President Donald Trump’s continued rejection of calls to shed light on Jeffrey Epstein and any co-conspirators exposes his “entire project” to be an outright “con to his base,” journalist and political analyst Anand Giridharadas said Thursday on MSNBC.
“This is revealing, the fact that he won't simply release these files, bring transparency [and] honor these survivors,” Giridharadas said, speaking on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.” “It reveals his entire project to be a con to his base!”
Giridharadas’ comments come in the wake of the explosive press conference Wednesday that saw survivors of Epstein – the disgraced financier who died in 2019 awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges – demand the Trump administration release files it currently holds on the child sex offender.
Trump has remained dismissive of such cries, claiming theories around Epstein – that he ran a blackmail operation targeting powerful figures and was potentially linked to intelligence agencies – a “hoax” conducted by Democrats to undermine his administration’s successes. Ari Ben-Menashe, who worked as an arms dealer for Israeli military intelligence, told National Enquirer Editor-in-Chief Dylan Howard that Epstein was involved with Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, though the claims have not been verified or corroborated.
“They're trying to get people to talk about something that's totally irrelevant to the success that we've had as a nation since I've been president,” Trump said Wednesday following the press conference, again labeling the effort to compel the Justice Department to release all of its files on Epstein as a “hoax.”
With Trump having pledged to “drain the swamp” for more than a decade, however, his reluctance to target potential co-conspirators of Epstein, Giridharadas argued, revealed his entire mantra to be nothing more than a ruse.
“He ran on saying 'there's a group of wealthy, powerful people who are sort of colluding, and I am outside of this system and I'm going to expose this system, I'm going to drain the swamp,’” Giridharadas said. “And now, in what is the ultimate caricature example of the wealthy and powerful colluding and doing harm, he has revealed that he is not serious about his project.”
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