Jeffrey Epstein

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      Perversion of Justice review: how Julie K Brown brought Jeffrey Epstein down

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      BooksPerversion of Justice review: how Julie K Brown brought Jeffrey Epstein downThe Miami Herald reporter is unsparing in her depiction of a life above the law – and the lives that were ruined because of it Lloyd GreenSun 25 Jul 2021 01.00 EDTLast modified on Sun 25 Jul 2021 01.12 EDTIn Perversion of Justice, Julie K Brown recounts the plight of the victims of the deceased financier Jeffrey Epstein and, allegedly, his sometime girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell, and how both avoided life-altering prosecution for a decade and more.Ken Starr helped Jeffrey Epstein with ‘scorched-earth’ campaign, book claimsRead moreThe author is a reporter at the Miami Herald. In November 2018, her three-part series injected Epstein into the public’s conscience, leading to sex-trafficking charges. For her work, Brown won a Polk award.She tracked down more than 60 women who claimed to be victims of abuse, and delivered the back story on an all-too-cozy relationship between prosecutors and Epstein’s lawyers.A sample headline: “How a future Trump cabinet member gave a serial sex abuser the deal of a lifetime.”Days after Epstein’s arrest in July 2019, that cabinet member, Alexander Acosta, Donald Trump’s labor secretary, was forced to resign his post.In 1994, Acosta clerked for Samuel Alito, then an intermediate federal appellate judge, now a supreme court justice. In the 2000s, during the administration of George W Bush, when Epstein was first charged, Acosta was the US attorney for the southern district of Florida. His remit included Palm Beach.Another Brown headline: “Even from jail, sex abuser manipulated the system. His victims were kept in the dark.”Under the deal done by Acosta, Epstein was technically imprisoned but cleared for work release. That was more about keeping an eye on his own finances – and as it turned out continuing his criminal behavior – than community service.With her book, Brown provides a vomit-inducing guide to how a criminal with deep pockets and zealous lawyers repeatedly manipulated and circumvented the American criminal justice system. And how his victims never stood a chance.In Brown’s telling, two nationally prominent legal figures, Ken Starr and Alan Dershowitz, stand atop Epstein’s legal heap. One chapter is titled Starr Power, another Dershowitz v Brown. Both are spotlight moments.In the 1990s, Starr supplied congressional Republicans with the legal fuel to impeach Bill Clinton for lying about his sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky. “Starr’s a freak,” Trump told Maureen Dowd in 1999. “I bet he’s got something in his closet.”In the 2000s, Starr and his minions at the law firm of Kirkland & Ellis drove a deal with prosecutors that would keep Epstein out of federal custody until 2019.In 2016, Starr left his post as president of Baylor, as the Texas college grappled with a rape scandal. In 2020, Starr joined Trump’s defense in his first impeachment.Dershowitz is now an 82-year-old former Harvard law professor. Back in the 2000s, he negotiated a “non-prosecution agreement” which permitted Epstein to do little more than a year in a local Florida jail, under the most comfortable conditions.The legal scholar, who also represented Trump at his first impeachment trial, is now suing Netflix in connection with Filthy Rich, a series based on Brown’s reporting. Whether Dershowitz simply received a massage at Epstein’s house from a “large Russian woman” while keeping his underwear on, or had sex with one or more underage girls, is a point of contention. He denies all wrongdoing. Furthermore, he and Virginia Giuffre, an Epstein victim, are suing each other for defamation in federal court in Manhattan.William Barr also appears in Epstein’s life. Why not?Epstein graduated from high school at 16 but never finished college. Regardless, Donald Barr, father to Trump’s second attorney general, gave Epstein his first job, as a math teacher at the Dalton school on the Upper East Side in Manhattan. The elder Barr, as it happens, also wrote Space Relations, a gothic novel from 1973 that contains alien sex.As reported by the Herald and repeated by Brown, one Dalton alumna, Karin Williams, recalled that “Epstein was considered a little creepy”. Another remarked: “You could see how maybe he was looking for young nymphs.”The younger Barr’s law firm – Kirkland & Ellis – came to represent Epstein, a fact which eventually led to Barr’s recusal from the case as attorney general to Trump. Epstein hanged himself in federal custody: on Barr’s watch.Brown pays attention to social connections. Once upon a time, Trump said Epstein was “a lot of fun to be with” and “a terrific guy” and marvelled at his interest in underage girls. According to Michael Wolff’s Fire and Fury, Trump, Epstein and Tom Barrack – a businessmen went on to chair Trump’s inauguration then, this week, to be indicted and bailed on lobbying charges – were a “1980s and 90s set of nightlife Musketeers”.Ultimately, Trump and Epstein parted ways. The predator wasn’t good for business. But there was a coda. Standing in the White House press room nearly two decades later, Trump told reporters he wished Maxwell “well”.Harvey Weinstein extradited to Los Angeles for sexual assault chargesRead moreEpstein was a Democrat and came to befriend Bill Clinton. In Giuffre’s telling, the other living impeached president visited Epstein’s island in the Caribbean with two young girls and flew on Epstein’s plane. Clinton vehemently denies it. Infamously, Prince Andrew was another Epstein buddy. So was Harvey Weinstein, until the two men reportedly had a falling out over Weinstein allegedly abusing one of Epstein’s “favorite” girls. Like Epstein, Claus von Bulow and OJ Simpson, Weinstein came to be represented by Dershowitz. Brown reminds us the rich and powerful can act badly. As if we didn’t know.Epstein is dead. Maxwell, his alleged partner in crime, faces trial in Manhattan. The opening sentence of the operative indictment says plenty: “The charges set forth herein stem from the role of Ghislaine Maxwell, the defendant, in the sexual exploitation and abuse of multiple minor girls by Jeffrey Epstein.” She denies the charges.The coroner said Epstein killed himself. Apparently, Brown isn’t completely convinced. One chapter is titled Jeffrey Epstein Didn’t Kill Himself and the book chronicles the inconsistencies surrounding his death. Brown wishes someone would examine “how and why” Epstein died.Regardless of whether Epstein killed himself or not, he left a world of carnage. But for Julie K Brown, he would quite likely have beaten the rap.TopicsBooksJeffrey EpsteinGhislaine MaxwellUS politicsUS crimereviewsReuse this content More

