This should have been a story about how the wealthy and powerful get away with murder, or at least sex trafficking of minors.  It begins in March 2005 when a 14-year-old girl and her parents tell police the child and a classmate were offered cash to come to the Palm Beach home of Bear Stearns partner Jeffrey Epstein and give him a massage.  The girls claimed they were sexually molested.

In May 2006, Epstein and two associates are charged with multiple counts of “unlawful sex acts with a minor.”  The case is referred by the state attorney to a grand jury.  The grand jury returns an indictment of one count of solicitation of prostitution without mentioning the victim is a minor.

At the request of the Palm Beach police chief, the FBI opens a federal investigation resulting in a 53 page indictment based on testimony from multiple victims from Florida, New York and New Mexico.  The grand jury also subpoenaed Epstein’s computers which had been removed from his residence prior to his arrest.

Fast forward to August 2007. Alexander Acosta, the U.S. attorney at the time, begins negotiations for a plea agreement.  Just in case that name sounds familiar,  Acosta is the current Secretary of Labor appointed by Donald Trump.  As the negotiations begin, Acosta sets aside the subpoena seeking access to Epstein’s computers.  By October, there is a tentative plea agreement which includes three quite unusual provisions.

• The victims are not to be notified of the plea agreement (in violation of the federal Crime Victims’ Rights Act).
• The terms of the plea agreement will be permanently sealed.
• All grand jury subpoenas will be cancelled.

The deal is rejected by Epstein’s lawyers and negotiations continue for seven months.  Finally, on June 30, 2008, Epstein pleads guilty to one count of solicitation with a prostitute and one count of solicitation with a minor under the age of 18.  Remember, the girl was a lot under 18.  She was 14 at the time.  Epstein is sentenced to 18 months in prison and required to register in Florida as a convicted sex offender.  He is released five months early and is confined for one year to his Palm Beach home except to commute to his office to conduct business.

In November 2009, one of Epstein’s butlers Alfredo Rodriguez tries to sell his employer’s “black book” with names of hundreds of girls and young women to an undercover FBI agent.  Following his arrest he begins cooperating with authorities at which time it is revealed the location of potentially illegal activities included Epstein’s home in the Virgin Islands.  The victims and “guests” often flew to the site on Epstein’s private jets.  In 2010, as part of a civil lawsuit, the plaintiff’s lawyers obtain the flight logs and passenger manifests.  You would recognize several of the names which I have omitted because, at this time, none have been convicted of any crime although some of the now-grown women who have since filed civil suits against Epstein claim they were raped by individuals who appear on the manifests.

Much of the above is taken from the outstanding investigative reporting by the Miami Herald’s Julie K. Brown including a November 28, 2018 timeline of the case under the title, “Perversion of Justice.”  If Brown’s reporting is accurate, many of the recent #metoo exposés pale in comparison.  This involves the trafficking of children for sexual purposes and powerful men who used them to satisfy their overactive libidos.

But today, that is not what this story is about.  This morning, from the top of their show at 6:00am, Mika Brzezinki and Joe Scarborough promised an explosive story about Epstein and “what is being called the most lenient sentence in the history of sexual offenses.”  The fact it involves a member of Trump’s cabinet makes it more newsworthy.

A few of the victims have gone public.  Some have settled their civil suits before going to trial.  Would one or more tell their stories?  Had they booked Brown to share how she broke the story?  Finally, someone was giving these women the attention they deserve.

Or so I thought.  It is now 8:40 a.m.  I understand.  There was other news.  41’s funeral. Congressional rebuke of Trump’s version of the Khashoggi murder.  Republican voter fraud in North Carolina.  Republican legislators limiting the power of newly elected Democratic governors in Wisconsin and Michigan.  But did we really need another story comparing Ivanka’s use of personal email to Hillary Clinton?  Or an interview about lessons learned in the mid-terms with the newly elected chair of the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee?

I’m sorry Joe and Mika.  Haven’t these young women been abused enough already?  Did you really need to use them again as teasers to hold your viewers?  SHAME!

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

There are naive questions, tedious questions, ill-phrased questions, questions put after inadequate self-criticism. But every question is a cry to understand the world. There is no such thing as a dumb question.

~Carl Sagan

During my time as a professor at Miami University, once a week I would reserve 10 to 15 minutes for what became known as “Dumb Question Time.”  Students were offered an opportunity to challenge me with any question they always wanted to, but had never asked, a faculty member.  The topics ranged from “Do you have favorite students and does it affect how you grade them?” to “What are your guilty pleasures?”  And it was often the least expected inquiry which resulted in the most insightful conversations.

I thought about “Dumb Question Time” while watching MSNBC’s The Beat with Ari Melber last night.  A scheduled segment was interrupted with “breaking news.”  Ivanka Trump had conducted official government business using a private email account.  After hearing from the reporter who broke the story, Melber turned to Washington bureau chief for Mother Jones David Corn and said:

David, I could ask the question two ways.  I could ask you on the one hand, what do you think is the import of this story?  Or I could ask you, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

In that moment, Melber asked the “dumb question” every other reporter and pundit has failed to ask for the past two years.  Imagine how different the news coverage over the past two weeks would have been if representatives of the fourth estate as a whole had chosen a similar approach.

