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America Is Being Governed By the "Epstein Class"

During yesterday's fiery hearing before the House Oversight Committee , one thing became clear: the Felon's Attorney General Pam Bondi (who should never have been confirmed by the Senate) has one mission: protecting the Felon and his circle of fellow friends and visitors of the late Jeffrey Epstein.  Despite many of Epstein's victims in attendance, Bondi and her minions have failed to interview the victims and follow up on matters that need investigation.  Like her boss, Bondi is arrogant, lied constantly, insulted her questioners, and /or refused to answer simple yes or no questions. But Bondi is but one of many liars in the Felon's regime populated by a circle of lying billionaires who have denied ties to Epstein and/or claimed to have long ago severed ties. Except, of course, in reality, they never fully severed ties and have lied about their involvement. With the release of millions of new pages from the "Epstein files" these lies have now been exposed perhaps more in Congress are belatedly realizing what a cesspool the Felon's regime is and that the ones seeking to protect Epstein's co-conspirators are not the so-called "liberal elites" but rather much of the rightwing media and the Felon's regime.   A piece in The Atlantic looks at some of the lies and efforts to hide the truth. Here are excerpts:

“I have nothing to hide. Absolutely nothing,” Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick told a Senate committee yesterday. Perhaps that’s true—but given his recent history, don’t bet on it.

During a podcast interview this past fall, Lutnick talked about an unsettling encounter he and his wife had with the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, who used to be his next-door neighbor, in 2005. After Epstein offered them a house tour and showed them his infamous massage table, Lutnick recalled, he was creeped out and left.

Only that wasn’t true at all. Documents in the Epstein files released by the Justice Department show repeated, if more cordial than chummy, conversation between the two men, as well as some shared business dealings. That’s okay, you might think—they never hung out socially again. Right? He seemed to confirm that, recently telling The New York Times, “I spent zero time with him.”

Well, about that: Yesterday, testifying before Congress, Lutnick reiterated, “I barely had anything to do with that person.” Then he admitted to having visited Epstein’s private island in 2012.

Lutnick seems understandably eager to show that he was not involved in sexual misconduct, and as Senator Chris Van Hollen noted, there is no evidence that he was. But he has no answer for his misleading statements about his dealings with Epstein, and his previous lies make it harder to believe him now. So much for having nothing to hide.

The Trump administration has always been tied to the Epstein scandal—the [Felon] president himself was once a close friend of Epstein’s—but these new details drag his allies still further into the spotlight. Even before his testimony, Lutnick was facing calls to resign from Democrats as well as from renegade Republican Representative Thomas Massie of Kentucky. The secretary, whose penchant for putting his foot in his mouth was already well established, seems to have held on to his job this long only because he is personally friendly with Donald Trump and because the president refuses to give his political adversaries satisfaction by firing anyone. (This stands in contrast to many other organizations and institutions that have been eager to create distance from Epstein by separating themselves from individuals who were connected to him.)

But Lutnick isn’t the only top Trump aide to come up in the new tranche of documents. Navy Secretary John Phelan, a reported billionaire Trump donor who was appointed despite lacking any military or naval experience, was listed as a passenger on flights between London and New York on Epstein’s private plane in 2006.

One reason the Epstein files have created such a stir is that they have revealed the elaborate social and financial ties among so many people in positions of power. It’s not that most or even many of the big names who appear in them were pedophiles or sexual predators, but rather that their dealings with him demonstrate that there’s a wealthy, powerful, globe-trotting club, and the rest of us ain’t in it. Lutnick inadvertently reinforced this image with his mentions of his “nannies,” plural. These glaring markers of privilege are what Senator Jon Ossoff, a Georgia Democrat, was talking about this past weekend when he called the Trump administration “a government of, by, and for the ultrarich. It is the wealthiest Cabinet ever. This is the Epstein class ruling our country.”

The defense that people connected to Epstein—from the billionaire financier Lutnick to the leftist intellectual Noam Chomsky and his wife—have offered is that they didn’t grasp Epstein’s abuses when they socialized with him and were appalled once they did. One problem is that this is sometimes demonstrably false: Lutnick visited the island four years after Epstein’s conviction for sex crimes, and emails show Chomsky offering Epstein public-relations advice after accusations became public.

Another problem is that many of them should have known. You don’t have to take my word for it. Take Trump’s. In 2019, he declared his surprise at the Epstein allegations: “No, I had no idea. I had no idea.” But the Palm Beach police chief at the time recalled that Trump commended him in July 2006, when charges first became public. “Thank goodness you’re stopping him; everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Trump said, as reported by Julie K. Brown of the Miami Herald.

The Epstein revelations are starting to sink in for members of Congress. “Well, initially, my reaction to all this was, ‘I don’t care. I don’t know what the big deal is.’ But now I see what the big deal is, and it was worth investigating,” Senator Cynthia Lummis, a Wyoming Republican, told NewsNation. (One reason Lummis may be willing to say so is that she is retiring, which insulates her from Trump’s wrath.)

These revelations about [the Felon's] Trump’s close allies could affect the GOP’s electoral chances if enough voters become aware of them, but at the same time that members of the Trump administration are popping up in the newly released files, coverage in conservative media outlets has dropped significantly, CNN’s Aaron Blake reports. The result is that Democratic voters, who already dislike and distrust the president, are hearing a great deal about Epstein, but Republican ones, who might be swayed, are not. When MAGA pundits such as Dan Bongino talked about a media cover-up of the Epstein scandal, they were onto something—they were just wrong about the media outlets in question.

