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The Felon's DOJ Epstein Coverup Continues

By now it should be obvious to all but the most rabid MAGA cultist that the Felon's Department of Justice ("DOJ") now exists for two functions: (i) threatening and trying to prosecute the Felon's critics and political opponents, and (ii) covering up damning information that incriminates (or worse) the Felon through his ties with Jeffrey Epstein.  The irony of the latter role is that if the Felon were truly innocent - something I do not believe - he should want all of the Epstein files released to clear his name. Of course, the exact opposite is what is occurring as it becomes increasingly clear that the DOJ is hiding documentation that accuses the Felon of sexual crimes against minors.  All of this underscores that if the Felon was innocent of wrong doing, he would not be acting as if he is indeed guilty and Pam Bondi - who is on her way to being the most corrupt Attorney General in the nation's history - would not continue to hide documentation at best unflattering to the Felon. The other thing that is most unusual is that the always litigious Felon has sued no one for libel or defamation for saying he's a child rapist, leaving the conclusion that the Felon fears what a lawsuit might bring to the light of day through sworn depositions and discovery of of other documentation.  A piece in the New York Times looks at the latest DOJ coverup:

The vast trove of documents released by the Justice Department from its investigations into the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein failed to include some key materials related to a woman who made an accusation against [the Felon] President Trump, according to a review by The New York Times.

The materials are F.B.I. memos summarizing interviews the bureau did in connection to claims made in 2019 by a woman who came forward after Mr. Epstein’s arrest to say she had been sexually assaulted by both Mr. Trump and the financier decades earlier, when she was a minor.

The existence of the memos was revealed in an index listing the investigative materials related to her account, which was publicly released. According to that index, the F.B.I. conducted four interviews in connection with her claims and wrote summaries about each one. But only one summary of the four interviews, which describes her accusations against Mr. Epstein, was released by the Justice Department. The other three are missing.

The public files also do not include the underlying interview notes, which the index also indicates are part of the file. The Justice Department released similar interview notes in connection to F.B.I. interviews with other potential witnesses and victims. . . . Officials did not directly address why the memos related to the woman’s claim were not released.

The woman’s description of being assaulted by Mr. Trump in the 1980s is among a number of uncorroborated accusations against well-known men, including the [Felon] president, that are contained in the millions of documents released by the Justice Department.

The missing records deepen questions about how the Justice Department has handled the release of the Epstein files, which was mandated by a law signed by Mr. Trump last year after bipartisan congressional pressure.

Under the law, the Justice Department can redact material that could be used to identify Mr. Epstein’s victims, depicted violence or child sexual abuse, or would hurt a continuing federal investigation. But the law expressly prohibited federal officials from withholding or redacting materials “on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity” to public figures.

Some lawmakers and survivors of Mr. Epstein’s abuse have strongly condemned the department for how it handled redactions, noting that details identifying some victims were left exposed and nude photographs of young women were included in the public release, while material related to claims of abuse by other men had been heavily redacted.

The woman who made the accusation about Mr. Trump came forward in July 2019, days after federal investigators arrested Mr. Epstein on sex-trafficking charges, according to records in the public files of tips the F.B.I. received during that period. She claimed that she had been repeatedly assaulted by Mr. Epstein when she was a minor in the 1980s, according to a summary of an F.B.I. interview with her on July 24, 2019.

The F.B.I. did three subsequent interviews to assess her account in August and October 2019 and made a summary of each interview, according to the index of records compiled in the case. But the memos describing those three interviews were not publicly released.

The public files do contain a 2025 description of her account, as well as other accusations against prominent men contained in the documents. In that 2025 memo, federal officials wrote that the woman had said that Mr. Epstein introduced her to Mr. Trump, and that she claimed Mr. Trump had assaulted her in a violent and lurid encounter. The documents say the alleged incident would have occurred in the mid-1980s when she was 13 to 15 years old, but they do not include any assessment by the F.B.I. about the credibility of her accusation.

