The Weekly Sift

Of all the indignities the second Trump administration has put me through, this may be the most annoying: Today I have to write about Jeffrey Epstein.

Epstein is the guy who seduced underage girls into having sex, and allegedly shared them with a long list of rich and powerful men that he then blackmailed to keep himself rich and out of prison. How much of that is true is anybody’s guess, as is the list of those rich and powerful men. Epstein’s apparent jailhouse suicide in 2019 has been a mother lode for conspiracy theories, especially in the fever swamps of the MAGA movement. Hardly anybody claims to be Q-Anon any more, but Q-Anon’s belief in a vast conspiracy of elite pedophiles has taken root in MAGA World, and Epstein is the one real-world hook you can hang that theory on.

This week, Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to remove that hook: Never mind, she says. There is no Epstein “client list”, nobody else needs to be charged with anything, and no further release of Justice Department information is warranted. Move along, people. Nothing to see here.

Now, I moved along years ago. I have no theory about what “really” happened to Epstein, and no interest in forming one. But the controversy itself has become news. There’s a real uprising in MAGA World, and Trump telling everyone to settle down and get back in line doesn’t seem to be working. The Trump faithful have ignored real issue after real issue, but this one seems to be more than they can stand.

Anyway, “Is Epstein the issue that will finally break through?” is this week’s featured post. It should be out shortly. The rest of the week’s news — court rulings about birthright citizenship, response to the Texas floods, and so on — will be in the weekly summary, which will appear around noon.