Can’t they just redact?
Why didn’t the Democrats release the documents?
Why didn’t Trump tell MAGA to shut up about the case many years ago?
But then why did Trump say “I wish her well” of Ghislaine Maxwell?
And why would he keep the documents secret except to save his own skin?
You’ll see that the first three points cut against the idea that Trump’s incriminated by the Epstein files, while the fourth and fifth cut very much in its favor. The first three work this way. If the documents are a time bomb for Trump, you’d think Trump would have them defused (that is, censored via redaction). You’d also think the Democrats would’ve released them back when Joe Biden was president, and that Trump would’ve spent the past six years trying to keep people—his people, the MAGA pundits—from talking about them. Instead the Democrats never released the files, and only now in the scandal’s sixth year does Trump try to shut it down.
But, fourth point, the head of the federal criminal justice system tells the world that he hopes things turn out well for a given suspect—that’s unusual to begin with, and it’s bizarre when the suspect’s charged with steering kids to a molester. Fifth point, what consideration could keep Trump from issuing the files if doing so would clear his name? He doesn’t care about the girls’ privacy or anything else except himself. If he could release the files and shut us up, he’d do so. Right?
I’d like to think the documents give the goods on Trump. It could spare the country more damage from his political career, and it would suit the facts as we know them. The great majority of those facts. Just not the ones about the Democrats not releasing the files, or the ones about no one at all redacting the files, or the ones about Trump being happy to have the case talked up by MAGA until this month. Explain those angles, and everything we see right now plays perfectly as Trump the sleazebag struggling to hide the goods on his sleazebaggery. But they haven’t been explained. Then again neither has Trump’s refusal to let the files out, or his public solicitude toward the fixer for our century’s foremost child molester.
Could the Democrats talk themselves out of stopping Donald Trump and saving the country from a rapist of underage girls? Answering as a wise guy, yes. But otherwise, beats me. If Clinton’s in the files, same point as with Trump—what about redaction? Whole pages can be blacked out, or you see gap-toothed paragraphs with stray words interspersed among little black bars. Everyone’s read about that or seen PDFs. But somehow no one thinks the Justice Department is up to doing it. The attorney general herself doesn’t think so, going by her department’s explanation for why it can’t release the Epstein documents (“Sensitive information relating to these victims is intertwined throughout the material”). On his podcast Rick Wilson says taking out sensitive material isn’t so tough: “That’s easy. That’s trivial. That’s a matter of hours, not days, if you do it properly.” But he doesn’t say why they didn’t take out Trump’s name and details. Given that there’s a thousand or so victims and just one Trump, removing him would be the work of minutes.
One would think. Or there’s some catch that makes the scheme unworkable and everyone knows but me. The redactors would have to bribed or shot. But couldn’t Trump send in his own people? He’s got plenty of compliant scumbags on payroll. Pam Bondi could let them in. The official redactors wouldn’t know; by the time the Justice Department team got the files, they’d think they were doing a second pass on work by colleagues. I suppose.
Asking questions can be a bad-faith maneuver to float a theory; therefore, unwelcome questions are a sign of dishonesty. At any rate that’s the Internet consensus. But really I’m just asking questions.