Donald Trump signed this Wednesday the law that orders the Department of Justice to release the papers in the case of millionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein. Or, at least, that’s what he said he did, 24 hours after the law overwhelmingly passed votes in the House of Representatives and the Senate.
This had arrived at the White House from the Capitol hours before. The president of the United States preferred to sign it without witnesses or the usual ceremony in these cases. He announced that he had given him a course in a message on his social network, Truth, after 9:00 p.m. (local time), at the end of a day in which, unusually for him, he avoided the press. At that time, no one in Washington expected him to do it until the next day.
In his message in Truth, Trump says little about the law, the crimes of his friend or his victims. In the text, he does take the opportunity to remember that Epstein was arrested and died in a maximum security cell in Manhattan (it was a suicide, according to the coroner) when he was president for the first time; He says that “he was (a) lifelong democrat”; and he takes credit for the processing of the law, because last Sunday he gave his people permission to support it in both chambers.
“The Democrats have used the ‘Epstein’ issue (the quotes are his), which affects them much more than the Republican Party, to try to distract attention from our INCREDIBLE victories,” wrote the president of the United States, before listing those victories with a mixture of exaggerations, lies and half-truths.
Trump cited in his message, for his “close ties” with the pedophile, former President Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, whom the publication last week of his emails with the financier has caused him to fall from several boards of directors, the Democratic donor Reid Hoffman, the minority leader in the House of Representatives, Hakeem Jeffries, whom he accused of having asked for money from Epstein after his prosecution, and the congresswoman of that party Stacey Plaskett, another to whom the last emails have been exposed for their connections with pedophiles.
The signing’s announcement puts an end to months in which Trump has repeatedly refused to authorize the release of Epstein’s files in the hope that a storm that raged especially among his supporters, the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, would subside on its own. The signing also sets the clock ticking for the Department of Justice, which has 30 days to make available to the public the enormous amount of material related to the pedophile’s crimes and the connections that these papers may reveal with his circle of friends of rich and powerful men.
It was in his power to veto it, but Trump had already announced that he would sign it if the rule passed through Congress. What no one in Washington counted on was that he would do it, this Tuesday, in such a lightning-fast manner and with such an agreement between both parties. Only one representative, member of the House of Representatives Clay Higgins (Trumpist from Louisiana), voted against the text. The rest, 427 congressmen and 100 senators, supported it, after Trump gave his authorization to the Republicans on Capitol Hill to support the initiative.
Between privacy and censorship
The Epstein Files Transparency Act orders Attorney General Pam Bondi to publish unclassified documents related to the millionaire pedophile and Ghislaine Maxwell, the arranger of his sex trafficking network and an accomplice in many of his crimes. Bondi, who changed his mind in July about releasing those materials after months of promising to release Epstein’s files, has 30 days from signing to comply with the order. That change in strategy came after a meeting at the White House in which he warned the president, who was friends with the pedophile financier for 15 years, that his name was “everywhere” in those papers.
This disclosure must be, according to the standard, “systematic.” Includes documents held by the Department of Justice; a varied and endless collection of files. There are millions of pages, including flight logs, personal communications, internal reports, metadata, immunity agreements, contracts with financier employees and emails.
The law approved by Congress, however, includes some exceptions that allow the Department of Justice to reserve information that could turn this new declassification into another chapter in the story of disappointments accumulated in this case by those who want it to be clarified once and for all how far Epstein’s sex trafficking network went and who participated in it or, at least, had knowledge of the crimes of the pedophile and his accomplice Maxwell. She is serving 20 years in prison in a minimum security prison after collaborating with the Trump Administration last July, and is now maneuvering to obtain a presidential pardon.
The law requires that published material be easily searchable and downloadable. And it authorizes the Department of Justice to censor information that may be compromising for victims, materials with descriptions of sexual abuse of minors, shocking images or data that may jeopardize an active investigation. Bondi is obliged to justify these censorships and Congress is obliged to write an additional report detailing the content. crossed out within 15 days of publication.
“We will obey the law,” Bondi told reporters three times this Wednesday. “In the meantime, we will continue to protect victims and act with transparency.” When asked what had changed since her Department said in a statement in July that they were not going to release more materials, the attorney general offered a haphazard response: “There is information, new information, additional information, but, again, we will limit ourselves to obeying (whatever) the law says.”
The victims, gathered on Tuesday at the Capitol to accompany the approval of the new rule, said they feared that the Trump Administration was going to deliver excessively censored material or that they would cling to the existence of these ongoing investigations. Specifically, those ordered by the President of the United States to Bondi last Friday, when he asked him to investigate Epstein’s links with the names of Democratic personalities (Clinton, Summers and Hoffman) who have appeared repeatedly in the papers that have become known over the years. Trump once again attacked this trio of personalities in his message this Wednesday in Truth.
In it, the Republican also compared the effort to disseminate Epstein’s papers with the scandal of the Kremlin’s alleged interference in the 2016 elections, which took him by surprise to the White House and which he usually refers to as “the Russia, Russia Russia hoax.” “For years, our great nation has had to endure (…) the first and second impeachment (for the two impeachments brought against him during his first term) and many other witch hunts and scams created by the Democrats, all of them terrible and divisive for our country, and carried out to confuse, divert attention and distract from the excellent work that the Republicans and the Trump Administration are doing. This latest hoax will backfire on the Democrats, like everyone else!
The most veterans of Washington these days remember another declassification: that of the John F. Kennedy Archives Act of 1992. Congress then ordered the gradual publication of documents related to the Kennedy assassination and established similar protocols for the management of classified information. Many of those papers were published, although successive administrations resorted to national security exemptions to delay their full disclosure. In 2017, Trump ordered the release of thousands of documents about JFK and added more this year, but more than thirty years later, there are still materials to see the light of day.
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