The Times’s examination of a set of serial numbers on the individual pages in the public files suggests that more than 50 pages of investigative materials related to her claims are not in the publicly available files.

Representative Robert Garcia of California, the top Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, said that when he reviewed unredacted versions of the Epstein files at the Justice Department on Monday, interview summaries related to the woman’s claim were also missing from that trove. . . . . Mr. Garcia said. He added that the Justice Department had also not provided them to the Oversight Committee, which issued a subpoena last year for all of the Justice Department’s investigative material regarding Mr. Epstein.

The woman spent most of the interview on July 24, 2019, describing in detail what she said were repeated violent assaults by Mr. Epstein that she had endured, as reported earlier by The Post and Courier. She said that as a teenager in South Carolina, she was asked to babysit at a house on Hilton Head Island. But after she arrived, there were no children to babysit, and only a man she came to know as Jeff who she said plied her with alcohol, marijuana and cocaine. She described him raping her on multiple occasions.

The woman joined a lawsuit later in 2019 against Mr. Epstein’s estate. She subsequently dropped her claim. Court records do not indicate if she received any financial settlement. A court record from 2021 said she was separately deemed ineligible for compensation from a fund set up for Epstein victims, but it did not specify why.

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The State of the Union Carnival Show

I will admit that I did not watch all of the State of The Union address for several reasons: it was laced with lies and distortions which is the norm for the Felon - a piece at the Associated Press lists the untruths - and went on for ever, and I simply was not in the mood to watch a spectacle of narcissistic preening that would have made it difficult to keep from vomiting.  Members of the military and the men's U.S. hockey team were used as political props to an utterly insincere performance bu the liar in chief.  The one thing the speech, if one can call it that, was missing was any accurate description of how the Felon's  policies will bring down prices and benefit everyday Americans. Indeed, while many are struggling financially, some in the GOP want more tax cuts for the super wealthy and large corporations. In short, the event painted an utterly false picture of where the nation finds itself under the regime of a narcissistic psychopath suffering from increasing dementia. With luck, the event will prove to be little help for the Felon's plummeting approval numbers that with luck will prove to be a heavy anchor on Republican candidates in November.  A piece at The Atlantic looks at the carnival barker's show: 

The longest State of the Union in modern history is now over. Donald Trump held court in the House of Representatives and said little of substance, but substance wasn’t the point. This year, he intended to put on a show, with an array of guest stars and special appearances. He was happy, because he was playing the roles he clearly loves: game-show host, ringmaster, MC, beneficent granter of wishes—and, where the Democrats were concerned, a self-righteous inquisitor.

Trump did his usual rote lying about the economy—pity the fact-checkers who tried to keep up even in the first 10 minutes or so of the speech—along with some of his other greatest hits, including the many wars he stopped and the magic of tariffs.

Ronald Reagan, the Great Communicator, once managed to do the entire State of the Union address in 31 minutes; that’s because he could say important things efficiently and well. Tonight, however, was not about communication, it was about showmanship. Almost every line was a cue for applause from obedient Republicans; they even gave Jared Kushner a standing ovation. Every few minutes, Trump told a story, and reached out into the audience like the host of The Price Is Right, telling people to come on down.

He started, of course, with the U.S. men’s Olympic hockey team. Just basking along with Team USA wasn’t enough. Trump soon announced that the goalie Connor Hellebuyck would receive the Presidential Medal of Freedom. Normally, this honor is bestowed for a lifetime of achievement . . . .

And so it went, all night. Sometimes, the guests were meant to tug at the heart, such as when Trump recognized Erica Kirk, the wife of the murdered activist Charlie Kirk. Others were presented as ornaments meant to illustrate Trump’s successes: Enrique Marquez, a Venezuelan political prisoner freed after U.S. forces deposed the strongman Nicolas Maduro, was given a round of well-deserved applause. Trump also gave a shoutout to a woman whose IVF medications were now, he claimed, cheaper.

