Turns out, the “raw video” of Jeffrey Epstein’s jail cell released by the Justice Department last week was heavily edited, and missing nearly three minutes of real time.
This word comes to us from WIRED, which published a report on the funny business involving the video on Tuesday, as Donald Trump, who many suspect was involved in Epstein’s child-sex ring in the 1990s and 2000s, tried to swerve us into thinking the whole Epstein story is a Democrat plant.
“In terms of the credibility of the different things that they’ve seen, I would say that these files were made up by Comey, they were made by Obama, they were made up by the Biden, and we went through years of that with the Russia Russia Russia hoax, with all of the different things that we had to go through, we’ve gone through years of it,” Trump rambled to reporters at the White House.
A dose of reality here: Epstein was first charged with child-sex crimes in Florida way back in 2005 – incidentally, in 2005, James Comey was a deputy attorney general in the George W. Bush administration, Barack Obama was a first-term U.S. senator from Illinois, and Joe Biden was a long-serving U.S. senator from Delaware.
Epstein would go on to be convicted on the state charges in 2008, the final year of George W. Bush’s second term in the White House.
He faced a number of civil suits during the Obama years, including one filed by a Jane Doe against both Epstein and Trump, alleging that the two men sexually assaulted her at a series of parties at Epstein’s Manhattan residence in 1994, when she was 13 years old, but the only other criminal charges against Epstein came as a result of an investigation by the FBI in 2019, when, guess who, Trump was president.
Epstein was arrested on July 6, 2019, charged two days later, and after his bail request was denied on July 18, he was found dead in his jail cell on Aug. 10, the victim of an apparent suicide.
To recap: Trump’s FBI arrested Epstein, Epstein died on their watch, and then Trump, on the campaign trail last year, raised the issue with the mysterious death of his former running buddy, trying to cast it as having been perpetrated by Democrats, somehow, with the oft-repeated promise to release the “Epstein files,” hinting that the files included a client list that would expose members of the world’s elites to possible criminal prosecution.
Trump’s second-term attorney general, Pam Bondi, who got the job because she ran interference for Trump over his Trump University scheme back when she was the attorney general in Florida, said multiple times earlier this year that the Epstein files were on her desk, as she pledged to hasten their release.
Which made the leak of an internal DOJ email two weeks ago in which the official word of the Trump administration is that there is no client list, and that there was nothing to Epstein’s 2019 death, all the more suspect.
Not so much among Trump’s critics from the left and center-left, who have always been suspect of Trump’s motives regarding his lifelong pedophile pal, but among his MAGA base.
Seems that promising to uncover the ugly details of every possible conspiracy theory to the tinfoil-hat set to get elected, then following up with, please disperse, nothing to see here, doesn’t sit well with those folks.
“It’s a very delicate subject, but we should put everything out there and let the people decide,” House Speaker Mike Johnson said in an interview with MAGA sycophant Benny Johnson on Tuesday.
Not exactly toeing the party line there, is he?
“I mean, the White House and the White House team are privy to facts that I don’t know. I mean, this isn’t my lane, I haven’t been involved in that, but I agree with the sentiment that we need to, we need to put it out there,” the House Speaker said.
Tim Burchett, the Tennessee Republican who changed his vote on the Big Ugly Bill because Trump signed swag for him in the Oval Office, is, shockingly, on the same page as the Speaker.
“I’m over it. It disgusts me. I’m big on clarity and transparency, and that’s a good reason people don’t trust government, either party,” Burchett told CNN in a quick interview on Tuesday.
Even Joe Rogan, somehow punch-drunk just from years of sitting ringside at UFC fights, has lobbed criticism at the Dear Leader.
“They’ve got videotape, and all of a sudden they don’t,” Rogan said on his podcast on Tuesday. “You know, you had the director of the FBI on this show saying, ‘If there was, nothing you’re looking for is on those tapes.’ Like, what? Why’d they say there was thousands of hours of tapes of people doing horrible shit? Why’d they say that? Didn’t Pam Bondi say that?”
She did; but now she’s saying, what exactly?
A reporter tried to press her on the Epstein issue at a press conference she called on Tuesday to talk about fentanyl, probably to revive her claim from a couple of months ago that her department had saved 258 million people from gruesome fentanyl-related deaths since Jan. 20.
Blondi – did I do that? – stuck to the script.
“Today is about fentanyl,” the AG said. “This is about a wall of people right outside this room who have died for, I appreciate your question, but this today is about fentanyl overdoses throughout our country and people who have lost loved ones to fentanyl. That’s the message that we’re here to send today. Nothing about Epstein. I’m not gonna talk about Epstein.”
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Chris Graham
