DoJ Releases New Tranche of Epstein Files – With Trump Mentions? – HotAir

Smoking gun? Or old news? Your mileage may vary, but the latest tranche at least shows that the Department of Justice has not hidden or redacted mentions of Donald Trump from its releases of all material relating to investigations of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. 





NBC News reports that today’s release will give Trump’s critics new material to use, but that doesn’t make the story new:

The DOJ said Tuesday that it was releasing nearly 30,000 more pages of documents, including some that mentioned President Donald Trump. Trump and Epstein were friends before having a falling out. The president has denied any wrongdoing related to Epstein.

The release came with an interesting pre-buttal, so to speak. The DoJ warned in a tweet that the mentions relate to “untrue and sensationalist claims” against Trump:

To be clear: the claims are unfounded and false, and if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.

Nevertheless, out of our commitment to the law and transparency, the DOJ is releasing these documents with the legally required protections for Epstein’s victims.

Doth the DoJ protest too much? This statement may have been more appropriate coming from the White House rather than the DoJ. Did they issue a similar warning about the “Tubba Bubba” pics with Bill Clinton released earlier? Not to my recollection. Normally, the DoJ would let this material speak for itself and let those implicated craft their own responses to put it in context. Of course, the DoJ would not normally release this material at all, but we’ll get back to that in a moment. 





The point of this caveat seems to be more aimed at answering critics of the earlier releases, such as Shutdown Chuck:

“The law Congress passed is crystal clear: release the Epstein files in full so Americans can see the truth,” Schumer wrote in a post on X. “Instead, the Trump Department of Justice dumped redactions and withheld the evidence — that breaks the law.”

The law passed by Congress had a ridiculous deadline for that release, especially when the law actually mandates redactions to protect victims in this case. Schumer has threatened legal action and contempt hearings, but any reasonable judge will scoff at the idea that this could unfold any quicker than this. The DoJ had tried to get the grand jury material released months ago, but federal courts refused. Once the law got signed, the DoJ promptly renewed those requests, and the judges reversed themselves and released the materials. The DoJ is producing an avalanche of material every day after doing the redactions that Congress mandated. They are clearly acting in good faith to comply as soon as possible, given the requirements of the task. A court order won’t speed this up, and might end up delaying matters further over redaction debates. 

Today’s release, containing a few Trump mentions, makes that debate a little less acute, if not altogether moot. So what do those mentions reveal? Trump flew with Epstein more often than was known before, but also a decade or more before Epstein’s crimes came to light:





Ahem. The flights in question were between 1993 and 1996, during a period when Trump had already acknowledged that he socialized with Epstein. Trump and Epstein had a falling out in 2004, as has been relentlessly documented over the last six years. Further, the only mention of traveling with Epstein and a potential victim or witness was when the woman in question was 20 years old, not underage. 

At least some of this is rehashed speculation and unverified claims that later got walked back. One tip report alleges that Trump and others were involved in a rape and murder, according to someone who talked with the FBI in August 2020. However, that particular tip got investigated and debunked:

She said Epstein recorded powerful men having sex with girls & that she had seen or possessed copies of such recordings. 

However, during SWORN testimony in the Giuffre v. Maxwell litigation: she walked back the tape claims and admitted she did not possess tapes. 

She acknowledged her earlier statements were exaggerated or based on belief, not firsthand proof. 

In court filings, her allegations about recordings were treated as unreliable and unsupported. 

Courts credit sworn testimony over books, interviews, or advocacy statements.

And this is why RETARDS who are new to the Epstein game shouldn’t be cherry picking documents to narrative shape fairytales to their followers





Get ready for a lot more of this to come, thanks to the decision by Congress to force the DoJ into releasing material that usually remains behind a seal for a reason. The FBI and other law enforcement agencies get lots of leads, some of which not only go nowhere but turn out to be outright false. Grand juries sometimes see this material, sometimes not, but the practice of American law has always been to only publish material that would be produced in open court in order to protect innocent people from the reputational damage this kind of exposure could cause. 

Eli Lake wrote about this Sunday at the Free Press in response to the “Tubba Bubba” photos being published:

The fact that the files are being released at all violates longstanding Justice Department rules, which bar the agency from disclosing information it gathers about individuals during an investigation until and unless they are charged with a crime. That rule was famously broken in the middle of the 2016 presidential election when FBI director James Comey discussed the details of the bureau’s investigation into Hillary Clinton’s private email server during her time as secretary of state. Comey did not charge her, but he discussed in detail her risky cybersecurity arrangement.

“The Justice Department has long had rules against even confirming or denying the existence of an investigation, let alone disclosing information an investigation has obtained regarding uncharged persons,” Andy McCarthy, the former assistant U.S. attorney who prosecuted perpetrators of the first World Trade Center attack, told The Free Press. “The government is supposed to comment publicly only when it has formally charged a person, who at that point is given the full array of Bill of Rights protections—including representation by counsel and court enforcement of due process—to fight back.” …

None of the files yet released prove the elaborate theory that has spread about Epstein: that he was running a sex-trafficking ring to blackmail America’s power elite. Instead, the release has fed another round of innuendo while eroding long-standing rules to keep the politics of personal destruction far away from our justice system.





Both parties have contributed to the spectacular violation of this necessary bulwark against mob justice. Both parties have, at times over the past year-plus, weaponized the “Epstein files” for political gain. Both parties will suffer damage from the fallout created by the bureaucratic documentation of irrelevancies to the Epstein case. Unfortunately, the damage will go well beyond those involved in this lunacy. Perhaps we’ll learn from this episode in the future, but count me pessimistic, since no one seems to be learning anything so far. 


Editor’s Note: The mainstream media isn’t interested in the facts; they’re only interested in attacking the president. Help us continue to get to the bottom of stories like the Jeffrey Epstein files by supporting our truth-seeking journalism today. 

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