assessing epstein

america deserves to know

as everyone seems to be speaking of the epsetin list (or lack thereof) and the seeming shakeups at justice, FBI and the political positions swirling around it, please allow an internet cat a moment upon a soap box to weigh in because everything about this entire epstein matter stinks like the underside of a monkey tree during over-ripe durian season.

epstein was obviously some sort of asset running some sort of ugly honeypot ring. he and ghislaine had all manner of ties to the intelligence community, this is exactly the sort of game the IC likes to play, and the stunning speed with which a whole bunch of charges got dropped back in 2008 after the FBI’s “operation leap year” led to a 53 page federal indictment for enticing and recruiting dozens of underaged girls into prostitution, sexual abuse, and sex trafficking cannot help but elicit suspicion. his infamous non-prosecution agreement led to this never being filed and full immunity from federal charges with slap on the wrist punishment in florida.

from there one would at least expect some level of future moderation, but nope. he became more politically connected than ever and the lolita express to epstein island was back in business and business was booming.

sorry, but this sort of stuff does not happen without all manner of very serious air cover.

cover like this.

In 2017, during his vetting for Secretary of Labor under the Trump administration, Alexander Acosta, the U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida who oversaw Epstein’s 2008 plea deal, reportedly told Trump’s transition team that he was instructed to back off Epstein because he “belonged to intelligence” and the matter was “above his pay grade.”

it does make quite a lot of sense. ghislaine’s father, robert maxwell was widely believed to be mossad and everything around jeffrey seems to have weird distortion fields of tactical incompetence and extreme coincidence that never quite allow the truth to out.

a man who knew too much about some excruciatingly powerful and ruthless people who was under tight surveillance manages unseen suicide at just the moment everything to monitor and prevent it failed.

huh.

people are, of course, free to have their own views here, but to my mind, to call this a heckofa series of co-ink-i-dinks would seem to exceed the bounds of even the most charitable assessment.

some facts:

July 23, 2019 – First Suicide Attempt:

• Epstein was found semi-conscious in his cell with neck injuries, initially reported as a possible suicide attempt. He was placed on suicide watch following this incident.

• Surveillance footage from outside his cell during this event was requested by the attorney of Epstein’s cellmate, Nicholas Tartaglione, to determine if Tartaglione was involved. However, federal prosecutors later revealed that the MCC inadvertently preserved footage from the wrong cell block due to a clerical error. As a result, the footage from outside Epstein’s cell on July 22-23, 2019, was permanently deleted. A backup system also failed to retain the footage due to technical errors

August 10, 2019 – Epstein’s Death:

• Epstein was found dead in his cell, ruled a suicide by hanging by the New York City medical examiner. Two cameras outside his cell in the Special Housing Unit (SHU) were reported to have malfunctioned, raising suspicions.

• According to reports, one camera’s footage was deemed "unusable," though it was not specified whether this was due to technical failure, poor quality, or other issues. Other cameras in the area captured clearer footage, but none showed the interior of Epstein’s cell, as MCC cameras were positioned to monitor only external areas like hallways.

• A Department of Justice (DOJ) report clarified that a hard drive issue, identified days before Epstein’s death, meant only one camera in the SHU was recording to DVR. This camera did not capture the entrance to Epstein’s tier or cell, limiting its usefulness. The cameras were functional for live monitoring by guards but did not record due to the hard drive problem.

• The DOJ later released surveillance footage from the night of Epstein’s death, showing no one entering or exiting his cell from 10:40 p.m. on August 9 until 6:30 a.m. on August 10, supporting the conclusion of suicide with no evidence of foul play. However, a missing minute in the footage’s timestamp (skipping from 11:58:58 p.m. to 12:00 a.m.) raised further questions, though no definitive explanation for this discrepancy has been provided.

Additional Context

• Guard Misconduct: Two guards, Tova Noel and Michael Thomas, assigned to monitor Epstein, were charged with falsifying records and failing to conduct required checks every 30 minutes. They admitted to sleeping and shopping online during their shift, contributing to the lack of direct supervision.

• Suicide Watch Removal: Epstein was taken off suicide watch on July 29, despite his earlier attempt, and was not assigned a new cellmate after Tartaglione was transferred, violating protocol. This left him alone in his cell, with excess bed linens that he used to hang himself.

this latest video one is just more “you have to be kidding me” level outcome.

metadata clearly shows that this video was modified and spliced multiple times in adobe premiere (a suite of editing software). claims that the “missing minute” is just normal daily reset seem strained. i struggle to imagine why you’d design a system that way. there also appear to be numerous other oddities, variances, and issues beyond “the mysterious minute,” which feels more like a magician's flourish to distract than the bunny in the hat which probably lies elsewhere.

occam’s razor is looking awfully dull on the “nothing to see here” claims.

parsimony may point another way…

but what i find especially interesting now is this new push to “there were no files, no tapes, no black book or list, it was all just a misunderstanding or cunning lie.”

with all due respect, pull my other paw, it plays jingle bells.

we’re suddenly seeing seeming shakeups at FBI and justice. bongino is allegedly quitting (though this is not confirmed as far as i know)

there is all sorts of speculation about other departures and why.

tectonic plates have shifted.

in this new context, the bondi stunt looks awfully odd. why make such a big deal over binders full of nothing and then wind up here?

why are the stories so oddly un-straight and ever-changing?

something seems off.

personally, i simply do not believe that there is no list, no video, no record.

from the looks of things, epstein had more video equipment than spielberg and piles of very suspicious stuff that was, suspiciously, not seizable when found and that then disappeared.

there is just SO much here that does not make sense if there is no fire behind this smoke.

this sudden pivot to “it’s all just a distraction” and “nothing to see here” and then to “this is all made up just like the steele dossier” smacks of complicity and capitulation. are we really buying that all the way back to 2005? and what were all those powerful people doing on all those plane flights to little saint james?

if you really knew this to be a nothingburger, this is not how you’d handle it. “the whole existence of the list was a psyop” is past credulity. you wanna make a claim like that, you better bring receipts by the bagful.

