Epstein’s Final Days: Trying – And Failing – To Extort Trump?

Help me understand this. Jeffrey Epstein reportedly had all sorts of material on his ‘friends’ and contacts, thanks to his sex-trafficking ring. According to Democrats, that included Donald Trump. So when Trump’s first-term Department of Justice reopened the sex-trafficking investigation into Epstein in 2019, indicted him and arrested him, why would Epstein not attempt to leverage whatever he had on Trump to get out of his legal jam?

According to the New York Times, Epstein did try to dig up dirt on Trump, either to extort him into getting the DoJ to back off or to cut a deal with prosecutors. However, Epstein had just one problem … he didn’t have anything on Trump:

At this point, Epstein’s only regular connections outside the M.C.C. were his lawyers, a seemingly never-ending parade of mostly young attorneys who met with him in the jail’s legal-visit room. Although they were ostensibly there to plan his defense, they knew their real role was to provide a highly compensated form of companionship and a pretext for Epstein to remain out of his cell as much as possible.

They sat with him for hours at a stretch, often to the annoyance of other inmates and their lawyers, who also needed to use the room. They listened as he seethed about the former friends who were now publicly distancing themselves from him, like Leslie Wexner, and tried to figure out whether he had any leverage to use against former associates like Bill Gates. Once, they heard him mutter: “I can’t do this.”

His attorneys discussed with federal prosecutors the prospect of a proffer: giving them information that might be useful in other cases in exchange for the possibility of some leniency in his own. Epstein was particularly preoccupied with what he might have on Donald Trump, who was then serving his first term in office. Jotting on a legal pad, he returned to the president again and again, trying to dredge up anything to offer prosecutors. But his scribblings — “Trump is a total con artist — smoke & mirrors” and “Never had money”— suggest that he could come up with little that wasn’t already known.

The main thrust of the NYT report aims at the controversy over Epstein’s suicide. The conclusion: Epstein sent out a number of signals suggesting he was contemplating suicide between his arrest and his eventual death, although the NYT also notes that some loose ends remain. One fellow inmate at the time, who had not been interviewed previously, told reporters that he’d seen Epstein practice making nooses. Another inmate who shared a cell told reporters (and investigators) that Epstein had asked him how to make them. The same inmate also talked about Epstein’s first suicide attempt, from which he rescued Epstein and alerted the guards. The exhaustive reporting on Epstein in this article – along with the DoJ’s own investigative report – should put an end to any conspiracy theory about Epstein’s exit. 

It should also put an end to speculation over Trump’s role in Epstein’s life. The NYT clearly hoped to get more information along those lines:

We went to court to win access to a document that had been described as a suicide note written by Epstein in jail before an earlier apparent attempt to take his own life, which was hidden from the public and investigators for years. We obtained about a dozen pages of other notes handwritten by Epstein in jail that were also previously unseen — including some in which he tried and failed to come up with significant information he might have on Donald Trump to offer to prosecutors. And we worked with colleagues who specialize in open-source visual investigations to analyze photographs and video footage from the unit where Epstein was housed and create a 3-D model of it. We considered every plausible theory of Epstein’s death, both official and otherwise, seeking out the most persuasive arguments and evidence for each.

That the official account of Epstein’s death would come under suspicion was all but inevitable. Epstein was a man of extraordinary yet hazily explained wealth, with private-plane manifests full of executives, dignitaries and even former heads of state, and a record of lurid sex crimes involving teenage girls. This profile, already fertile ground for conspiracy theories, became radically more so after his death. And the facts, as they emerged, were rife with odd-seeming coincidences, outwardly baffling decisions and credulity-straining mistakes and oversights.

Like Epstein, though, the NYT came up empty. Trump’s name only comes up five times in an essay of multiple thousands of words, none of which connect to any crimes or malfeasance by Epstein. One mention relates to Stephen Bannon and another to Bill Barr, which leaves the three in the excerpts above.

What does this tell us? First, if Epstein didn’t have dirt on Trump, it means that Trump never participated in Epstein’s sex crimes, as Trump has said all along. If Trump had, then indicting Epstein would have been a catastrophic error from the beginning. Epstein wouldn’t have been sitting in his cell trying to come up with dirt on Trump; he would have gone to Trump after the Miami Herald forced reconsideration of the case earlier in the year to warn him about the dangers to Trump if his case went to court. All Epstein had while sitting in that jail was the same boring allegations about “smoke and mirrors” in the Trump Organization’s wealth claims, which had been litigated ad nauseam by the mainstream media in 2016. Epstein didn’t even mention connections to his sex trafficking in his personal notes or with his attorneys.

Second: It explains why we’ve had to slog through endless conspiracy theories about Epstein’s death. If Epstein really killed himself, it’s because he was cornered and had no leverage left, which means that he didn’t have dirt on anyone who mattered, either politically or to prosecutors. The Epstein Files have largely borne this out; as Alan Dershowitz repeatedly warned, the people named in them were not the subjects of the Epstein Files fantasists. One key reason to spin those “Epstein didn’t kill himself” fantasies – and this applies across the political spectrum – is that a conspiracy to kill Epstein allows for the potential that one’s political betes noires could be implicated in the murder and the sex-trafficking activities. 

The truth is much more prosaic, boring, and useless. Epstein killed himself after more than one suicide attempt because Epstein had run out of options and leverage. He had nothing on Trump because there was nothing to have in the first place, and Trump’s DoJ was going to put him in prison for the rest of his life. Epstein took the coward’s way out, a choice facilitated by bungling at the Metropolitan Correctional Center, which had a long reputation for being a “s*** show,” which closed two years after Epstein’s suicide. All of the rest of this has been nothing but a fantasy spun by political activists hoping to exploit any ambiguities to paint Trump as a pedophilic predator, when Trump was actually one of the first Palm Beach figures to suss out Epstein as a malignant character and distance himself entirely from him. 

Kudos to the NYT for reporting on this, minus several demerits for burying it in the middle of the report and then failing to point out the obvious meaning. 

The latest episode of The Ed Morrissey Show podcast is now up! Today’s show features:

• What do Dems plan if they win back control of the House? Andrew Malcolm and I discuss their obsession with Trump, and why it’s going to land flat. 
• We also talk about the Iran deal and why we’re keeping our powder dry until we see the text of the MOU.
• Also: Does 60 Minutes suffer from delusions of virtue?  

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