But no group received more attention than the U.S. military. Trump handed out two Purple Hearts (one posthumously), a Legion of Merit, and not one, but two Congressional Medals of Honor. Military awards that should have been treated with dignity and respect were placed on men like prizes, including a moment when Trump’s co-host, the First Lady, put one of the Medals of Honor around the neck of a 100-year-old fighter pilot.

Trump even had designated heels in the audience: the Democrats. He called them crazy, and accused them of impoverishing the nation. He dared them to stand up if they agreed with him that “the first duty of the American government is to protect American citizens, not illegal aliens.” This stunt was obviously meant to force Democrats either to stand or boo or otherwise do something that Trump could exploit; instead, it merely resulted in several awkward seconds of a staring contest between the president and the Democrats in the chamber. Trump managed to bait Representative Ilhan Omar into shouting at him, but for the most part, he seemed genuinely irritated that the Democrats sat through his show in stony silence.

The only thing Trump did not do was explain his policies—especially about war and peace—to Congress or the American people.

The largest American armada assembled since the second Gulf War is now encircling Iran. Trump never mentioned the buildup; instead he claimed that his one overriding interest was that Iran would forswear nuclear weapons forever. But the brief case he laid out was not for nonproliferation, but for regime change.

But if some of the address was a game show, much of it was a bloody Grand Guignol theater of horror stories, almost all about immigrants preying on the helpless and the innocent. Trump led into these anecdotes by starting with an accusation that the Somali community of Minnesota was scamming the state. He followed up with stories of murder and mayhem, . . . .

Trump tonight went far beyond what even the most self-indulgent presidents would have envisioned. Beset by scandal, facing multiple defeats in America’s courts, and hitting levels of unpopularity that would make Richard Nixon nod with empathy, he turned the State of the Union into a vulgar, populist carnival.

Trump made a great show of honoring a handful of U.S. military heroes. Meanwhile, thousands of young men and women are a world away, waiting for his orders to go to war. The president of the United States might have taken a moment tonight to tell their families why they’re out there, and what they’re supposed to do. But why bother? The show must go on.

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The Republican Party Has a Nazi Problem

With the Felon openly longing to be a dictator and the Republican Party welcoming even the ugliest elements of the far right into the party, the GOP's drift towards open fascism has intensified,  Indeed, within today's GOP even open admiration of Hitler is not a disqualification for not only party membership but leadership as well. Meanwhile too many old school Republicans cling to the fantasy that the GOP is the same party as in the 1980's or 1990's.  Nothing could be further from the truth and, as a lengthy piece at The Atlantic lays out, the Republican Party has a Nazi problem and, by extension, so does the nation as a whole.  The piece traces the rise of open anti-Semites in the GOP and the growing use of slightly revised Nazi memes in GOP talking points and propaganda (aided and abetted by Fox News and its imitators). In its quest to win at any cost and disregard of whom that goal has made political bedfellows, the GOP has both lost its moral compass and any sense of shame as to whom one is empowering. Throw the openly racist and totally immoral Felon into the mix and the descent to moral bankruptcy and acceptance of Nazi  devotees into the GOP became all too assured.  Here are column highlights and a description of what moral Americans must do:

Over the past few months, during his agency’s chaotic crackdowns in Chicago and Minneapolis, the U.S. Border Patrol chief Greg Bovino has worn an unusual uniform: a wide-lapel greatcoat with brass buttons and stars along one sleeve. It looks like it was taken right off the shoulders of a Wehrmacht officer in the 1930s. Bovino’s choice of garment is more than tough-guy cosplay (German media noted the aesthetic immediately). The coat symbolizes a trend: The Republicans, it seems, have a bit of a Nazi problem.

