AG Bondi blames deep state for nothingburger Epstein files
Conspiracies are fun. Reality notsomuch.
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Last week, President Trump invited a gaggle of rightwing influencers to the White House. On the driveway, the toxic superspreaders proudly brandished their "binders of “evidence” about the conspiracy to protect pedophile Jeffrey Epstein for the waiting cameras. (Watch below.)
Attorney General Pam Bondi congratulated herself for “following through on President Trump’s commitment to transparency and lifting the veil on the disgusting actions of Jeffrey Epstein and his co-conspirators.” But in reality the folders were stuffed with documents that had long been in the public domain and the influencers themselves were just props arranged for a photo shoot.
Wingnut agitators who’d been excluded from the event jeered.
“There is one person who takes the blame for what happened today. It’s @PamBondi,” tweeted Laura Loomer. “I think she should resign. She went on Fox News and said the files were on her desk. Then she went on Fox News last night and said we would have files today. She is a total liar.”
“THIS IS NOT WHAT WE OR THE AMERICAN PEOPLE ASKED FOR and a complete disappointment. GET US THE INFORMATION WE ASKED FOR!” groused Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, before heading to One America News to vent her ire to her former colleague Matt Gaetz. (Irony is dead.)
Realizing too late that she’d stepped in it, Bondi fired off an email — and posted it online! — to newly-confirmed FBI Director Kash Patel.
“By 8:00 a.m. tomorrow, February 28; the FBI will deliver the full and complete Epstein files to my office, including all records, documents, audio and video recordings, and materials related to Jeffrey Epstein and his clients, regardless of how such information was obtained,” she fumed. “There will be no withholdings or limitations to my or your access. The Department of Justice will ensure that any public disclosure of these files·will be done in a manner to protect the privacy of victims and in accordance with law, as I have done my entire career as a prosecutor.”
Then she went back to Fox for more cleanup.
“A source had told me where the documents were being kept, Southern District of New York, shock,” Bondi vamped to Sean Hannity. “So we got them all by — hopefully all of them — Friday at 8 am."
The AG claimed to be going through "a truckload of evidence" withheld by her own staff at the Manhattan prosecutors’ office.
"You know, sadly, these people don't believe in transparency. But I think more unfortunately, I think a lot of them don't believe in honesty,” she huffed. (Watch below.)
It’s a breathtakingly hypocritical smear by the former state prosecutor who killed an investigation into Trump’s scam “university” after a well-timed political donation. But Bondi’s entire schtick consists of railing about the evil deep state, especially in godless New York.
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Two weeks ago at CPAC Bondi defended the corrupt dismissal of charges against New York City Mayor Eric Adams by falsely accusing federal prosecutors of taking “one of the biggest mayors in the country off the playing field in order to protect their sanctuary city” with “incredibly weak case filed to make deportation harder.”
Miami Herald journalist Julie Brown, who spent years chasing down the Epstein story and interviewing victims, writes that the FBI’s “Epstein files” likely contain a tremendous amount of information that can’t be released publicly. The identities of minor victims and grand jury materials are protected by law. Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell has appealed her conviction, and any future trial could be jeopardized by the haphazard release of evidence in her case. (Note that this is the same justification accepted by Judge Aileen Cannon when she ordered the DOJ not to release the Special Counsel’s report.) And Loomer is actually right that, if the rumored blackmail sex tapes do exist, then they amount to child sex abuse material.
The problem for Bondi is that she swims in a sea of fake online scandals where the truth is largely irrelevant. Elon Musk rants about $50 million of condoms for Gaza; EPA Administrator Lee Zeldin accuses his predecessor of “stealing” $20 billion in “gold bars” and giving them to Stacey Abrams; HHS Secretary Kristi Noem steals $81 million from New York based on a lie about gang leaders housed in luxury hotels. Bondi probably hoped to stage a similar headline-grabbing stunt as her fellow cabinet members and the de facto head of government.
But unlike her colleagues who concoct stories about faceless liberal bureaucrats, Bondi’s lie evokes rancid conspiracies about Democratic pedophile cults that motivate a sizable (if deranged) portion of the Republican base. She promises to deliver the goods to people primed by Pizzagate and Qanon to believe wild tales about cabals of evil liberals raping and murdering children.
But there are no “goods” to be had — not in the FBI “vault” or anywhere else. Conspiracy theorists babble about a vast plot to protect a demonic predator because it’s easier than reckoning with the reality that preying on children, especially young girls, was so common 20 years ago as to be barely worth mentioning.
“When you’re a star, they let you do it”
In 1979, the most famous comic filmmaker of his generation cast himself as a 42-year-old dating a high school girl. He later ran off with his 21-year-old step daughter. The comedian who defined the 1990s was dating a teenager at the height of his popularity. Two generations of Hollywood actors happily appeared in movies directed by a “genius” who pled down from charges of drugging and raping a 13-year-old girl to unlawful sex with a minor. To the extent that any of this has changed, it’s thanks to the #MeToo movement that Trump and his fellow Republicans despise.
None of this is a defense of Epstein, who was clearly a monster. But pretending that only a grand conspiracy of blackmail and sex tapes can explain how he evaded prosecution and continued to run in “elite” circles is to willfully ignore the routine victimization of women and girls.
Everyone knew that the finance guru paid young girls for sex, and they all treated it, not as a crime, but as the peccadillo of an untutored genius with exotic tastes and the ability to pay for them. It wasn’t a secret because it wasn’t a scandal. Trump himself joked to reporters that Epstein was “a terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
And so it’s wholly unsurprising that in 2007, the US attorney for the southern district of Florida, Alexander Acosta, would allow Epstein to plead to prostitution charges and serve a few months in an unlocked jail cell with liberal “work release.” Like everyone else, Acosta thought the girls were prostitutes — despite being too young to legally consent to sex with an adult — who got what they bargained for.
It never occurred to him that this decision would later derail his career and force him to resign his position as Trump’s secretary of labor. Nor did it occur to Florida Attorney General Pam Bondi to prosecute Epstein between 2011 and 2018 when she was the chief law enforcement official in the state. As Donald Trump once put it, “When you’re a star, they let you do it.”
But now Bondi is in between a rock and hard place. She fed the jackals who bray that the “Epstein client list” will bring down the pedo cabal covered up by the evil deep state. She can’t go back to them now and admit that the episode is part of a sad era in which girls were treated like expendable commodities to be rented by the hour — particularly when her boss has promised to return to that past, restoring America to a halcyon time before Marxist liberals supposedly ruined it with DEI.
Because if Epstein wasn’t a blackmailing mastermind, he was just another rich guy exploiting girls for sex, just like his real estate buddy who bragged about barging into the locker room at teenage beauty pageants. If those two things are the same, well, making America great again is going to be even worse for women than we all expected and Bondi is going to have to do more than snort on Fox about the evil deep state if she wants to distract the masses.
Meanwhile, Trump has managed to get actual sex traffickers Andrew and Tristan Tate released from Romanian custody and sent back to Florida. But unlike Bondi, Florida AG James Uthmeier is actually investigating them.
Liz Dye is a legal columnist and producer of the Law and Chaos Substack and podcast.
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Thanks for reading.
If one thinks like Trump, when America was great was during the McKinley Administration in the late 1800s. How do you think women/females were treated then?
Very good reporting.