I’m a fairly skeptical guy. I never bought into those claims that Epstein didn’t kill himself — hey, he was in prison, with deeply dismal prospects, his fall was precipitous from rich guy with his own private island to convicted pedophile in prison, it wasn’t a stretch to imagine he might despair and commit suicide. But then…along comes Dan Bongino and Kash Patel. Pam Bondi says she has Epstein’s client list on her desk, then Bongino and Patel announce that there is no client list. They release security footage from outside Epstein’s cell and guarantee that it is totally unedited and complete, but it turns out that there is notable splice in the middle of it.
It sure looks like something fishy happened, and that high-level authorities are engaged in a cover-up.
I mean, the alternative is that the entire Trump administration is packed with epic fuck-ups who are unqualified and incompetent and who constantly manage to piss on their own shoes. How likely is that?
“O, what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive!” – Walter Scott
Did you know Maggie Haberman’s mother worked for Rubinstein, a publicity firm that represented Trump,Epstein,Kushner and Rupert Murdoch, amongst others? The Kushner family is so close to Netanyahu, he used to sleep in Jared’s old bedroom when in Washington. Robert Maxwell, Ghislaine’s father, was a Mossad agent who mysteriously fell off a yacht in 1991.
From Sarah Kendzior’s newsletter back in 2024:
“The last person alleged to see Maxwell alive was his best friend, American political operative Samuel Pisar. Pisar was also Maxwell’s lawyer. After Maxwell died, Pisar became Jeffrey Epstein’s advisor.
Pisar was also the stepfather of Secretary of State Antony Blinken.”
It’s a decades-enduring crime syndicate trying to cover its tracks. There is no conspiracy theory needed to believe that.
You don’t need to be a conspiracy theorist to believe that rich, disgusting people will commit horrible crimes and then go to whatever lengths needed to cover them up. They’re used to doing whatever they please, assuming they can get away with it because they’re protected by money and power: that’s just everyday life for the rich and disgusting.
I remember Bondi saying that the footage cut out for a little over a minute, because the tape had to be replaced every day at midnight. Yes, the 24 hour videotape has to be replaced daily, decades after security footage was being backed up digitally without interruption.
I’ve also heard that Bongino, who went from hosting a conspiracy podcast straight to being the deputy director of the FBI, hasn’t been seen in nearly a week. Strange coincidence, that.
Talking of rich, disgusting people Robert Maxwell would stand out even today. I hadn’t heard of a Mossad connection before.
Haven’t Trump’s lickspittles learned this simple lesson yet? Everyone who gets involved with Trump eventually pays the price. (Except his immediate family.) Bondi, Bongino, Hegseth and all the rest of half-bright brigade will be cast off in due course.
“But when we’ve practised for a while, how vastly we improve our style!” – Anon (AFAIK)
Word is that WIRED looked at the video metadata, and that it had been edited by an Adobe video editor. Not exactly “raw”.
Certainly Epstein’s death was “suspiciously convenient”.
Dead men tell no tales.
Robert Evans on “Behind the Bastards” did a recent series on Maxwell. Besides being an intelligence asset, he more or less ruined the scientific publishing industry.
Here’s part one of two:
https://youtu.be/JnmFTvlrsOo?si=oI3dSW6UKFZCdqGx
I didn’t bother looking deeply into things back when it happened, but I always thought that Epstein’s death just had too many extremely convenient coincidences that happened for it to have actually the way the official story went. Now that we’re getting more details, the coverup is quite blatant.
Interesting how the conspiracy theories grow regarding Robert Maxwell:
Mossad – Maxwell was a rich Jewish guy who contributed to the Israeli state. They undoubtedly talked to him, but he wouldn’t have been an “agent” as such.
His suicide – He was being indicted for war crimes (committed during WWII) and was facing prosecution for the theft of millions from the Mirror Group pension fund (for starters – there were far more scams and grifts). Had he lived his business empire would have been cannibalised to reimburse the tens of thousands of his employees he stole money from whilst he languished in jail or lived out his days with little money and on the run. By having a last cigar and checking out enough of his fortune was put beyond reach of the administrators so that his family were provided for (although £10,000/month was not enough for Ghislaine).
