US President Donald Trump. The current US ambassador to Turkey, Tom Barrack. The Clinton administration’s Treasury Secretary and former Harvard dean, Larry Summers. The billionaire founder of PayPal and close ally of Vice President J.D. Vance, Peter Thiel. The former Prime Minister of Norway, Thorbjorn Jagland. And also the Russian ambassador to the UN, Vitaly Churkin.
All of the aforementioned refer in one way or another to the messages of convicted pedophile Jeffrey Epstein, which were made public by the Democratic members of the House of Representatives Oversight Committee, opening a new round of confrontation around the scandal that poses the greatest threat to the White House.
Recipients
It is recalled that the emails include conversations between Epstein and his convicted paedophile partner Gillian Maxwell and journalist Michael Wolff, in which Trump is mentioned by name and it is implied that he knew more about the abuse of minors than he has admitted. Specifically, in a 2011 email to Ghislaine Maxwell, he had written that “the dog that didn’t bark is Trump,” adding that “one of the girls spent hours at my house with him.” In another message, in January 2019, Epstein wrote to journalist Michael Wolff that “of course he knew about the girls, since he had asked Ghislaine to stop.” Democrats argue that these messages show that the president was aware of Epstein’s actions.
However, if the aforementioned messages – which were characterized by the White House press secretary, Caroline Levitt, as a slanderous narrative – concern Epstein’s allegations, a series of others prove that he maintained or wished to acquire strong contacts with high-ranking figures in the political and diplomatic world. Such as Bannon, for example, to whom Epstein was willing to mediate as a liaison with leaders of European countries, in case the ideological “architect” of the Trump phenomenon decided to become active in the Old Continent. In the case of Jakland, who led the Council of Europe at the time, Epstein again offered himself as a mediator, this time between Washington and Moscow. “I think you could suggest that Putin ask Lavrov to talk to me,” he wrote, specifically a month before the US president met his Russian counterpart in Helsinki in 2018, during his first term in the White House. And he mentioned that he had previously discussed Trump with Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s ambassador to the United Nations, before Churkin died in 2017.
The culmination of the new, dark chapter in the already knotty case is the email correspondence between Epstein and Barack, in which the latter asks the former to send him a photo of himself “with the child” to make him smile.
Boomerang
It wasn’t long ago that Trump declared that he would release all the files related to Epstein, “we’re probably going to see some very interesting things,” he declared during the campaign, announcing revelations regarding the infamous “list” with which he allegedly blackmailed a series of high-ranking figures who visited his private island. The commitment satisfied a demand from the most hard-line segment of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, which links Epstein’s death to the QAnon conspiracy narrative – according to which a global elite of pedophiles rules the world. And it summed up Trump’s message, in terms of arguments, that a corrupt elite had betrayed America’s interests and values.
The first disappointment came from the joint investigation by the Justice Department and the FBI, which concluded that there was no evidence that Epstein had a “clientele” that he blackmailed or that he himself was murdered in prison. Even more furious was the reaction from Trump supporters, after a post in which he called on his followers “not to waste time and energy on a guy [ed. Jeffrey Epstein] that nobody cares about anymore.”
In the wake of the recent revelations, the ruling party attempted to respond drastically. Thus, the Republicans who are part of the relevant committee, released 23,000 pages of documents on the case, while Trump accused the Democrats of using the “Epstein Fraud” to distract from the 1.5 trillion dollars in damages that they caused in the US with the federal shutdown. However, the Democrats are also criticized by journalists who point out the presence of powerful figures from the party in the infamous correspondence. They themselves accuse the party’s leaders of a boundless willingness to political exploitation, which further exacerbates the polarization.
The “MAGA people” however seem to have formed an opinion. Just four in 10 Republicans say they are satisfied with the president’s handling of the case, according to a Reuters/Ipsos poll conducted in October. At the same time, a small but powerful group of conservative lawmakers, led by the leading figure of the pro-Trump movement, Marjorie Taylor Greene, have signed a discharge petition to put the full release of Epstein’s files to a vote.
And all this while the recent election contests are interpreted as a first warning shot to the ruling party, in view of the midterm elections next year.