By this, I mean that some Republicans are deploying Nazi imagery and rhetoric, and espouse ideas associated with the Nazi Party during its rise to power in the early 1930s. A few recent examples: An ICE lawyer linked to a white-supremacist social-media account that praised Hitler was apparently allowed to return to federal court. Members of the national Young Republicans organization were caught in a group chat laughing about their love for Hitler. Vice President J. D. Vance shrugged off that controversy, instead of condemning the growing influence of anti-Semites in his party.

Even federal agencies are modeling Nazi phrasing. The Department of Homeland Security used an anthem beloved by neo-Nazi groups, “By God We’ll Have Our Home Again,” in a recruitment ad. The Labor Department hung a giant banner of Donald Trump’s face from its headquarters, as if Washington were Berlin in 1936, and posted expressions on social media such as “America is for Americans”—an obvious riff on the Nazi slogan “Germany for the Germans”—and “Americanism Will Prevail,” in a font reminiscent of Third Reich documents.

Trump, of course, openly pines to be a dictator. In his first term, he reportedly told his chief of staff, General John Kelly, that he wished he had generals who were as loyal as Hitler’s military leaders. (The president was perhaps unaware of how often the führer’s officers tried to kill him.) More recently, the White House’s official X account supported Trump’s pursuit of Greenland by posting a meme with the caption “Which way, Greenland man?” That is not merely a clunky turn of phrase; it’s an echo of Which Way Western Man?, the title of a 1978 book by the American neo-Nazi William Gayley Simpson, a former Presbyterian minister who called for America to expel its Jewish citizens.

The people pushing such trash are offended by the accusation that they are pantomiming Nazis. . . . But when even Laura Loomer—conspiracy theorist and ardent Trump supporter—says on social media that “the GOP has a Nazi problem,” then perhaps the GOP has a Nazi problem.

As a former Republican, I’m aware that the American conservative movement has spent generations fighting off intrusions from the far right, including the John Birchers and the Ku Klux Klan. But I am still surprised and aggrieved by how quickly 21st-century Nazism has found a home in the party of Lincoln. . . . Today, Trump and his party haven’t bothered to even pretend to be appalled by the degenerates gathering under the GOP aegis.

So how did a major American political party become a safe space for such people?  When I first joined the GOP, in 1979, the party around me did not seem hospitable to Nazis. . . . I was, like many people then, a resolute ticket-splitter, voting often for local Democrats but always for Republican presidents, because I believed the national GOP was a moderate institution. Ronald Reagan, for example, disappointed the far right and his evangelical base by reducing nuclear weapons, leaving abortion rights largely untouched, and granting mass amnesty to undocumented immigrants . . .  .

I first encountered the fringe elements of the conservative base in 1990, when I went to work in the U.S. Senate for John Heinz of Pennsylvania. I remember fielding an angry phone call from a constituent who grilled me about whether the senator was part of a globalist one-world-government conspiracy.

The country and the GOP were in the hands of Bush, the ultimate moderate, but extremists were making inroads to power. The populist demagogue Pat Buchanan, crusading against modernity and multiculturalism, challenged Bush in 1992 and garnered 23 percent of the Republican-primary vote. Bush, in turn, gave him the stage at the Republican National Convention in Houston. Buchanan’s speech, which envisioned a “religious war” for the country, shocked many Americans.

A few years later, Representative Newt Gingrich of Georgia carried Buchanan’s culture war into the House speakership. For Gingrich, politics was solely about winning; his scorched-earth approach treated opponents as enemies and compromise as treason. He wanted votes, and wasn’t concerned about who was animated by his viciousness.

Later Republican presidential nominees—good men such as John McCain and Mitt Romney—represented the moderate coalition that had brought people like me into the party. As they stood in the center of the GOP tent, they began to see who was now lurking in the back. In 2008, the nation saw too, when McCain had to defend Barack Obama as a “decent family man” to a delusional town-hall participant who had obviously imbibed racist right-wing propaganda.