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      American Kompromat review: Trump, Russia, Epstein … and a lot we just don't know

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      Craig Unger’s new book has already made headlines, in this newspaper and elsewhere, because of a charge from an ex-KGB colonel, Yuri Shvets, that Donald Trump has been a KGB asset for 40 years.But as Unger himself points out, former CIA director Michael Morell has called Trump an “unwitting agent” of the Russians; former national security director James Clapper has described him “in effect … an intelligence asset”; and former CIA director John Brennan has said Trump is “wholly in the pocket of Putin”. So Shvets’ accusation isn’t really very surprising.Many other Trump-Russia books have dated Trump’s initial contact with the Russians to a visit to Trump Tower by then Soviet ambassador to the United Nations Yuri Dubinin, in 1986. Unger – through Shvets – reports that the association actually began six years earlier when Trump purchased 200 television sets from Semyon Kislin, a Soviet émigré who co-owned Joy-Lud electronics on Fifth Avenue. According to Shvets, Kislin was actually a spotter agent for the KGB. Kislin denies any connection.In any case, the meaning of this transaction – like scores of anecdotes recorded in these pages – is never fully explained. The subtitle of Unger’s book is How the KGB Cultivated Donald Trump, and Related Tales of Sex, Greed, Power and Treachery – a rubric that enables the author to throw in almost every bit of unconfirmed gossip ever published about everyone from convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein to former British press magnate Robert Maxwell. And Maxwell’s daughter, Ghislaine, who was – or wasn’t, depending on which page of this book you’re on – Epstein’s girlfriend as well as allegedly his collaborator in recruiting underage girls to sate Epstein’s seemingly unquenchable sexual appetite.As well as being a publisher, according to Unger, Maxwell was extremely close to the Israeli secret service, Mossad, and the KGB. And perhaps Mossad was actually responsible for killing Maxwell, whose drowning off his yacht was officially ruled an accident.Unger’s sourcing for this is typical of the book. He writes: “According to the Sunday Age, in Melbourne, Australia, on 2 November 1991 … an unnamed source close to the Israeli cabinet told Hersh that Maxwell would soon be eliminated. The author did not know how seriously to take the threat. Three days later, Robert Maxwell went missing …”Hersh is Seymour Hersh, probably the most famous investigative journalist of his generation, but in the copious source notes of Unger’s book there is no indication Unger ever contacted Hersh to confirm this Australian bulletin. Since Hersh is in the phone book, and he actually answers his own phone, I found it quite easy to reach him.Did he remember being contacted “by a source close to the Israeli cabinet” who told him Maxwell was about to be knocked off?“I have absolutely no memory of getting such a tip,” Hersh told me. “And I must note that most people, so I gather, who want to kill prominent others do not usually discuss such in advance.”And so it goes throughout Unger’s book: dozens and dozens of wild stories and salacious accusations, almost all “too good to check”, in the parlance of old-time journalists.This is particularly true of the lengthy section about Epstein, who is here because he had the largest collection of kompromat of anyone in history. Or did he?Unger writes that it was “widely known” that Epstein “was making tapes of grave sexual crimes”. But Unger has never seen any of the tapes, or found any reliable witness who says that he has.: “The people who knew weren’t talking,” Unger writes. “There was speculation that it was used to facilitate deals with Wall Street power brokers and to cement the loyalty of various actors in the drama, be they high-powered lawyers, heads of state, royalty, billionaires, media moguls, or operatives in any intelligence service.”On page 186, we are treated to a barrage of bold-faced names from Epstein’s notorious black book – everyone from Deepak Chopra, Mick Jagger and Michael Jackson to Bill Clinton, Queen Elizabeth and Saudi prince Bandar bin Sultan al-Saud. And that sounds very exciting – until you get to page 195, when Unger admits that “being on Epstein’s contact list meant nothing in and of itself. It’s far more indicative of the power brokers he and Ghislaine were cultivating than whether they actually had knowledge of or participated in Epstein’s nefarious activities.”Unger is much more interesting in a long section about Opus Dei, the secret Catholic society with origins in fascist Spain which the lawyer and Columbia lecturer Scott Horton describes as “the most effective secret society in American history, especially when it comes to changing the nature of the judiciary and filling vacancies with people who are their picks”.There is also the remarkable story of FBI agent Robert Hanssen, the most successful Soviet double agent of modern times, who belonged to Opus Dei and whose brother-in-law, John Paul Wauck, got a job writing speeches for then acting attorney general William Barr in 1991. At that moment, Unger writes, Barr was overseeing “the greatest mole hunt in FBI history, yet presumably [was] unaware that the mastermind spy they were hunting was his own speech writer’s brother-in-law, and that all three of them were closely tied to Opus Dei”.Details like that keep you turning the pages. But Unger’s willingness to include almost anything to titillate makes this book wildly uneven, and ultimately unsatisfactory. More