Just an exceptionally prolific criminal who used the courts and money to shield himself who ran out of road. No “syndicate” needed (although “birds of a feather”). Just SOP for a certain type of criminal who even Machiavelli wrote about in “The Prince”.
They’ve always been with us.
I don’t know why we care so much whether Donny is listed on some Epstein file or not. Whose mind would it change about him either way?
“Dismal prospects” still meant tens, if not hundreds of millions of dollars in assets under his control, quietly enriching him as they tear away wealth within the economy.
@12. kenbakermn : “Whose mind would it change about him either way?”
Maaaybe, just maybe some of the old Quanon set or those that actually do care about kids as they claim to – if there are any such creatures in the reichwing ecosystem? Perhaps. Quite possibly also not but still.
It’s #2. Believe me.
Epstein had to die, whether by his own hand or that of an assassin. Too many very powerful well-placed people throughout the world purchased Epstein’s product. If he ever talked it would end the life (as they knew it) for many of these influential high-powered people. Could you imagine if he gave up names and these people had to appear in court? Once Epstein was dead the paperwork cleanup was supposed to be the easy part, yet the Trump administration seems to be fucking that up.
People have really bad memories.
People have forgotten that the Epstein investigation and arrest and death took place during the first Trump administration. If Trump had ever had anything with dirt on prominent Democrats that would have blown up the Democratic party, he would have released it in 2020, or January 2021. Heck, maybe someone could have leaked it in October 2024, to help guarantee the win he wouldn’t have known was coming at the time.
The fact that he didn’t shows that he either never had anything, or had something so toxic that it would have taken down the Republican party as well.
During the Biden administration, MAGAts with bad memories spun up this nonsense that Biden was hiding something that would make Democrats (and presumably only Democrats) look bad. They forgot all about how Trump must have had the same stuff first.
All of the blather about having the list was just pandering to the morons. At some point, the disappointment had to land. Well, it landed, and now Trump is snapping about how that Epstein business is so over.
Trump has already had a jury of his peers decide the preponderance of the evidence indicates he’s a sexual predator. His cavalier attitude towards the deaths of other people has been on public display for years during the covid pandemic and more recently with his push for this disgusting budget bill that will partially fund his givaway to the rich parasite class by denying healthcare to medicaid recipients.
A court has not ruled that he has anything to do with Epstien’s death or that he was involved with sexually abusing Epstein’s captive minors. But considering these things to be entirely possible is not unreasonable. In fact it’s far more logical than any of the claims his government has made about immigrants or trans people.
His government loudy declares it’s interested in finding waste, fraud, and abuse. It’s as if they’re daring the rest of us to point out that Trump and the other clowns riding his coattails are the greatest source of all of these things in government.
Of course, it’s doing the rounds.
—
PS [OT] KG, that’s a good one! I was not aware of it.
But one like it:
“Curiosity killed the cat, but satisfaction brought it back.”
(Attributed to “The Titusville Herald,” December 1912)
Owlmirror–
The Epstein investigation started in 2005. The infamous cushy deal that closed down the FBI investigation in exchange for information on his “clients” was 2006. That deal was negotiated by Epstein’s lawyer (the well-known ethicist Alan Dershowitz) and the US Attorney for Southern Florida, a certain Alexander Acosta who later became Secretary for Labor by appointment from Trump. Of course, not a single piece of promised information about clients seems to have made its way to investigators. All of this took place under Prez Bush Jr., not that I have any reason to believe Bush was involved personally in any of it. But both the feds and the Florida police were run by Republicans at the time.
It was the second investigation that took place under Trump. And I’m not in the loop, of course, but what I was reading about it at the time was that there was pressure from central FBI to drop the case but the New York office refused.
I like Moist Critical:
Everyone knows.
Missing 61 seconds? Meh.
But does it happen every night and, for reasons of mismanagement or incompetence, no-one ever checks and no-one noticed till now?
