Epstein vs. Russiagate

By J. Peder Zane
Real Clear Wire

It’s a tale of two stories.

The first concerns President Trump’s back-peddling on pledges to release government files connected to the long-dead pervert Jeffrey Epstein.

The second involves the growing evidence that President Obama and his top officials spread the false narrative casting Trump as a treasonous agent of Russia, one that hobbled his first term.

While the Epstein saga is a tawdry kerfuffle with no larger significance, the new revelations about the Russia hoax provide scorching detail on one of the biggest political scandals in American history.

Guess which one the legacy media is running with? Which one is it trying to bury?

The answer is obvious. If only stating that was enough, and we could just laugh away the legacy media’s predictable and partisan coverage. They are not serious people. Unfortunately, they are deadly serious in their continuing efforts to malign Trump while covering up their own malfeasance. The contrasting coverage of the Epstein and Russiagate stories is just the latest example of a media that has lost its way.

First, Epstein. During the last few weeks the legacy media has covered that story as if it were Watergate. The New York Times, for example, published more than 50 articles and opinion pieces on Epstein and Trump between July 16 and July 23.

Much of the rest of the legacy media has followed suit. Except for a salacious, if inconsequential, story spoon-fed to the Wall Street Journal – that Trump may have contributed a bawdy letter to a birthday book for Epstein 23 years ago – none of them broke news or advanced the story.

The last blockbuster article written about Epstein was Lee Fang’s May 21 piece for RealClearInvestigations revealing how officials in the U.S. Virgin Islands – including Democratic Rep. Stacey Plaskett – appear to have benefitted from and shielded Epstein, who brought young girls to a private island he owned there.

Yes, the Epstein saga is a legitimate story. Despite legacy media claims to the contrary, there was a cabal of wealthy and influential men who cavorted with Epstein – and almost certainly some of them had sex with young girls. But it is unlikely that proof of such criminal acts is detailed in material in the government’s possession. Nevertheless, the Trump administration should release what it has and let the chips fall where they may for these amoral folks who tied themselves to a disgusting person. Or Trump should forthrightly explain why that is a bad idea. A full account may be hard, given a Florida federal judge’s ruling yesterday that the law “does not permit” the release of secret Epstein grand jury testimony as requested by the DOJ. 

It is telling that the recent wall-to-wall coverage focuses so much on Trump. The irony is that he appears to be one of the few stand-up guys in the Epstein story. The two men were apparently friends at one time, – though probably not all that close given the lack of articles linking the two men before Trump ran for office. We do know that Trump was one of the few people who distanced himself from Epstein long before the financier pleaded guilty to sex crimes in 2008. Trump barred Epstein from Mar-a-Lago before his arrest, supposedly because of his creepy behavior toward a minor. There are also reports that Trump may have been the one who alerted the authorities to Epstein’s predations – not, perhaps, out of conscience but because of a real estate dispute.

While the legacy news organizations pile on to the Epstein story, they are downplaying the recent revelations detailing the Obama administration’s efforts to push the Trump/Russia hoax. In their telling, his administration declassified a batch of new documents to distract from the Epstein scandal and to seek retribution against his perceived enemies.

Whatever Trump’s motivations, the newly disclosed documents are significant. As Aaron Maté reported this week for RealClearInvestigations, they show that the official “confirmation” of the Russiagate hoax – the Intelligence Community Assessment completed in the January 2017 and reports by Special Counsel Robert Mueller and the Senate committee investigating the issue – “all excluded the intelligence community’s own secretly identified doubts and evidentiary gaps on the core allegation of Russian meddling.”

The intricate timeline of events Maté details makes this point abundantly clear: Suspicions that Russia interfered in the 2016 election were repackaged as purported facts after Trump’s stunning win.

We do know that emails stolen from the Democratic National Committee were published in the summer and fall of 2016 by Wikileaks. But, Maté notes, a September 2016 intelligence assessment reportedly “had no hard evidence that Putin ordered the theft of Democratic Party material as part of an influence campaign to help Trump.” Maté’s previous reporting for RCI has also shown that there is still no proof that Russia removed any emails from the DNC servers or passed them along to anyone else.

That assessment was ignored after Trump’s victory in November. It is also clear that President Obama was a key player in advancing the false narrative of Russian interference. Obama – who had been briefed that summer about Hillary Clinton’s plans to falsely cast Trump as a Kremlin stooge to deflect from her email scandal – requested a new intelligence assessment in December 2016. It was to be a rush job he wanted to get out before leaving office. That report, crafted largely by CIA Director John Brennan, suppressed FBI and NSA doubts about Russian interference.

Obama went further. On Jan. 5, 2017, he held an Oval Office meeting with various figures, including FBI Director James Comey. Two days later, Comey briefed President-elect Trump about the Steele dossier – a phony and sloppy bit of opposition research paid for by Clinton’s campaign that suggested Trump and his associates had been compromised by the Russians. That briefing became the news hook anti-Trump media needed to quickly report on the bogus dossier, launching the Russiagate probes.

Two points: First, Russia probably did try to interfere in the 2016 election. But the actual facts we know – that they purchased a handful of ads on social media, and that they probably hacked into the DNC servers, albeit without proof that they removed emails published by Wikileaks – do not support the Mueller Report’s famous claim regarding a “sweeping and systematic” effort.

More importantly, Democrats and the legacy media are trying to pretend that we spent three years debating Russian meddling. In fact, their efforts were aimed at painting Trump and his associates as treasonous allies of a foreign enemy. It was never about interference, but collusion.

I believe this was the worst scandal in American history because unlike Watergate – where wrongdoing was largely confined to the White House – Russiagate’s cancer metastasized from the White House to the CIA, the FBI, and the legacy media. The lack of accountability for these actions gave Democrats and their media allies a sense of impunity. It is why they felt free to lie so brazenly about other things, including Hunter Biden’s laptop and Joe Biden’s mental acuity.

Those forces are so invested in hiding their own duplicity that they can never admit the truth. While the Russiagate and Epstein stories are clearly of different orders, Democrats and the legacy media insistently push a mirror image of the news, claiming the new revelations about corruption at the highest reaches of the government are simply Trump’s effort to “deflect” from Epstein.

You can’t make this up – except they can.

J. Peder Zane is a RealClearInvestigations editor and columnist. He previously worked as a book review editor and book columnist for the News & Observer (Raleigh), where his writing won several national honors. Zane has also worked at the New York Times and taught writing at Duke University and Saint Augustine’s University.

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