The way Trump's acting shows this time he truly is worried

I want to get back to some of the content that was found in the 23,000 emails released by the House Oversight Committee that were obtained from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein.

I’m going to go straight to the authority, Julie K Brown. She’s the reporter for the Miami Herald who wrote that blockbuster series revealing that Epstein got a sweetheart deal from federal prosecutors. It’s because of her that any of us knows Epstein's name.

Here are the facts reported in Brown’s piece published last week about the new collection of Epstein correspondence. For brevity’s sake, I’m going to liberally edit so the only quotes are from the emails.

• Epstein wrote that Donald Trump not only knew he was trafficking girls – but that in one case, Trump had “spent hours” with one of the sex trafficking victims at Epstein’s house.
• In releasing three emails, Democrats on the Oversight Committee redacted the victim’s name. The Republicans, on releasing all 23,000, revealed her to be the late Virginia Giuffre, who had previously said that, to her knowledge, she never saw Trump do anything inappropriate with girls or women.
• “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump,” Epstein wrote to accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in 2011.
• In 2019, Epstein told journalist Michael Wolff that Trump “of course knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”
• That exchange with Wolff came less than a month after the Miami Herald published in 2019 an investigation into Epstein’s crimes – the sex trafficking of dozens of underage girls
• Epstein offered insight on Trump to a Russian diplomat.
• Epstein offered to send New York Times reporter photos of Trump posing with girls in bikinis in his kitchen.
• Larry Summers, the former Harvard president, asked whether the Russians had “stuff” on Trump. Epstein didn’t answer.
• In March 2018, Epstein’s brother, Mark, told him to ask the Trump-advisor Steve Bannon if Vladimir Putin has “the photos of Trump blowing Bubba.” It is unclear what “Bubba” refers to, but it was a nickname for former President Bill Clinton.
• In 2018, Kathryn Ruemmler, who worked in the Obama White House, sent a Times op-ed debating whether Trump should be impeached. “[Y]ou see i know how dirty donald is,” Epstein said.
• Epstein’s death was ruled a suicide, although a subsequent investigation by the Federal Bureau of Prisons noted that cameras in the unit were not working properly and that guards had fabricated their reports. Mark Epstein, Jeffrey's brother, believes he was killed because he had damaging information on powerful people.

‘Use the spa to try to procure girls’

When I read that Epstein had told Wolff “of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop,” I was reminded of something. It was a piece written by the Editorial Board’s own Lindsay Beyerstein.

In July, Lindsay dug up an old Page 6 gossip item from the Oct. 15, 2007, edition of the New York Post. In it, an anonymous source explained Epstein’s exile from Trump’s Florida club, Mar-a-Lago.

That anonymous source, Lindsay said, was almost certainly Trump. He “was notorious for laundering his version of reality through Page 6, either anonymously or under the pseudonym ‘John Barron.’” she said.

Here’s what that source (Trump) told Page 6 about Epstein: “He would use the spa to try to procure girls. But one of them, a masseuse about 18 years old, he tried to get her to do things. Her father found out about it and went absolutely ape-[bleep]. Epstein’s not allowed back.”

Lindsay had dug up that item, because of something Trump said on Air Force One last July. He said the reason he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago was because he was poaching spa workers.

“People were taken out of the spa, hired by him. … When I heard about it, I told him, ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people, whether it was spa or not spa.’ I don’t want him taking people. And he was fine. Then not too long after that, he did it again and I said, ‘out of here.'”

As Lindsay wrote, Trump made it sound like their falling out was due to Epstein “hiring away valued employees with in-demand skills.”

But the Page 6 item suggests he knew more was going on — that there was a longstanding pattern to “use the spa to try and procure girls.”

This latest revelation in Epstein’s own words is a further incrimination: “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”

Using Giuffre to shield Trump

Republicans on the House Oversight Committee accused Democrats of redacting for bad-faith reasons the name of the sex-trafficking victim who had “spent hours” with Trump at Epstein’s house. They said that by hiding the name of the late Virginia Giuffre, the panel’s Democrats were just trying to smear the president with selectively leaked emails.

It’s true enough that Giuffre had said under oath that she didn’t believe Trump had any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. In her memoir, she said she met Trump once. Giuffre did not accuse him of any wrongdoing.

But aboard Air Force One back in July, the president acknowledged that Giuffre was one of the teens taken from the club. In 2000, Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell recruited her, she said. In 2007, Trump said anonymously that “a masseuse about 18 years old, [Epstein] tried to get her to do things.” That wasn’t Giuffre, but the point is, he knew. And according to Epstein, that’s why Trump asked Maxwell to stop.

The suggestion is that Giuffre didn’t know the whole story.

It’s also that the Oversight Republicans are using a dead sex-crime victim (Giuffre killed herself in April), who “spent hours” with Trump at Epstein’s house, to shield the president from the consequences of knowing what a child-sex trafficker was doing under his own roof.

Guilty is as guilty does

A lot is still unknown, but what we do know is how the president is behaving to the revelations found this week in the Epstein emails.

Which is to say, like he’s guilty.

Trump also ordered the Justice Department to redirect attention away from him and toward Bill Clinton and other Democrats who were in Epstein’s circle. There is no credible evidence connecting the former president to Epstein’s crimes, Reuters said.

The House Republicans are expecting “mass defections,” according to Politico, in favor of the discharge. The House votes this week. I don’t put much stock in him, but it’s worth noting Joe Scarborough said Thursday he does not expect Senate Republicans to stand in the way.

Perhaps that’s due to growing public skepticism.

CNN’s poll editor Henry Enten said Thursday, “Nobody is buying what Trump is selling on Epstein. His net approval on it is an absolutely dreadful negative 39 points, far worse than any other major issue. It isn't improving over time. Even among the GOP, just 45 percent approve of the job the Trump admin is doing on the Epstein case."

"It's clearly the biggest scandal in presidential history,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-CT) during an interview. “He wouldn't be acting this way if he wasn't so deeply worried about what's in those files. What we've already seen is immensely incriminating. Clearly Trump was at the center of a child-sex ring ... the scandal could bring him down."

“The scandal could bring him down"? Eh, maybe. He might be acting guilty now, but this criminal president is always acting guilty … of something. It’s all in plain sight. Will this one bring him down?

All I can say is we’ve been here before.