I did some maths on frame-rates. I’d they (or the supplier’s lowest-bid software) didn’t take video frame rates into account correctly, they could end up with a 1000:1001 discrepancy in timecodes by the end of a day. Which is a little more than 86 seconds. (A decades-old legacy of NTSC TV colour.)
Close… interesting, but not a good enough explanation on its own.
I would ask an expert to look at the system and figure out why drop-code frame rates seem to be used in the released footage. And at what stage the video-overlay is added to the camera feed. This would be acutely embarrassing for the security surveillance system provider if it turned out their system produced legally admissible footage for only 0.1% of each day.
Regarding the sanewashing and rationalising of Robert Maxwell going on here, I suggest you read “Hiding In Plain Sight” by Sarah Kendzior, it’s all there. If people had read Sarah since 2015, maybe the US would not be in this situation.
Essentially, there is a direct line from Trump to Epstein to Israel (and Putin eventually).
Hopefully, this is how the spell is broken and MAGA collapses. That said, it sure would be replaced by something at least as bad. And there will still be all of the mess it left that needs to be cleaned up which will take years if it’s ever done.
John Watts @ # 6: Everyone who gets involved with Trump eventually pays the price.
Even Vlad P is not the happy-go-lucky fellow we knew four years ago. Chairman Xi has headaches now too.
Yet Kim Jong Un, by all reports, apparently skips along as merrily as ever.
@25. That won’t happen but it might get a few MAGA to become disillusioned enough to not vote or actively support him and his movement. At the minimum, it allows us to (accurately) call Trump and his supporters creeps and defenders of PDFs (that’s the term used nowadays for the P-word). And the fact that even huge YouTubers and apolitical influencers are talking about this is even better. Everyone can see the cover-up in real time. This is something nobody can ignore this time.
When it comes to a choice between cover up and pissing on their own shoes…I choose both.
Trump Pravda on 2025-07-08:
https://rollcall.com/factbase/trump/transcript/donald-trump-remarks-cabinet-meeting-july-8-2025/
(Search or scroll down)
(Notice that he steps on Bondi’s answer)
Analysis of the Trump Pravda above, and that released on 2025-07-12:
https://www.emptywheel.net/2025/07/13/jeffrey-epstein-is-about-command-of-attention/
There’s also an intermediate possibility. Knowing that Epstein was suicidal, they took him off suicide watch, probably hoping the problem would solve itself. That’s safer. Of course, if it hadn’t worked, they could always go to a more direct and riskier strategy of plain old murder.
I’m slightly doubtful there actually is a list. We’re talking about a theoretically massive cover-up that spans multiple countries and would involve possibly hundreds of people. Where are the leaks? The history of conspiracies shows that they rarely last long
I’m slightly doubtful there actually is a list. We’re talking about a theoretically massive cover-up that spans multiple countries and would involve possibly hundreds of people. Where are the leaks? The history of conspiracies shows that they rarely last long
@Aoife_b:
Epstein was a sex trafficker who provided the rich and the powerful with a lot of young women. The “list” is not so much as an actual physical list hidden in some drawers and kept secret by shadowy organizations, but more like a track list of clients and names that is spread over a lot of different documents.
Also, if you have been paying attention to sexual assaults and other crimes of sexual nature, you will realize that even hundreds of victims can be silenced. For example, there was the British children’s shows scum bag and the other guy who was a coach who abused hundreds people and the first guy even got away with it.
sheila@#30:
It doesn’t require him being taken off suicide watch. It doesn’t even really require a conspiracy. It just requires guards not doing their jobs to the best of their ability, possibly with a side of it being deliberate as one or more of them figured that the world is better off without this particular asshole.
Aoife_b@#31:
See also the ‘Stringer Bell rule’… a.k.a. “Is you taking notes on a criminal f**king conspiracy?!”
And you’re right, why would Epstein actually need a blackmail list? That assumes that someone with the ethics of Trump wouldn’t just do him a favour because Epstein was rich and had already done him a favour. He was the party guy, everybody who could afford to be at his parties wanted him to keep holding them. If Epstein ever actually implied that he had a blackmail list, somebody would likely have tried to kill him long before he ended up in jail, and he probably wouldn’t have got that sweetheart deal from Acosta.