“somebody nobody cares about?”

that seems like a really questionable assertion and a sort of limited hangout to make it about “epstein” personally as opposed to what the existence of a ring like epstein’s would mean if, indeed, such a thing were true.

let’s not lose sight of this, because that is the real query.

it’s not about jeffrey, ghislaine and their probably creepy proclivities.

it’s about this:

do we really have a society of kompromat-extorted sex predators dug into the upper reaches of our government and business communities?

it’s kind of a big question.

one might even go so far as to claim that “if true, this would have major implications for an awful lot of things.”

i mean, call me crazy, but it seems like something you’d want to know the answer to and maybe make some plans around.

and it’s not as far-fetched as many would imply.

looked at as pure sociopathic machiavellian power politics, it’s a highly sensible structure. how do you attract the right sort of egomaniac power hungry psychopaths and narcissists, bind them into a team, and keep them onside and doing what they are told?

by selecting for having done or making them all do something horrible that you can hold over their head, real career-ending stuff.

political cabal by mutually assured destruction and enforced compliance to whoever is calling the shots owing to same and the knowledge that if you turn squealer, no place is safe and “was suicided” is always an option.

stranger things have happened.

everyone seems to have some partisan oar to stick into the mix or political axe to grind. trump is playing the supercillious dismissive: “are you people still talking about that?” as though this were all somehow old news of little import.

this seems an ill-conceived strategy both because, well, yes a lot of us do still care if our government is a captured cadre of blackmailable blackguards bonded and bound by sexual abuse of minors and because it’s just going to inflame interest and suspicion.

justifications are running amok.

scott adams (who has me blocked so i cannot respond to him directly) is now creating fantastical hobgoblin hostage puppies to excuse the refusal to release the epstien list.

"unless you are willing to experience every one of these wild surmises about some bad thing that might happen, you need to trust the government to decide what's best for you!" is not a serious position, it's a false framing by assumptive false premise.

possible does not mean certain or even likely. "would you favor going to buy a car if you knew you might one day kill a pedestrian who would have grown up to cure cancer?"

i mean, you can take this logic anyplace.

are we really to believe that it is only by allowing unaccountable executive branch purview to hide possible rings of adult atrocity "because we know best" that we can stop bad things from happening?

that seems like quite a stretch.

are we seriously to imagine that such a status quo is somehow the lesser of long-term evils or that leaders compromised by such kompromat are somehow more likely to be on our side or to lead to a better world?

this idea that we elect the president to “decide what the public can safely see” seems an intense inversion when speaking of an idea like “your government might be a compromised pedo cult.”

on what planet does safety lie with hiding that fact?

in such a case, can we the people even know who is ruling our rulers?

how would this not represent a no-limit bet on a game of close your eyes and open your mouth played with the sort of svengali who thinks “sexual blackmail ring as governance, what a great idea!?!”

how could “such people rule you by stealth” possibly be something that we the people could safely NOT know?

anyone espousing “trust the government to make good choices about when to lie to you about the government being liars” is not a serious person.

note that scott does not even consider that such disclosure might have positive effects to balance out this risk fantasy of his. he speaks of needing to account for hypotheticals about “what we must give up” but makes no accounting (or even mention) of what we might gain.

leaving out the “benefit” side of a cost/benefit equation seems like the very definition of an incomplete analysis.

• what if full disclosure finally led to a more decent, uncaptured government more in line with american values and could restore some semblance of fiscal responsibility?

• what if it gutted the two political parties and allowed us to finally break their strangle-hold on our politics?

scott’s take seems a one-sided political tapdance that boils down to "trust the government to decide what we the people should know about our leaders."

that is not a practice with a history of working out well for the demos.

one of two states of the world are true:

1. either there is (or at least was) an epstein list incriminating to a great many powerful people and proof positive of their immorality, awfulness, and capture

2. or there isn’t/wasn’t.

i can simply see no case in either eventuality to not simply come clean or any case to “trust the president to hide it if there is a good reason.”

there really is no even remotely plausible reason good enough.

in light of past claims and findings and a vast mosaic of implication, “there is no list and never was” is an extraordinary claim and will require extraordinary proof, especially as one would be trying to prove a negative and would thus need a massive preponderance of evidence favoring non-existence in order to be convincing. if the evidence is there, provide it and let’s be done with it for real. “trust us and don’t worry your pretty little heads, we have bigger fish to fry” is just not going to cut it.

but if the list and offenses and networks ARE real, well then we REALLY need to know. “OMG, but it could cause some bad outcome in the short run” seems a thin gruel to outweigh the meaty stew of “can you not see how incredibly bad it would be to have a government of compromised and captured blackmail targets with profound anti-social tendencies all of whom are steered by some unseen players who are the sort of people that are OK running the world through sexual extortion rings that prey upon the underage?”

that seems an awfully substantial counterweight to leave off the scales of risk and reward here.

and like so much around this issue, that does not seem like a mistake you make by accident.