The whole right wing universe with few exceptions is all about protecting Epstein's co-conspirators, particularly the Felon.

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Unlike in America, British Politicians Still Have Shame

Numerous European nations now have their own Epstein investigations underway, some with particular focus on whether Jeffrey Epstein was working with Vladimir Putin and passing on compromising information that Putin could use to blackmail the Felon - issues the Felon's DOJ is striving to keep hidden - and others. One other notable difference between the European approach to Epstein is that European politicians, especially those in the United Kingdom still have a sense of shame and seemingly more accountability to their electorate.  Hence the pressure being visited on British Prime Minister Starmer who has no direct contacts with Epstein himself but who allowed a apparent member of Epstein's circle to be appointed ambassador to the USA. Besides mainstreaming overt racism and misogyny, the Felon has ushered in a level of shamelessness once unknown in American politics. Admittedly, the Felon has been aided in this endeavor by Congressional Republicans who refuse to hold the Felon accountable even when he launched an insurrection on January 6, 2021.  Indeed, the Felon's cabinet appointees such has Howard Lutnick and others feel free to lie on all subjects, especially ties to Epstein.  The more morally compromised, the higher one stands in the Felon's orbit.  A piece in The Atlantic looks at the stark contrast between shame in the UK and shamelessness in the Felon's regime. Here are highlights:

There is an irony to the undying Jeffrey Epstein scandal: It may never be more than an annoyance for President Trump, who knew Epstein well, but it could topple British Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who never met the sex-offender financier. . . . . The reasons for the Labour Party leader’s deepening plight are moral, because decency and shame still matter in British politics. But they are also institutional. An American president is less democratically accountable than the British prime minister, because partisanship has disabled the checks that the Founders placed on the chief executive.

Starmer’s troubles stem from appointing Peter Mandelson, a Labour politician known as the “Prince of Darkness,” to be his ambassador to the United States. Mandelson was long known to have been friendly to Epstein but got the job anyway, replacing Karen Pierce, an effective career diplomat with warm ties to MAGA-land who did not particularly want to leave. Mandelson’s term lasted only eight months, ending in September when it was revealed that he was even closer to Epstein than previously realized. He had expressed fury at Epstein’s prosecution for sex crimes in a Florida court in 2008, writing to Epstein, “I think the world of you.” In addition, he’d signed an infamous “birthday book” for Epstein’s 50th birthday that also featured a lewd entry allegedly signed by Trump . . . . Like most of the fiascos of Starmer’s premiership, the Mandelson error was unforced.

But the revelations contained in the tranche of 3.5 million files released late last month by the Justice Department worsened the crisis. The records seem to show Mandelson giving Epstein confidential information about the European Union’s bailout. They show direct payments for unspecified purposes from Epstein to Mandelson and his now-husband (Mandelson has said he has no recollection of receiving the money). There is even a photo of Mandelson in his underwear. This is Mandelson’s third disgraceful exit from public life over his long political career, but it appears to be his final one. He is no longer a member of the privy council (which advises the king), the House of Lords, or the Labour Party. But even such a thorough torching of Mandelson’s political career might not be enough to save Starmer’s.

Though voters gave Labour a large parliamentary majority in 2024, Starmer has seemed befuddled about how to wield it. Little has been accomplished, and Labour’s woes seem likely to benefit the Reform Party, a new nationalist, populist outfit led by the Brexit instigator Nigel Farage. A crisis over Labour Party leadership is now expected.

The contrast with America is striking. For many American political figures, having palled around with Epstein is barely grounds for embarrassment. “It’s really time for the country to maybe get onto something else, now that nothing came out about me,” Trump said in the Oval Office on February 3 (he is mentioned thousands of times in the latest documents released, but there is no damning evidence of misconduct). Two billionaires in Trump’s orbit—Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, and Elon Musk, the Republican super-donor and onetime special government employee—both shrugged off correspondence showing plans to visit Epstein on his island years after his conviction.

The United States is supposed to be a puritanical country in comparison with godless Europe, but in reality it is so saturated in scandal that new ones elicit little outrage. A single dodgy ambassador—Trump has appointed many, almost all unnoticed by the public—could hardly bring down a presidency.

The controversies that have embroiled recent British prime ministers look quaint by recent American standards. . . . You would think that the British prime minister—who definitionally has a parliamentary majority behind him in a country in which Parliament is supreme—would be able to behave more like an elected monarch than the American president, who is supposed to be constrained by checks and balances. In the modern day, the opposite looks to be true. Parliamentary systems encourage palace coups because if you remove your party’s leader, you might be able to claim the job.

Congress has, over the past half century, also turned over more and more of its authority to the personal discretion of the president and the executive branch. When Thomas Jefferson was writing on the demerits of parliamentary government, he observed that “an elective despotism was not the government we fought for; but one which should not only be founded on free principles, but in which the powers of government should be so divided and balanced among several bodies of magistracy, as that no one could transcend their legal limits.” When there is no separation of powers, but merely a separation of parties, this intricate system breaks down, leaving an imperial presidency with exactly the concentrated power that the Founders feared.

They might also be saddened that 250 years after declaring independence from a tyrannical British king, the American system of government has arguably less democratic accountability for its leaders than the British one. But perhaps they would not be entirely shocked: The idea that there was something intrinsic to America that immunized it from autocracy was anticipated and deemed not credible. “Human nature is the same on every side of the Atlantic,” Jefferson wrote, adding, “The time to guard against corruption and tyranny, is before they shall have gotten hold on us.”

Corruption and tyranny are currently unleashed in the USA.

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