@27 kitcarm
Postscript? What are you talking about?
It’s euphemistic algospeak for “pedophile”.
For those who are unaware, I got the bot to define it:
🧠 Algospeak is a form of coded language used online—especially on social media—to dodge automated content moderation systems. It’s a linguistic workaround designed to avoid triggering algorithms that might flag, suppress, or remove posts containing sensitive or controversial terms.
🔍 Why It Exists
Content moderation algorithms scan for specific keywords linked to violence, sex, drugs, hate speech, or misinformation.
To avoid penalties like shadowbanning or demonetization, users substitute these flagged terms with euphemisms, misspellings, emojis, or homophones.
🧩 Common Examples
Algospeak Term
Original Word
“unalive”
kill/suicide
“corn” 🌽
porn
“leg booty”
LGBTQ
“le dollar bean”
lesbian
“accountant”
sex worker
“PDF file”
pedophile
“going camping”
abortion
“mascara”
sexual assault
🧬 Linguistic Roots
Draws from Aesopian language, leetspeak, and rhyming slang—historical methods of obfuscation used to evade censorship.
It’s a modern evolution of cant or argot, adapted for algorithmic environments.
⚠️ Implications
Pros: Enables marginalized voices to discuss sensitive topics without suppression.
Cons: Can obscure meaning, cause miscommunication, or be exploited to spread harmful content covertly.
@36, 37
I have heard the term “PDF files” thrown around like that. Never heard it corrupted to “PDFs” until now.
I don’t know what people think they’re gaining by adopting those euphemisms. Marginally sophisticated tech will quickly learn those new meanings (much like your bot did) and track the people using them just like before.
Well, you only had to take a butcher’s. :)
“Draws from Aesopian language, leetspeak, and rhyming slang”
(You know, butcher’s hook, meaning a look)
Anyway. Moist Critical is a bit like me; kinda likes to hammer a point home.
Does anyone remember when all those QAnon loons were bragging about how Trump — in his first term — was about to bring on “The Storm” and mass-arrest all those alleged Democrat elite pedophiles? “The Storm” wuz gonna come any day, just you wait, all those libs are gonna be sorry, it wuz gonna be a world-changing purge, restoration of American family values, whatever, blah blah blah, all the way up to Trump being voted out, and then we never heard jaque merde about “The Storm” again.
Now Trump’s back in, and no one gives a shit about child molesters, and all those people swearing up and down that they care about prosecuting crimes are falling all over themselves and can’t even get their stories straight about what they have.
Not sure what else I’d expect from a child-raping con-artist…
@jenorafeuer #34
The most likely reason someone like Epstein would keep a list is as an insurance policy: Things get set up so that if something happens to you, a pile of evidence lands in the lap of authorities and/or the press. Now, none of your clients gets to know exactly what is in that package of evidence, they just know that there’s probably stuff that would be bad for them and stuff that other powerful people will be very upset about.
You don’t use it for active blackmail, just something that everyone involved knows is sitting in a safety deposit box somewhere and that will stay there so long as nothing happens to you. (There are probably a fair number of small town lawyers willing to be paid to store away a series of unopened envelopes until some prearranged message from another lawyer.)
PZ:
A term I came up with at the time of Epsteins’s death you might with to consider: Conspiracy hypothesis.
It’s not about claiming there is a conspiracy. but that there is a reason to consider the possibility and to see if there is anything to support it.
@33,
“The “list” is not so much as an actual physical list hidden in some drawers and kept secret by shadowy organizations, but more like a track list of clients and names that is spread over a lot of different documents.”
The list is currently sitting in a low security prison in Tallahassee, Florida. That’s why Republicans don’t want GM to come and testify before Congress, which she has offered.
Heh.
A bit more jocularity:
Just published (WSJ):
Jeffrey Epstein’s Friends Sent Him Bawdy Letters for a 50th Birthday Album. One Was From Donald Trump.
Still in the news, here in Oz:
No end in sight:
(Petard theory?)