of that party—every day. This is not the way the system of law enforcement is supposed to work in this country. To my recollection, and I’ve been covering politics and government for a long, long time, this has never happened before.

Trump and his minions will say that it happened to him—that President Biden ordered the DOJ to investigate and prosecute Trump — but it’s a lie. Trump was investigated for his theft of classified documents because the National Archives had repeatedly demanded that Trump return documents that he had taken from the White House. When several boxes of documents were finally presented by Trump’s team in January of 2022, months after they had been requested, the Archives discovered that they contained classified information and notified the DOJ in February. The DOJ ordered the FBI to investigate to see if other classified information had been taken from the White House and thus began what turned into the “classified documents case” that ended up being charged and prosecuted by Special Counsel Jack Smith.

The White House had nothing to do with this referral. President Biden was not even aware that this had taken place.

Republished with permission from Lucian K. Truscott IV

The House voted 427 to one to order the release of the files kept by the Department of Justice on convicted sex-trafficker, well-known pedophile, and friend of Donald Trump and other powerful men, Jeffrey Epstein. It turns my stomach to write a sentence containing that vote count. Just two days ago, the vote on the discharge petition to force today’s vote was 218 to 217, with only four Republicans voting for the petition. That the rest of them, save for the execrable Clay Higgins, changed their vote after Trump essentially gave them permission, turns my stomach.

And the shit keeps flowing downhill, as usual. I picked up the New York Times at Walgreens, and my eye caught this headline—a subhed, actually: “Bondi rushes to investigate Democrats.”

This is just wrong on so many levels, it’s hard to know where to start. First, in my mind, is the normalization of this outrage by the Times in the manner the subhed is presented: flat, matter of fact, as if an Attorney General of the United States is ordered by the President of the United States to investigate members of a political party—and only members of that party—every day. This is not the way the system of law enforcement is supposed to work in this country. To my recollection, and I’ve been covering politics and government for a long, long time, this has never happened before.

Trump and his minions will say that it happened to him—that President Biden ordered the DOJ to investigate and prosecute Trump — but it’s a lie. Trump was investigated for his theft of classified documents because the National Archives had repeatedly demanded that Trump return documents that he had taken from the White House. When several boxes of documents were finally presented by Trump’s team in January of 2022, months after they had been requested, the Archives discovered that they contained classified information and notified the DOJ in February. The DOJ ordered the FBI to investigate to see if other classified information had been taken from the White House and thus began what turned into the “classified documents case” that ended up being charged and prosecuted by Special Counsel Jack Smith.

The White House had nothing to do with this referral. President Biden was not even aware that this had taken place.

The Times story is accurate, in that it depicts Trump’s order to Bondi to investigate Democrats for their connections to Epstein as a tactic to distract from the DOJ documents, which are expected to show a close connection between Trump and Epstein. Such a connection has already been shown in the emails produced by the Epstein estate last week. The latest count of the number of times Trump’s name appears in the emails to and from Epstein is 2,020. You can be certain that was noticed by Trump and his people, and so the wheels of The Great Lie Machine were put in operation with the order to Bondi to investigate Democrats. The Times even came up with the number of minutes that transpire between Trump’s order to Bondi and her announcement that she had appointed the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York to head the investigation: 217 minutes.

So, all that is to the good. The Times is on the story of how Trump is “weaponizing” the DOJ, to use another word had not been in use to describe our system of law enforcement until Trump came along. But there is a way to take note of how unusual this is. The Times could have used the word “unprecedented” to describe Bondi’s “rush” to investigate Democrats on the orders of President Trump.

But come to think of it, so much has been unprecedented about Trump’s behavior since he took office in January of this year that the word has lost its meaning, and I guess you could make a case that the Times is justified, to some extent anyway, in dropping “unprecedented” from use in its headlines. There have been days, after all, that “unprecedented” would have appeared in every single headline in the New York Times in stories about Trump’s moves in office. His pardons of over 1,000 January 6 insurrectionists on the same day he ordered the closure of entire departments of the government by executive order come immediately to mind.

In yet another disgusting development, my colleague Nina Burleigh has done us the great favor of diving deeply enough into the Epstein emails that she has come up with a shit-spray of nuggets of exchanges between Epstein and Steve Bannon. The sickening details of the frat-boy back-and-forth between these two bottom-feeders are best read with one’s head close by the nearest toilet.

Burleigh reveals the, yes, stomach-turning fact that at the time Epstein was arrested in 2019, Bannon was in the process of making a documentary film about him.

