Attempt To Entangle Trump in Jeffrey Epstein Debacle Confirms Democrats’ Moral and Tactical Bankruptcy

By Conrad Black

The evolution of the Jeffrey Epstein controversy confirms the moral and tactical bankruptcy of the contemporary Democratic Party. It is being sculpted into a vintage second stage of the Democrats’ only electoral strategy, which is the confection and orchestration of hatred of President Trump.

For years, the Democrats claimed that everything Mr. Trump was doing was designed to take attention away from what would be the politically mortal disclosures of Mr. Trump’s wrongdoing if the truth of his relations with Jeffrey Epstein were publicized. The pattern is now familiar; this was what they said in the earlier stages of the Russian-collusion fraud.

Senator Christopher Coons of Delaware said then that we would get the key to Mr. Trump’s corrupt arrangements with Russia in his tax returns. Senator Mark Warner said that there was “a great deal of smoke,” and that he would find the fire. As all the world knows, it was all utter, premeditated, malicious nonsense.

Presidents Obama and Biden were fully aware that the Hillary Clinton campaign commissioned a pastiche of lies and defamations and called it professional intelligence that therefore need not be researched further by the press, and the director of the FBI joined in the effort to get it into the news. Mr. Trump contends, too, that Mr. Obama filed false affidavits seeking telephone intercepts on the Republican candidate even when he had become president-elect. The former CIA director, John Brennan, accused Mr. Trump of treason, and the former national intelligence director, James Clapper, declared the president of America to be “a Russian intelligence asset.” This is not Norman Rockwell’s, or even James Madison’s, America.In the summer of love of 2020, the Covid pandemic prompted changes in voting procedures in numerous states, including the distribution of millions of unsolicited mail-in ballots, gave rise to concerns over potential ballot-harvesting by the Democrats. The widespread expansion of voting by mail meant that no nonpartisan official authority had any idea who actually signed or handled many millions of ballots. Any suggestion to require voter identification was deemed to be an attempt to prevent African-Americans from voting. When the appalling video of George Floyd in the last minutes of his life came to light there were riots of outrage and solidarity in many American cities.

The Democratic press said that they were “mainly peaceful” even as smoke and flame belched in the background from the destructiveness of arsonists. Black Lives Matter received sizable support from respectable liberal America. Yet it seems to have gone chiefly as a tax fiddle for the benefit of the organization’s leaders. The disorder around the country that went on most of the summer and cost dozens of lives and over $1 billion of property damage was attributed to “Trump chaos.” Never mind that practically all of it was the work of his enemies who successfully defunded the police in many cities, pushing up the crime rates; never mind that he barely managed to save Andrew Jackson’s statue and the Church of the Presidents adjacent to the White House from the mobs. These were just photo-ops and it had nothing to do with the actual demonstrators: it was “Trump chaos.”

In the latest enactment of the Democrats’ post-Saul Alinsky  playbook, millions of pages of documents and photographs recklessly dumped from the Epstein files fail to disclose the slightest inconvenience to Mr. Trump but are being transformed by the hyperactive far left of the Democratic Congressional delegation into an exposé of the decadence and nihilistic corruption and moral dissolution of the current American financial elite, which for their own partisan convenience they personify as the president.

Never mind that there is not one word in these millions of pages that reflect negatively on the president, nor a scintilla of evidence that Epstein was blackmailing anybody on the basis of liaisons he might have arranged between wealthy individuals and young women.The political irrelevance of the Epstein affair will not distract for a moment the mudslinging and mythmaking apparatus of the Democratic Party and its national political press appendages from escalating these reams of innocuous material into a sanctimonious condemnation of the Sodom and Gomorrah presided over by Mr. Trump. The principal crusader here is the smarmy Silicon Valley Congressman Ro Khanna, edging ahead of those upstanding Democratic behavioral exemplars, Congressman Eric Swalwell and Mayor Pete Buttigieg.

This is just a fraudulent morality play, a clunker which confirms that Epstein made his fortune as an astute financial advisor, and while an oversexed satyr, he was also a demiurge of astounding social energy who impressed the extreme social critic and nonagenarian linguistic scholar Noam Chomsky.The takeaway, apart from the helplessly contemptible conduct of the Democrats with the exception of Senator John Fetterman and a few others, is not that Epstein was an odious character, which was well-known, but that he was such a talented financier and aggregator of influence.

First published in the New York Sun