By the time Romney was running against Obama, in 2012, Trump had launched his political career by pushing the “birther” lie, which capitalized on racial animus toward the 44th president. Rather than try to push Trump out of the tent, Romney accepted his endorsement. McCain came to be viewed as a traitor by the Republican base; Trump made that permissible by mocking his war-hero status.

In his third run for office, Trump expanded his vote share despite embracing fascist themes of xenophobia, nationalism, and glorification of violence. I didn’t want to see what was happening to the Republican Party, until the durability of Donald Trump made it impossible to ignore.

[R]acism is the original sin of the modern Republican Party. White voters were alienated by the passage of the Civil Rights Act in 1964 and the violence around the 1968 Democratic primaries. As Black voters deserted Republicans, the segregationist George Wallace proved with his ’68 presidential run that white southerners were up for grabs. Richard Nixon made a cunning and cynical calculation to sweep up those disaffected white voters, using appeals to “law and order” to stoke racial anxiety. By the 1970s, the GOP was the de facto white party in the United States. . . . years of racial pandering had created a too-big tent, enlarged in the name of electoral expediency, that offered dark corners for despicable ideologies.

Political realignment also made the GOP vulnerable to extremism. Democrats became appealing to wealthy suburbanites. Republicans, whose voters were now less educated and more working-class, gained among white voters in rural areas and the Rust Belt. Gerrymandering helped turn red districts redder and blue districts bluer. Democrats’ more diverse constituencies were a built-in trip wire against politicians who cozied up to extremists, while Republican-primary candidates—influenced by the rise of talk radio, Fox News, and the Tea Party—were not subjected to serious moderate challengers. Unprincipled and bizarre candidates could now thread a path to victory in ruby-red districts.

Critics of the GOP have long argued that something like the Trump movement, and the emergence of a new American Nazism, was inevitable—that conservatism, as a belief system, inevitably decays into fascism. . . . . Without Reagan, the Reaganite coalition began to dissolve in the face of Buchanan’s angry populism and Gingrich’s cold opportunism. The Republican Party, as an institution, weakened over time, until it could be hijacked by an aspiring dictator. Republican leaders who warned against Trump in 2016—senators such as Ted Cruz, Lindsey Graham, and Mike Lee—soon discarded conservative principles to protect their jobs. Their eager amorality has allowed extreme elements to use the GOP as a vehicle for bigotry and rage. Racism and hate are now structural parts of the Republican Party, replacing consensus, compassion, and compromise. Trump started his second presidency by pardoning the insurrectionists who’d wanted to unlawfully extend his first. Little wonder that fascists and other miscreants feel welcome.

Some Republicans lament these developments and still hold fast to conservative principles and policy ideas. But their party has laid out a welcome mat for an ideology that Americans once had to defeat in combat, at the cost of millions of lives. If wannabe Nazis now confidently roam the halls of power—and the streets of American cities—it is because Republican leaders have made them feel at home.

What can Americans do in the face of moral rot in a major political party? The only short-term answers are shaming, shunning, and mockery—and punishment at the polls. Decent citizens must ostracize those among them who toy with Hitlerism. Americans—especially journalists—should resist becoming inured to fascist rhetoric. No one should rely on euphemisms about “extreme” comments or “fiery” speeches. Call it what it is: Nazi-like behavior.

When a Gen Z Republican focus group has 20-somethings talking about how Hitler “was a great leader,” even if “what he was going for was terrible,” something is amiss not only in the Republican Party but also in America’s homes, schools, and neighborhoods.

Whatever their intentions, some Americans are expressing or abetting ancient hatreds, smirking at the mention of Hitler, and plastering public spaces with images that Allied soldiers once tore from the walls of destroyed German cities. Political leaders who encourage or tolerate such scoundrels should be driven from office.

The Republicans have a Nazi problem, yes. But this means that the United States also has a Nazi problem. The responsibility for defeating it in the 21st century falls, as it did in the 20th, to everyone—of any party or creed—who still believes in the American idea.

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