Disturbance in the Force

Friday Night Garbage

There is an old Washington tradition, called “Friday Night Garbage”.  It goes like this:  if you have something distasteful, some situation where you need to make a press statement, but you don’t want any attention paid to it; put it out on Friday after five pm.  It won’t make the Nightly News because it’s too late, and besides, no one pays attention to Friday news anyway. There’s too much else to do.  

Perhaps we should now include the entire weekend in the “Friday Night Garbage” routine, at least when it comes to the Trump Administration.  The President is clearly faced by an existential threat, one that non-MAGA Americans really don’t recognize:  the Epstein Files. (And, if you just saw Hamilton, the Musical, like we did for the sixth time, sing “Epstein Files” like the “Reynolds Pamphlet”.   Maybe we need Joe Biden in full King George regalia dancing across the stage handing out file folders).  

Political Physics

How do we know that Epstein is an “existential threat”?  Politics, like physics, has basic laws.  One of those is the law of action/reaction.  The White House “reaction” to the Epstein situation is so extreme, that the “action” of those files must be pretty serious.  So serious in fact, that Donald Trump is willing to risk the support of his most fervent MAGA followers, rather than give them what he promised:  full access to the files.

Here’s a list of “stuff” that’s “hit the fan” since Friday – mostly from the White House:

•  President Obama accused of treason
• Senator Adam Schiff accused of mortgage fraud
•  300,000 pages of Martin Luther King Jr FBI files “dumped” to public
• Hillary Clinton email investigation now reinvestigated
• Trump threatens to take away Rosie O’Donnell’s US citizenship
• NPR and PBS defunded at White House request
• Trump demands that professional sports teams in Washington and Cleveland change their names back to racial tropes
• Trump sues Wall Street Journal over Epstein related article for $10 Billion

 (thanks to MSNBC’s Morning Joe for help in categorizing this list).

And besides all of that, the First Amendment battle between the Administration and Harvard University opened up in Court, Stephen Colbert was cancelled by Paramount, and a whole bunch of tariffs were instituted (if you don’t know, check your coffee prices). 

Not Treason

Before we go forward, let’s get one thing clear.   The treason accusation against Obama is based on an “investigation” by Director of National Intelligence, Tulsi Gabbard.  After five previous investigations, including a bipartisan report by the US Senate intelligence committee, the Mueller investigation, the Durham investigation, and an investigation by the Justice Department Inspector General; Gabbard discovered something “new”.  She determined that the intelligence professionals didn’t agree that Russia “hacked” the US elections.

Of course, that’s not what the intelligence said.  It stated that Russia did hack the Democratic National Committee (the stolen emails on Wikileaks). And it did make a concerted effort to back the Trump candidacy on social media.  While there were attempts by Russia to hack actual voting machines, there was no proof  showing an actual impact on the election outcomes. But Gabbard took that last point, and built a “case” saying that Obama altered the intelligence analysis to go after Trump.  That’s not what the Intelligence analysis said (the famous report that Jim Comey presented to Trump in New York prior to his inauguration).  But Gabbard needed a way back into Trump’s good graces. This was her contribution to distract from Epstein. 

MAGA Universe

Let’s go back to “physics” for just a minute.  We know that far-away planetary bodies are often discovered not by being sighted, but by the reaction their gravitational pulls create on known other bodies in space.  The bigger the reaction, the bigger the “hidden” body.  Politics is often the same.  If a “story” is small, then it gets “thrown out” with Friday night “garbage”.  But if it’s bigger, it takes a lot of other distractions to create political cover.  So how big is the “Epstein Files”?

What we can surmise is that whatever involvement Trump has with Epstein is big enough that it’s worth all of this effort.  And keep in mind:  Democrats like President Bill Clinton, Ambassador Bill Richardson, and Senator George Mitchell are already implicated in Epstein’s sordid activities.  On the surface, that’s something that Trump would blast to the world. But he’s holding back.  

And the “Epstein Files” have been a pillar of the MAGA movement since 2020.  It’s all part of the “Deep State” conspiracy, as well as the connection to the QAnon “Democrat Pedophile” canon.  When Attorney General Bondi said, “There’s nothing here”, it created a “disturbance in the force” of the MAGA universe, that can’t be undone.

Two Know

We may never know.  The one other person (not Trump) with direct knowledge of Trump’s involvement is in Federal custody in Florida, serving twenty years.  Ghislane Maxwell remains silent; probably a smart move considering the uncertainty surrounding Epstein’s death in Federal custody. Attorney General Bondi is sending Trump’s trusted lawyer, Todd Blanche, to have a “talk”, soon.

And it’s not like Democrats are all lined up.  Hunter Biden is ripping off the Biden dropping out band-aid one more time.  That’s one more distraction, though probably not in concert with the White House.  But the one thing you can be sure of:  there’s a “there, there” when it comes to Trump and Epstein. 

 What other possible reason would he have to cover it up?