Hey, Why Did Trump DOJ Stalk Reporter Who Broke Epstein Story?
JUST VERY CURIOUS.
Lordy, these Epstein files! The Department of Justice has now posted hundreds of thousands of files at Justice dot gov, and says that there are a million more to come. A bit more than the ZERO Kash Patel and Dan Bongino were trying to convince people existed mere months ago. Now the files have turned into a firehose of crap in a two-pound bag, with already enough ugliness to make you want to abandon the written word and embrace pointing and grunting.
Like, two reports accusing Donald Trump of being adjacent to the MURDER of underage victims. Wild claims, and who even knows what to think! And there are things that are clearly made up, like a fake video from 4Chan supposedly depicting Epstein killing himself in his cell, which is quite obviously not his cell, for starters.
NOT made up, though: that Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell ran almost an assembly line of grooming and child rape, which led to what Trump’s own DOJ claims was at least a thousand victims.
And the Miami Herald reporter Julie Knipe Brown, who first broke the Epstein secret-sweetheart-deal story in 2018, has now found herself in the files, in evidence that the Department of Justice had obtained her flight records from American Airlines as part of a grand jury subpoena in February of 2020. The record shows her booking travel in June of 2019 to go to Little Rock, Arkansas, on July 6, then returning two days later, a trip Brown said was to interview Epstein victims Annie and Maria Farmer. Maria was one of the first Epstein victims to go to authorities, and told the FBI about Epstein and Trump creeping on her when she was 16 in 1996, and again in 2006.
But it was a trip Brown did not take, because July 6, 2019 turned out to be the same day Epstein was arrested for the second time in New Jersey, and her editor sent her to New York instead.
Brown’s itinerary, she says, was among about six to eight others attached to the same subpoena, including an August 2019 flight itinerary for Ghislaine Maxwell, but the other names are redacted.
Sooooo … why was the Trump/Bill Barr DOJ interested in a grand jury seeing Brown’s flights? And what grand jury? Did it even exist? Though the FBI recorded Maria Farmer’s complaints, neither she, nor her sister, or Brown, was ever contacted by the FBI again about those reports, much less asked to testify in front of any jury, grand or otherwise. Neither Maxwell’s nor Epstein’s grand jury heard from any victims or journalists at all; the only two witnesses were from law enforcement.
Maybe there was a legitimate reason, maybe not, the DOJ has not yet explained! Democrats on the House Oversight Committee would like answers too.
So, given that the files are a fatberg of documents with little to no context, and neither Barr nor Pam Bondi’s DOJ has explained or has any credibility anyway, it is now up to reporters and the Reddit Bureau of Investigation to try to piece together what the fuck was actually going on. This peekaboo-style trickle transparency doesn’t seem like a solid strategy for the regime if they’re hoping the whole child-rape-cabal story will become boring and simply blow over, but these people are as competent as they are honest.
On the “maybe not” side of the balance, it’s notable that as far back as August 2018, Steve Bannon asked Epstein, “Do u have access that’s not the front door — they have 24/7 surveillance on u.” Bannon, you know, the guy who was Trump’s White House adviser for the first seven months of his first term, then pivoted less than a year after his departure to personally giving public relations advice to Epstein, and vice versa. All while publicly heaving about a BILL CLINTON CHILD RAPE CABAL on his WAR ROOM podcast, and right after rounding up women for a press conference outside of Hillary and Trump’s debate in St. Louis, to accuse Bill Clinton of being a creeper and Hillary Clinton of being soft on rape as a defense attorney in the 1970s. Bannon et al. are nothing if not craven, projecting hypocrites!
So what was Bannon doing watching the watchmen on the pedo’s behalf, especially a year after Bannon had officially departed government work for full-time grifting in the private sector?
Thanks to Julie K. Brown’s reporting, Epstein had long been known to employ private detectives to track and intimidate his little-girl accusers and their families. Stormy Daniels accused Trump of having goons track and intimidate her in 2011, too. So it’s kind of hard to give Team Pedo the benefit of any kind of doubt that whatever was going on there at the Trump/Barr DOJ was to benefit the child victims, somehow. And obviously it did not.
And, even after their public breakup, Trump sure did keep a lot of Epstein acquaintances, allies and enablers around, and still does! Alexander Acosta, the then-US attorney of the Southern District of Florida who signed off on Epstein’s sweetheart deal because he thought Epstein’s dozens of victims lacked credibility, was Trump’s first secretary of Labor. Alan Dershowitz was Epstein’s defense lawyer and Lolita Express frequent flier, then a Trump impeachment-defense lawyer. Ghislaine Maxwell, who Trump has never said one negative word about, he wishes her well, and he blessed a prison transfer for her. Then there’s Bill Barr, whose weirdo father wrote a fantasy book about teenage sex slaves and hired Epstein to teach high school math at Dalton, even though Epstein didn’t even have a college degree. And Barr junior himself, whose law firm, Kirkland & Ellis, worked with Epstein on a land deal in Miami. And not least, Melania’s name has come up in this story, not that she has ever committed a sin in her life, heaven forfend.
SEE ALSO!
And remember, Julie K. Brown is not just some mommyblogger. It was her series of stories in the Miami Herald that got Epstein re-investigated in the first place, starting in November 2018 with the article “How a future Trump Cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime,” which exposed the secret deal that Acosta made with Epstein. Which was so embarrassing that it eventually led to Acosta resigning. Brown wrote THE book on Epstein, Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story, which came out in 2021. If you’re interested in Epstein files deep dives, her Substack is well worth the $6.67 a month!
Anyhoo, like we said, a fatberg in a firehose, these files. Thousands of victims, possibly hundreds of enablers, who knows how many other child rapists, and the worst-kept secret in Palm Beach and New York.
More Julie K. Brown, on what might be in the other million pages:
More to come, for sure.
OPEN THREAD.
[Epstein Files at Justice dot gov / Julie K. Brown Substack / Jacobin]
Today has been a not pleasant day.
It was going OK until there was a knock on the door this afternoon. It was my next door neighbour's daughter letting us know that our lovely neighbour, Marilyn, passed away earlier this month. I knew Marilyn had been unwell and I suspected it was serious as there had been a steady stream of nurses visiting the house, some of them from the local hospice. It still came as a shock.
Marilyn was a wonderful neighbour, we've known her since we first moved onto the estate and have never had a cross word from her in the entire 10 years we have lived here. She even kept a discreet eye on Cakes Jr for us the first time we had to leave her to look after the house and our various pets while we travelled to my cousin's funeral. She always had a cheerful smile and took the time for a bit of a chat whenever we saw each other outside our houses. In short, she was the best of neighbours.
GNU Marilyn.
And Fuck Cancer!
Also, I want to do something for her family who are staying at the house, at least until the funeral. I like the idea of the old custom of providing food for the family after a loss, it feels like the kind of community support that we should be trying to maintain. I'm reluctant to prepare an entire meal as I don't know about allergies, preferences, etc. Baking cakes or cookies feels wrong under the circumstances. Would freshly baked bread be acceptable do you think? If anyone is gluten intolerant it could be turned down without causing offence, and just the smell of freshly baked bread is enough to bring comfort.
Monday Bear to ease the stress of this fucked up world.
https://substack.com/@ziggywiggy/note/c-192836509?utm_source=notes-share-action&r=2knfuc