Usually when a politician opens their mouth, it's never a question of what you are going to get. I believe my father used to say that he, “Needed to change his boots" when any of them spoke because the level of…brown muck…was getting so high that it ruined his shoes.

But that’s the thing, whatever they say, it's oft just party-line rhetoric and thus it is entirely unclear what they mean and what they want. It would be nice for this article to just settle into complaining about the swamp in Washington that never got drained as was promised; how you not just generally, but comfortably know what you are going to get when you vote for a guy.

No, this is a real puzzle – straight from Washington. It has everything a ‘good’, or gut-wrenchingly horrible story needs to be captivating, and it has not yet seen its end, not so long as Ghislaine Maxwell has not strangely committed suicide by defenestration.

For a refresher: Jeffrey Epstein was a man who made a name for himself, as well as money, in the finance sector. While there, he also began rubbing elbows with ‘elites,’ i.e., bankers, trust fund babies, and all sorts of the rich and famous. Eventually, he opened a business that dealt with getting extraordinary sums (many millions) of money back for people who had it taken from them by fraud, and (of course) he also assisted those people who committed fraud. Wherever money was to be found, one could suppose.

Epstein was smart, charismatic, and had a knack for helping the rich get richer, finding stolen money for them, hiding that money for them, or what he is most notorious (rightly so) for was the child sex trafficking that he handled for himself and his clients. Over the years, Epstein would even tell people he was a spy. British Counterintelligence said that Ms. Ghislaine Maxwell (his… ‘girlfriend’) was working for the KGB, while there are allegations that he worked for Israel’s Mossad.

U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida Alexander Acosta, who handled Epstein's case (per investigative journalist Vicky Ward), said when he was being interviewed to join President Trump’s administration in his first term:

“I was told Epstein belonged to Intelligence and to leave it alone,” and then Attorney Acosta was hired by the White House.

It should also be noted that Epstein was intimately involved in defrauding U.S. investors of over 970 million dollars in the ‘Towers Financial Corporation’s Ponzi scheme’ and was never charged.

In the 1980’s in the Iran-Contra Affair, Epstein helped a man named Khashoggi transfer U.S. weapons systems from Israel to Iran. There are plenty more nefarious money-related activities, but this article doesn't need to be a bullet-point list; just that he made money doing bad things, sometimes for bad people, sometimes for himself, sometimes for his friends, and he was a convicted pedophile.

He also kept decent flight logs over the years: who was on what jet with him at what time, etc. Part of those logs were originally revealed to the public by journalist John Cook at Gawker.com, and the rest of the list followed in the coming years.

Epstein was arrested in 2019 and “committed suicide," not long after.

First, guards admitted that they falsified records to show that they were doing their job and properly observing Epstein, then they admitted to shopping online and napping. He was taken off suicide watch and did not have a cellmate, which is standard prison policy for people with a high-risk profile. Strangely, he was also allowed to have an unmonitored phone call with someone unnamed, which is also completely against policy.

Onto the core of the puzzle,

On the campaign trail with President Trump, Vice President J.D. Vance called for the release of Epstein’s ‘Client list.’ In regard to this, John Roberts of Fox News asked the sitting U.S Attorney General Pam Bondi,

“The Department of Justice might be releasing a list of Epstein's clients; will that really happen?”

Attorney General Pam Bondi: “It is sitting on my desk right now. It has been a directive of President Trump.”

Then, the Department of Justice and Pam Bondi said that there was no client list, and no such list has ever existed. Also, Epstein never blackmailed anyone.

Then, the DOJ released eleven hours of footage from Epstein's cell in what they explicitly labeled in official communications as ‘raw footage,’ however, those recordings were looked at by wired.com, and even Hany Farid, Ph.D, Professor of Forensics at U.C. Berkley, a world-renowned expert witness in digital media manipulation and digital evidence, said that the DOJ’s ‘raw footage’ quote, “If a lawyer brought this to me and asked if it would be suitable for use at court, I would say no. Go back to the source, do it right–no monkey business."

The video shows in its embedded metadata that it had been manipulated several times and had been saved multiple times. Farid also comments that the aspect ratio of the footage shifts several times throughout, something that would not be the case if it were unaltered footage.

So, the American people are expected to believe that the sleazy, Ponzi-scheme (stealing a billion for hardworking Americans) pedophile-spy, Jeffrey Epstein, who often flew with world ‘elites’ in his cozy, secret jet with underage girls sometimes on board at the same time, sometimes not; was not…. and had never blackmailed anyone? Really? That Boy Scout? And then, when he is going to take another plea deal, he confidently kills himself when nothing and nobody worth their salt in the prison is working.

President Trump campaigned on the platform of draining the swamp, and honestly, ‘not being like those career politicians’ was a sentiment that I heard from him and others. J.D. Vance campaigned on releasing the files, and when asked about a client list specifically by Fox News, Pam Bondi said, “It’s on my desk right now.” Then, an altered video is given as unaltered, ‘raw’ footage by the Department of Justice, which is not acceptable in any court of law as evidence because it has been tampered with.

Then, a Democrat in the House of Representatives puts forward a motion to have all the Epstein files (but for the victims’ names) be put forth and made public. A hundred or so Republicans voted to keep them sealed. Only one Republican, Ralph Norman, voted to release them.

What a sham.

Sham or not, I spoke about a puzzle:

If the client files never existed in the first place, why wouldn’t the Biden administration have said so? It would serve them to be honest, and if they did exist, then there is a chance that the proverbial ‘swamp’ (that President Trump has claimed time and time again he has a desire to drain) is just that administration using that list as blackmail on world leaders to get what they want?

Then, if that were happening, and there was a list, then Trump’s administration is doing that same thing that Biden’s was doing: using incriminating evidence of elites engaging in rape and pedophilia, to blackmail the political ends that the administration desires.

So, if we are presuming those files never existed, why wouldn't the Biden DOJ say so? And, when Trump took office, why would he (or at least J.D. Vance) have the honor to admit that, upon taking office, the new administration was wrong about the democrats and there were no files to be had?

 Conversely, if we are presuming those files exist currently, and were used by the Biden administration, then the logical conclusion for the Trump administration is that they are either A: using those files too, or B: too incompetent to find which file cabinet the previous administration hid them under. Additionally, the submitted and edited footage with missing minutes around a very suspect death, presented to the public as ‘raw,’ only makes the whole thing stink worse.

To top it off: the vote in the House to release the files in which Republican Ralph Norman voted with the democrats to release the files said, “I believe in transparency, I believe in putting things on the table.” All the rest of his partisans voted not to release the files.

If President Trump’s interest was ‘draining the swamp’ and transparency, if he weren't like all the other politicians, he would be Ralph Norman, a man with some clear integrity. So, who is being protected then, by not releasing the files? With Epstein's rap-sheet, there are likely many people who deserve at the very least to be publicly shamed, no?

If, like Pam Bondi and the DOJ say, “No evidence of blackmail, just victims,” and Congress put forth a vote to release all of the data except the stuff about the victims’ personal information, then what would essentially be released is nothing. Yet, career republicans voted against it.

It’s a puzzle that hurts Republicans either way. Either it does exist, and they look bad for voting ‘no’, to releasing… nothing. Or they are protecting, and/or blackmailing elite pedophiles, and I am sure even blackmail is protecting, since those elites get to go on with their fancy lives in their fancy jets.

Austin Petak is an aspiring novelist and freelance journalist who loves seeking stories and the quiet passions of the soul. If you are interested in reaching out to him to cover a story, you may find him at austinpetak@gmail.com.

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