Round-up: Epstein saga's limits. The Ghislaine Maxwell angle. Prosecuting Obama.

Analysis of the week's events

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The Epstein saga’s limits

The Epstein affair isn’t showing many signs of going away. House Republicans have subpoenaed the “Epstein files” from the Department of Justice and called Epstein’s fellow sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell in for testimony. House leader Mike Johnson even had to recess the House early to avoid further votes that might embarrass Trump, who desperately wants the issue to go away.

Yet at the same time, Republicans have established some predictable limits to how they’re going to handle the matter. Direct criticism of Trump - much less acknowledgement that he might have been implicated in Epstein’s crimes - is definitely off the table.

That’s despite a steady drumbeat of news reports that threaten to thrust Trump’s relations with Epstein to the center of the story. These include the leaking of a risqué birthday card Trump sent Epstein, new videos and photos of them together, and the (unsurprising) news that Trump’s name is in the files.

If anything, these revelations have helped Trump to quiet the affair rather than inflaming it. They provide a useful way for him to try to refocus anger on the “liberal media” for its “lies”. Other Republicans have been quick to say they consider it all fake news.

That presents a paradox: the closer the news gets to Trump, the less seriously Republicans are going to engage with it. If footage of Trump groping a teenaged girl while stood need to Epstein leaked tomorrow, I suspect they’d all have an aneurysm. Any survivors would then promptly say it was time to forget about the whole thing and move on.

For now, the evidence directly implicating Trump is the sort that can be dismissed (which isn’t to say it should be). Absent a smoking gun, the dynamic will probably remain. As a result, we get hilarious quotes like this one from Laura Loomer: “It’s absolutely absurd for people to be implying or insinuating for one second that Donald Trump is somehow implicated in some kind of a sex scandal.”

Yep, that’s right - the same Donald Trump who paid hush money to a porn star and bragged on tape about committing sexual assault. Absurd, I tell you!

The Ghislaine Maxwell angle

As the Epstein scandal has come back into the spotlight, there’s been renewed interest in Ghislaine Maxwell - who, as noted, may testify before Congress.

But she’s also been consulted by the Department of Justice. Just yesterday, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche - who was formerly Trump’s personal lawyer - went to see her in federal prison, where she is serving a 20 year sentence for trafficking underaged girls for Epstein.

What could the Trump regime want with Maxwell all of a sudden? I think the answer is pretty obvious - they want her to do something that will direct attention away from Trump.

What that might be, I’m not sure. But remember that because Maxwell is spending time in federal prison, Trump could pardon her or commute her sentence. Given everything she is documented to have done, I guess that’s not very likely. But the possibility of a quid pro quo is there if the White House gets desperate enough.

Maxwell might, for instance, suddenly announce that she just remembered details of some prominent Democrats who partied with Epstein. A few new revelations might help the White House regain control of the news cycle. And it’s much easier to get Maxwell to fabricate them than it is to uncover them in the “Epstein files”, which the White House seems desperate not to release.

Still, there are probably limits to how far this will get Trump. As noted, it seems very hard to imagine him actually pardoning Maxwell or commuting her sentence. But might he dangle the possibility in order to get her to cooperate? Absolutely.

So watch out for some shocking new “revelations” in the next few days.

Prosecuting Obama

Another way that Trump is trying to turn the page on the Epstein scandal is by cooking up a new one of his own. And the way he’s going about that is downright terrifying.

This week, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard suddenly announced that she had carried out a new review of the intel community’s accusations that Russia interfered in the 2016 election with the goal of electing Trump.

After the Mueller report and numerous investigations by both the media and Congressional committees, you would think there was nothing new to say about this topic. But, according to Gabbard, new evidence has emerged that actually the whole thing was a giant criminal conspiracy cooked up by Barack Obama, who was president at the time.

And the evidence emerged in exactly the same week that Trump is desperate for anything to distract from the Epstein scandal! Such a coincidence, right?