Their scant occasional utterings aside, West Virginia’s quartet of Congress members have said little regarding President Donald Trump’s Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
Perhaps they are dumbstruck by the president’s initial claim that Attorney General Pam Bondi did not tell him that his name appears in the files (as The Wall Street Journal reported), but then saying he knows how his name got into them. It was Joe Biden and former FBI Director James Comey who did it, he said. We await explanations as to their methods, given that they had been out of office for two years when, in 2019, the FBI raided Epstein’s New York City mansion, where they got the documents.
Such confusions notwithstanding, our GOP Reps. Riley Moore and Carol Miller have skedaddled out of Washington on orders of the very pious Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who opted to shut down the U.S. House of Representatives, rather than hold a vote to release the files about child sex trafficking.
The president’s congressional assistance aside, Trump now employs a pair of strategies to extricate himself from the Epstein business. First is his push to hush-up Ghislaine Maxwell, who is doing 20 years for her job as Epstein’s procurer. Second, he has gone into wing-flapping dust-bath mode in hopes of generating clouds of distraction from all things Epstein.
The president’s desperate efforts at misdirection increasingly evoke the visage of a guilty man. As if he were jangling keys in the face of a baby Uncle Sam, he trotted out his director of national intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard, to claim that President Barack Obama had, “disrupted the peaceful transfer of power†by creating “a false narrative of Russian interference,†following the 2016 election. “It’s time we go after these people,†he added, calling for the arrests of Obama and his alleged accomplices, Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, Oprah and Beyonce. Nice try, Donald, but too over-the-top for all but the most malleable believers.
Neither Trump nor Gabbard mentioned that Senate Republicans, then led by Trump’s present secretary of state, Marco Rubio, had published their own exhaustive study that found extensive Russian election interference by means of a torrent of false internet stories designed to aid Trump’s campaign (exactly as Obama had asserted) but that there was no voting machine/system infiltration, also as Obama had said. I wonder, during the Trump/Gabbard production, did the duo sense that the ghost of Epstein was settling into an Oval Office chair and fixing its avaricious gaze on the president’s desk?
Did Trump believe he was fooling anybody when, during a Cabinet meeting, he immediately cut off Bondi’s attempted response to a reporter’s question about the Epstein case? It’s old news, the president announced, as attendees sniffed the distinct odor of smoke from the Epstein fire drifting about the room.
Trump trotted out a familiar old distraction chestnut with his attack on Rosie O’Donnell, including an empty threat to revoke her citizenship. He demanded that the Washington Commanders and Cleveland Guardians revert to their old nicknames. Yet, the Epstein matter grew larger. When The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump allegedly had drawn a semi-obscene picture within a birthday card The Journal said he had sent to Epstein, the president claimed he never “wrote" a picture. A half-hour later, numerous drawings Trump allegedly had done were darting around the internet.
Relating to the quieting of Maxwell, Trump’s primary defense lawyer in the Stormy Daniels hush money case was Todd Blanche, whom Trump later converted into the U.S. deputy attorney general. Last week, Blanche was tasked with interviewing Maxwell. If Trump and Blanche are not attempting to mute Maxwell with promises, explicit or implied, of a pardon or commutation, they certainly have put themselves in the position where a patriotic Republican could suspect them of it.
But despite his Herculean efforts to change the subject and to neutralize Maxwell, the Epstein storm clouds continued to gather larger and darker over Trump. One wonders whether, in his loneliest moments, he strains not to hear the thumping of his own tell-tale heart.
Joseph Wyatt is a Gazette-Mail contributing columnist and emeritus professor at Marshall University. Reach him at Wyatt844@hotmail.com.
