The victims speak

There are not many true heroes in politics these days, but they do exist.  Congressmen Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna have been leading a campaign to force the release of the real information about Epstein's clients that the Trump administration is determined to keep hidden.  Massie is currently advancing a "discharge petition" -- a procedure which, if it gains the support of 218 House members, can force a full House vote on a bill even without the speaker's consent.  This is a work-around to force the release of the full Epstein files -- a vast body of video, photo, and computer evidence -- now in government hands, despite speaker Johnson's opposition to doing so.  The assumption is the most Democratic members will sign, so just a few Republicans will suffice to pass the petition.  Yesterday a White House official declared that any Republican who signs it "will be seen as committing a hostile act" against the Trump administration.

Clearly Trump is desperately determined to prevent the release of the real information that would expose Epstein's clients.  His supporters would do well to ask themselves why that is, especially since he ran for the presidency partly on a platform of exposing child sex abusers in high places.  The administration has tried to fob them off with a series of events in which old information, already mostly public, was released -- but nothing that reveals the clients' names.

Another surprising voice on the side of good has been Marjorie Taylor Greene, who has threatened to use her Constitutional privilege as a member of the House to name names of accused clients on the House floor, if all else fails.

Yesterday, in another dramatic move, Massie and Khanna held a press conference in front of the Capitol, in which a group of Epstein's victims spoke out urging support for the discharge petition and the full release of all the files.  Some of them even suggested they might compile their own list of client names.  These women know who the abusers are, after all -- they're the ones who were abused by them as minors.  In one way a list issued by them would be ideal -- it would not be curated or edited by any political force.  But it would lack the supporting evidence which is in the files held by the Justice Department.

Still, even if these women do not hold the hard evidence, they have their own memories.  Before the press conference they held a private meeting with several members of Congress -- of whom one, Nancy Mace, was so disturbed at what she heard that she had to leave early.  If the discharge petition stalls, one must hope that these women, who have shown so much courage already, will take their stories public to ratchet up the pressure on Congress and keep the Epstein issue front and center with the public.

Trump denounced the press conference, dismissing the whole issue as a "Democrat hoax" and desperately trying to change the subject, as he usually does.  He also arranged a low overflight of fighter planes that drowned out parts of the press conference.  His toadies in the cowardly Republican "leadership" continue to oppose the discharge petition, instead urging support for Johnson's own meaningless bill which does not demand immediate release of the entire body of evidence but would just mean more of the same fiddle-faddling around that we've seen for months now.

Trump and his gang are not alone in their efforts at distraction.  So far I have not found a single story specifically and only covering the press conference on Daily Kos, Crooks & Liars, Breitbart, NRO, or most of the other left or right ideologically-committed news sites.  RedState posted an article endorsing Trump's "hoax" bullshit and pushing the absurd line that there were no clients and that Epstein committed all the sexual abuse himself -- belied by the victims' own suggestion that they may release their own client list (and the Justice Department has estimated that there were at least a thousand victims, suggesting a massive operation likely involving hundreds of abusers).  Most of the TV MSM covered the event, but Fox cut away when Taylor Greene started criticizing Trump, switching to distraction programming.  Surprisingly, Gateway Pundit, usually the most scurrilous right-wing fake-news site of all, ran a straightforward report.

This across-the-board de-emphasizing of the press conference, along with the fact that the Democrats also did not release all the evidence when they held the presidency and Congress, reinforces my earlier view that the cover-up is bipartisan because the clients are bipartisan.  A pedophile sexual orientation has no logical connection with political affiliation.  If the full truth comes out, some of the biggest names in both parties (and in Hollywood) will likely go down.

But as I said in July -- let them go down.  Justice must be done, and the truth about what these men did must be revealed, including the names of each and every one of them, Republican or Democrat.  This fight must continue until all the evidence is out and every last one of those abusers is hounded out of politics in disgrace.