The Iran war has been raging for nearly two weeks but it hasn’t yet managed to bomb the Epstein Files out of existence — to the enormous regret of a lot of people in Trumpworld.
Yes, those documents are still around, and people like me have no intention of shutting up about them. Ever.
Let’s take a quick look at all the things the Epstein Files are not:
- They are not a hoax.
- They are not disproven.
- They are not fully released.
- They have not been significantly investigated.
Oh yeah, one other thing: Trump has not come close to being “completely exonerated” no matter how intensely he or his toadies may claim it. In fact, the opposite is true.
Trump’s Department of Injustice has done everything in its power to hide the documents that matter most when it comes to Trump’s complicity with Jeffrey Epstein, explaining them away most recently by claiming, “Oh sorry, we failed to include them in the files release because we mistakenly thought they were duplicates.”
Funny how there were no such errors when it came to mentions of Bill Clinton or anyone else. It tracks with everything contended so far, in arguing against the most likely scenario to be the most plausible one.
More people need to acknowledge that a man publicly accused of sexual misconduct by at least 28 women over decades, found liable for sexual abuse in a department store dressing room, and exposed as a serial liar should reasonably be suspected of joining a man known to have been his best friend — who died a convicted sex offender arrested on new charges — in the sexual assault of underage girls.
Why would women who have nothing to gain and much to lose risk everything — including perpetual harassment, character assassination, and threats of bodily harm to themselves and to family members — to concoct untrue stories about abusive, illegal, and immoral behavior of a man long known to have no self-control or decency?
We are instead asked by Trump and his minions to turn off 99 percent of our brains and believe him.
The internal battle that MAGA fanatics fight to convince themselves Trump is telling the truth despite all conceivable evidence to the contrary must be incredibly fierce. It seems they have no choice but to believe him. Otherwise, their entire life view would be proven fraudulent.
There has to be something to the thousands of mentions of Trump in these files. Otherwise, the DOJ wouldn’t be working so hard to disappear and/or discredit them. Common sense says you don’t try to hide papers that absolve you, only ones that expose your duplicity.
The official explanation is always some version of care and caution surrounding the identity of the girls, now women, named throughout the files. Except that the women almost without exception welcome the files’ exposure and scream for more.
The idea that anyone associated with Trump gives the slightest whit about these women is utterly farcical. They’ve proven over and over that this is a game of Whac-A-Mole, Trump’s every waking moment consumed with staying a step ahead of the game.
It’s all about delaying, obscuring and deflecting, so there is never any accountability and we all forget and move on. Yet no doubt to the amazement of Trump, we’re still here, demanding answers and justice. For the first time in his disgraceful life, running and hiding isn’t working. He stomped his feet to make it vanish, and it didn’t.
The reason is that there are people on both sides of the political divide who don’t want their president to be a predator. Or at least, if the president is a marauding deviant who treats women and girls as pieces of meat placed on earth for his own genitalia-grabbing amusement, they had better hold the cost of groceries and gas low and keep us out of wars.
So much for that.
Now it’s clear Trump has never even tried to keep a promise, the torch-bearing villagers are at the gate. But we’re also finding that isn’t quite enough. It’s time for Republicans in Congress to grow a spine. If not, liability will stay out of reach.
We all know Trump should be nowhere near the highest office in the land but in a prison cell instead. But too many have relegated themselves to pretending that the overwhelmingly obvious is somehow impossible to consider.
I won’t recount the innumerable examples of Trump’s likely guilt embedded in Epstein’s papers, photos, and videos, even among documents the DOJ has released. There simply isn't space.
But there is one story that needs to be pointed out again and again: the claim from the woman interviewed repeatedly by the FBI in 2019, who said she was introduced to Trump sometime between 1983 and 1985, when she was between 13 and 15 years old.
The woman alleged that Trump forced her to perform oral sex on him, but she allegedly “bit Trump’s penis because he disgusted her.”
The woman said Trump responded by pulling her hair, punching her in the side of the head, and saying, “Get this little bitch the hell out of here!”
The woman told the FBI that years of harassment, intimidation, and threats followed, including twice being run off the road.
Before dismissing this uncorroborated claim, I ask: do you honestly not believe Trump is capable of this kind of behavior?
The answer is key to everything.
- Ray Richmond is a longtime journalist/author and an adjunct professor at Chapman University in Orange, CA.
