Does Putin Know What the Epstein Files Reveal About Trump?
The answer is clearly yes. And seriously, who doesn't know at this point? How much more obvious do you need it to be?
So at this point, it's more than clear that there is compromising material about Donald Trump in the so-called "Epstein files."
While Trump has alternately issued dopey denials and barking bids for us to stop talking about this already, the Wall Street Journal has been putting up three-pointers from way downtown. We've learned that Trump apparently penned a 50th birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein featuring a naked woman and alluding to “a wonderful secret" the men might have shared.
Today's dispatch from WSJ informs us that Trump knew as early as May that his name was in the Epstein files. Any time he has said that he didn't know whether he was mentioned in the dossier since then has been a lie - typical for Trump, but still unacceptable.
CNN has gotten into the action, too, sharing with us the deeply unsettling story of former Epstein employee Maria Farmer. The implications of what Ms. Farmer reports are so damning as to actually be frightening. According to CNN, emphasis ours:
Maria Farmer worked for Epstein in the 1990s and said he and Maxwell sexually assaulted her.
Farmer also said she once met President Donald Trump in Epstein’s office at the Helmsley Building in New York in the 1990s when she was about 25.
She does not accuse Trump of any wrongdoing.
“So I get there and I’m waiting and it’s dark, like, there’s no light on in the offices, and I thought that was really weird."
Farmer said she was waiting for Epstein to come out of one of the offices when Trump walked in.
“I immediately was like, ‘That’s Donald Trump. What’s he doing here? I’m supposed to be working for Epstein and interviewing with him. Why is Donald Trump here?’” she said.
Farmer said Trump stood a few feet from her and stood over her “in a very imposing way.”
“And looked at me like, like he was in on some secret or something. It was really weird, like smirking kind of. And I felt threatened,” she said.
Farmer said Epstein walked out of one of the offices, laughed and told Trump, “She’s not here for you,” before escorting him to another room.
She said she has always wondered who was in the room Epstein escorted Trump to.
What the details are is anyone's guess, but we all know what it probably is: Epstein almost certainly facilitated Trump and others having sex with teenage girls, aged probably 13-16. That appears to be the age of the girls that interested Epstein and Trump.
If this were not the case, then Trump would not be having so many FBI agents combing through the files for his name and would not now, all of a sudden, be pivoting on releasing them, as well as suing his political ally, Rupert Murdoch, for reporting on something Trump knows full well that he did.
Trump knows what he fucking did.
And we all know what he did, too - even his so-called "supporters." They just have been willing to look the other way on the subject and delude themselves into thinking that Trump is fighting the sex predators rather than being one himself: that he will “drain the swamp" rather than reigning as alligator-in-chief right in the middle of it all.
After all, this is the man who has been found liable in a civil court for sexual assault.
This is the man who suggested on The View, in front of 24-year-old Ivanka Trump, that if she were not his daughter, he might be dating her.
This is the man who, ten years later, prompted Miles Taylor, a former chief of staff at the Department of Homeland Security, to write in his memoir, "Aides said he talked about Ivanka Trump’s breasts, her backside, and what it might be like to have sex with her, remarks that prompted [John] Kelly to remind the president that Ivanka was his daughter."
This is the man who proclaimed himself a sex predator in the Access Hollywood tape.
That wasn't just "locker-room" talk or "bawdy humor," as right-wingers have convinced each other. It was an admission that he chooses to sexually assault women.
"Boys will be boys, right?” And fuck this motherfucker and everyone who looks the other way on this. You are a fucking apologist for a sexual predator who is now trying to cover up crimes he never dreamed would leave the sun- and sin-drenched shores of Little Saint James, in the US Virgin Islands - colloquially, "Epstein Island.”
And here we want to stop and zoom out for a moment. Let us not forget that, in living memory, even one photo or video that surfaced and hinted at a friendship between someone like Jeffrey Epstein and someone who aspired to politics on the national level would be ruinous for that person. He'd be tainted by his associate’s crimes, just by proximity! He'd have to stay in the world of business, with no hope of a political future - and he'd have to be prepared to take a few hits in Corporate World, too.
In other words, this is not normal.