Imagine if Fox News Sunday host Chris Wallace had responded to Donald Trump’s assessment the mid-term election “was a tremendous victory for me and the Republican party,” ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

When Trump said he was unaware of Matthew Whitaker’s criticism of the Mueller investigation, Wallace had again asked, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

When Trump  took the word of another autocrat Saudi Crown Prince MBS (which I believe is short for “Mega Bull Schiff”) over that of the CIA concerning the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, the only appropriate response was, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

When Trump claimed the Secret Service prevented him from attending a commemorative ceremony at Aisne-Marne Cemetery in France, why didn’t at least one reporter ask, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

When Trump said he was too busy making phone calls to travel 4.5 miles from the White House to the Tomb of the Unknown Soldier to honor veterans last Monday, where was the resounding, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

When Kellyanne Conway compared the White House press office’s doctored version of the video of CNN’s John Acosta to instant replay at sporting events, it should not take a Carl Sagan to ask, ARE YOU KIDDING ME?

I could go on and on, but you get the point.  Ironically, the only other people regularly asking the question, “Are you kidding me?” are Trump’s defense team when their client told Chris Wallace he alone had drafted the answers to Mueller’s questionnaire.

POSTSCRIPT

Speaking of the media and their coverage of current events, perhaps they should be paying more attention to journalist icon Edward R. Morrow who once said, “The obscure we see eventually.  The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.”

On November 16, ABC News reported, “Nearly three dozen sealed criminal indictments have been added to the federal court docket in Washington, D.C. since the start of 2018.”  The press has offered two possible explanations.

1. To avoid a “Comey Moment,” Mueller chose to keep the indictments under wraps until after the mid-term election.
2. In anticipation of the firing of Attorney General Jeff Session, Mueller filed the indictments while Rod Rosenstein still was responsible for overseeing the investigation.

Both explanations are feasible with a couple of caveats.  If some indictments were filed as early as January, going forward immediately would not have violated the Justice Department’s “60-day rule” (assuming the policy is valid).  And, if you wanted to make sure Sessions’ successor did not intervene in the grand jury proceedings, why not move forward and issue arrest warrants for the targeted subjects?

Previous Mueller filings and indictments provide a better explanation for sealing the court documents.  In each instance, Mueller’s team laid out in great detail with substantial evidence each of the alleged crimes.  As the indictments move closer to Trump’s inner circle, we should expect no less.  This information would be invaluable to Trump’s defense team as it would offer an opportunity to manufacture alternative explanations for any perceived collusion or obstruction of justice.  I have no doubt Mueller wanted Trump to first give his side of the story (either through written answers or an interview) without benefit of what the Mueller team already knows.

As I have often said,  Occam’s Razor can be a blunt instrument.  In this case, it may be as sharp as a non-existent laser carving knife offered by Matthew Whitaker’s defunct company World Patent Marketing, Inc.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP

On October 30th, I posted a parody of the Orson Welles 1938 radio broadcast of War of the Worlds.  It appears the similarities between H.G. Wells’ story of a Martian invasion and the refugee caravan bringing crime and disease to the United States does not end there.  Below is the front page from the October 31, 1938 New York Times.

Besides the coverage of the radio play, one cannot help but appreciate the irony that the story appeared next to an article about rising anti-semitism in Europe.

As reported, the fantasy about visitors from the Red Planet was a false alarm.  And now we know the same is true about the fabrication of an imminent threat at our southern border.  Not based on coverage of the story.  From the lack of coverage.  For two weeks, Fox News dedicated its nightly unholy trinity of talk shows with tales of rapists, drug-dealers, murderous gangs and middle-eastern terrorists on the verge of destroying the American way of life.

Yet, within days of the mid-term elections, the threat had miraculously disappeared.  How do I know.  Consider this morning’s FoxNews.com website, below.

Not a single word about the caravan or deployment of armed forces poised to retaliate against rock-throwing thugs.  Equally telling, Pentagon spokesman Lt. Col Jamie Davis told CNN, “We are not calling it ‘Operation Faithful Patriot,’ we are calling it ‘border support.'”  I wonder why.  Maybe it was neither an ‘operation’ nor ‘faithful’ nor ‘patriotic.”  Rumor has it, the new moniker is “Operation Costly Political Stunt.”

So, one of two things must have happened.  Either the refugees seeking asylum discovered the secret to the Klingon cloaking device.  They are still there and we just cannot see them any more.  Or, like Orson Welles’ broadcast 80 years ago, there just simply was no there there to begin with.  Too bad the New York Times did not take a lead from its 1938 staff and publish the following edition on Thursday morning.

For what it’s worth.
Dr. ESP