Let us stop and consider that for a moment. Epstein had been convicted of the crime of “felony solicitation of a minor for prostitution” in Florida. At the time of his conviction, Julie K. Brown, an investigative reporter for the Miami Herald, wrote a series of articles that exposed the secret and extraordinarily corrupt plea deal Epstein had worked out with Trump’s DOJ to avoid federal prosecution. She identified 80 – eighty – of Epstein’s victims and proved beyond a shadow of doubt that in addition to his conviction for a sex crime, Epstein had for years been running an extensive sex ring, trafficking underage girls to wealthy and powerful men.

Bannon knew this, and still he was arranging to make a kiss-kiss-and-let’s-forget-the-details documentary about Epstein.

Bannon was all over Epstein with requests for money and jet-favors and business advice, but then, that’s in character for the man who was convicted of fleecing suckers out of hundreds of thousands of dollars in a scam that involved promising to help Trump build his wall on the border with Mexico. The only thing that got built was additions to Bannon’s bank account. When he was arrested for the crime, he was on a billionaire’s mega-yacht off the coast of Connecticut.

Emails between the two reveal that Epstein provided his private jet for Bannon to fly all over the world for meetings with billionaire financiers including Qatari sheiks and a former Gulf prime minister. To describe the flavor of their emails as “locker room talk” insults both locker rooms and the act of talking. Here is just one nugget from Burleigh’s Substack, "American Freakshow."

“Short notice for jet charter,” Jeff texted Steve in November 2018. “But can for tomorrow morning to Paris lunch in Paris then fly you to wherever”. Bannon replied, “What a life.” and “u r a pretty good asst.” Epstein responded, “Massages. Not included”.

Epstein and Bannon took to referring to one another as “brother,” a rather dated form of hip-speak commonly used by stiff-backed squares thinking they are getting down with the dudes, if you catch my drift. The diminutive for “brother,” “bro,” isn’t found in the emails uncovered by Burleigh, but among the 20,000-some that were produced last week, I can guarantee you “bro” is in there somewhere.

Disgusting references to women pepper the emails throughout. Listen to this, from Burleigh’s Substack: “How was Paris fashion week,” Steve inquired in Spring 2018. “There’s nothing left in my testicles but a speck of dust .. and a puff of air,” Jeff replied. “Im putting up a poster of you in my apartment,” Steve wrote back.

You ask yourself how much lower could scum like Bannon go in his quest to become one of this country’s most repellent public characters, and then you discover that the last email message Epstein sent was from Teterboro Airport on July 6, 2019, as FBI agents closed in on his jet to arrest him for sex trafficking minors. They had been discussing the documentary film that Bannon had been working on, and the message Epstein sent was to, you guessed it, his “brother,” Steve Bannon. Here it is in its entirety:

“All cancelled.”

If only these assholes could be cancelled, every one of them, forever. But they are still here among us, living it up in spas for the super-rich like Palm Beach and on ranches in Montana and New Mexico, at the tops of Manhattan skyscrapers, flying hither and yon on their Gulfstream jets that cost in the tens and even hundreds of millions of dollars.

It was learned today that Larry Summers, about whose alleged contrition over his Epstein connections I wrote last night, will continue to teach five classes at Harvard on the subject of economics, because of course Summers was such an economic genius that he frequently went to Jeffrey Epstein for investment advice. We should have known that was coming. Summers is a member of the club. Harvard is the club. The way the club has always worked is to close ranks around even the worst of its members in their time of need, especially when they are men.

This is hard to say, but the problems we have in this country are deeper than the organized sexual abuse of minors. We know that some of these masters of the universe have indeed been involved with the likes of Jeffrey Epstein and taken part in sexual abuse of minors. They have also taken their money and donated it to a political party that has the single aim of undermining our democratic system and denying ordinary citizens the right to vote because of the color of their skin or their ethnicity or even their gender. And far, far too many of them are bent in their determination to control the lives of women.

Epstein and Trump and the wriggling, oily likes of Steve Bannon are part of a deeper rot in the soul of this nation. Money is at the heart of it. The more money these monsters accumulate, the worse things get for the rest of us. It is no coincidence that when we speak of the “powerful men” who were befriended by Epstein and along with him took advantage of underage girls – we may learn that underage boys were abused as well – we are speaking of men who shared secrets not only about sex but about how to make themselves and each other even more wealthy.

It turns my stomach to say this, but we have not yet seen the bottom into which these wicked creatures have led us. Not even close.