But let's go a step further, beyond our borders. Previously, we offered an excerpt from an interview David did with venerated American journalist, the late Edward Jay Epstein (no relation), suggesting that Jeffrey Epstein may have possessed compromising material on the future King of Saudi Arabia, a close friend of the Trump family. Nobody wants to talk about yet: What is the Saudi role with Jeffrey Epstein?
The antisemites want to suggest that Epstein was working for Israel, but there is no evidence of that, nor that Epstein worked for the FSB or other Russian entities.
However, that doesn't mean that Russian spies were not aware of what Epstein was up to, or what the billionaires and celebrities in his circles were doing.
So come now, just think logically: Whatever the FBI and CIA were able to figure out about Epstein, it's almost certainly something that other intelligence agencies could figure out, including those hostile to America, including those who historically operate through using compromising information - “Kompromat” - to manipulate public figures.
And people don't want to deal with the implications of that. Because if Russian intelligence knows, then perhaps Chinese intelligence knows, too. Which other foreign espionage agencies may have compromised Trump, Elon Musk, and others in their circles? Which other shadowy, Epstein-like figures are out there who were wise enough not to draw attention to themselves with a high-flying, private-island owning lifestyle?
But here's a sobering reality: The road paved with these speculations is where Q-Anon emerged.
As absurd as the Q-Anon people are, their conspiracy theory, like almost all such fantasies, has some foundation in reality. Jeffrey Epstein obviously was involved with other famous and powerful men, and he likely engaged in sex crimes with them or facilitated sex crimes for them.
So why haven't these men been prosecuted? Prince Andrew, son of Great Britain’s Queen Elizabeth II, brother of current King Charles III, and the former Duke of York, was all but disowned over the Epstein disgrace: He was removed from the line of succession, stripped of his royal duties and patronages, and has stopped using his HRH title, but that's about it as far as fallout is concerned. Why are the rest of these men being "protected?"
The answer is a very mundane, almost boring one, which the conspiracy theorists really don't want to hear. That's because it makes the whole house of cards collapse.
Epstein's files and the investigations into him would most certainly suggest, even confirm who some of these men likely are, even those who haven't been named or implicated yet. However, the reason they haven't been prosecuted isn't because some conspiracy of elites or a "Deep State" is protecting them in an organized conspiracy.
Why is Epstein co-conspirator and sometime partner Ghislaine Maxwell the only one to be convicted for this amazingly brazen set of crimes? How come others haven't been jailed, too? And for God's sake, why is a woman left to take the fall for this enormous and complex network of life-ruining crimes against young girls?
It's a horrifying reality of our justice system that we often forget:
Prosecutors only want to prosecute people when they are convinced they have enough evidence to win a conviction. Just look at what happened when the state overreached with Sean “Diddy” Combs and his million-dollar sexual escapades. So what was he guilty of? Prostitution? OK. The racketeering charges were not clear enough to stick, and the repercussions of failing to make that case may be felt for a long time.
Most crimes go un-prosecuted in this country - really all around this world. So if Trump and, for instance, Musk did engage in crimes of some sort, and Putin and other hostile entities are using that knowledge and evidence of it to manipulate them, that would be normal and nothing extraordinary or unusual historically.
Sure, there are tons of people in all those FBI files, and it's juicy, but do you know why all the information can't be released to any satisfaction? Because included in it are the hard drives of Epstein’s personal computers. Are you insane? You think something like that would ever just get dropped onto the internet, from a government website, so you could download its contents yourself?
You want to keep playing internet sleuth, right-wingers? You can go and be independent, investigative detectives and round up all the billionaire men named in the files who the DOJ didn't have confidence they can prosecute?
This is just another example of the far-right having some fantasy conspiracy-theory policy. And now that this dog has bitten the car, the MAGA faithful have to realize what the rest of us in the land of boring, mainstream politics have understood all along: It's just not possible, on a practical, logistical level, to implement the lies that Team Trump has sold its base.
But getting back to the big, scary question again: Does Putin know what is in the Epstein files? And what are the big picture implications of that if so? What do you think? Sound off in the comments or share your preferred conspiracy theories about this on Substack Notes.