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      Alex Acosta and the Guidelines of the Elite

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      Two fundamentally ambiguous events concerning the Jeffrey Epstein affair have left many people wondering how far the web of influence around the convicted sex offender extended. The first was the trial that ended with a sweetheart deal allowing Epstein, an American financier, to be virtually free while serving prison time. The second event was his apparent suicide in prison as he was awaiting trial on separate charges. 

      The conditions surrounding his suicide are so spectacularly equivocal that any rational person can only be dumbfounded by the uncritical acceptance by the media of New York City’s medical examiner’s declaration of suicide as definitive. CNN, for example, reporting on the most recent news concerning the 2005 trial and the sweetheart deal writes drily: “Epstein died by suicide in a federal jail in August 2019.”

      Zambia Is The Economist’s Damsel in Distress

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      In the article, CNN cites a review by the Department of Justice finding “that Alex Acosta, President Donald Trump’s former Labor secretary, exercised poor judgment when, as a US attorney in Florida, he gave sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein a non-prosecution agreement.” It adds that “the review did not find that Acosta or other prosecutors engaged in professional misconduct.”

      The article mentions that Acosta was guilty of a second count of poor judgment “when he failed to notify the girls and young women who alleged they were sexually abused by Epstein about the decision to not prosecute the multi-millionaire on federal charges.

      Today’s Daily Devil’s Dictionary definition:

      Poor judgment:

      The commonly attributed failing that explains why a crime committed by any member of the elite (defined as those empowered to judge the acts of others and exempt from being judged by others than their own) cannot be considered a crime since the mistake of showing poor judgment eclipses in gravity the crime itself

      Contextual Note

      As a federal prosecutor and then President Trump’s secretary of labor, Acosta belongs to the middle ranks of the judicial and political elite just as Epstein belonged to the middle ranks of the financial and social elite. Epstein appears also to have been associated with the international intelligence elite. That offered him supplementary security because intelligence can never be accused of crimes since its duty is to be engaged in serious criminal activity. By virtue of their belonging to the elite, both Epstein and Acosta knew they were at least theoretically protected from ever being convicted of serious crimes. But so were people like Harvey Weinstein, who belonged to the entertainment elite, or Bernie Madoff, who worked his way into the financial elite.

      Epstein, Weinstein and Madoff demonstrate that it’s possible to go too far in exercising poor judgment. All three had, at some point, probably lost any notion of there being such a thing as “too far.” They thus learned they weren’t quite as elite as they imagined themselves to be.

      Embed from Getty Images

      The Epstein case helps us to understand one important principle: that in the circles of the elite, there are always two levels of logic that protect them. The first is the phenomenon of the first offense, or the first occasion in which the subject crosses a line that could expose the nature of the game. The less timid or cautious actually push their luck to discover where that line may be before pulling back to their safety zone.

      The second is the security deriving from the self-interested solidarity of the elite. They will never betray the secrets of their peers, whom they learn to protect passively. Passive protection translates as the rhetorical skill of denying even awareness of actions deemed compromising. It is important to avoid recourse to active protection, such as rising to the defense of a peer. This is frowned upon because it may raise suspicions of complicity. Individual sins can be brushed away. Collective sins require more effort.

      Sexual crimes (Epstein, Weinstein) — typically individual sins, but not crimes — if found out and verified, are paradoxically the least forgivable, especially today, after the Weinstein scandal and #MeToo. Judicial crimes and crimes of political influence, such as Acosta is accused of, are easily dismissed because they are generally viewed as part of the job of balancing interests out among the elite.

      Then there are serious political crimes, including war crimes. In some sense, they are the easiest to gloss over because they are motivated by “noble” (i.e., nationalistic) intentions. But because they concern public policies, they become highly visible and can draw the attention of political opponents. Protecting them becomes more complicated, requires working closely with the media and takes time.

      Take the example of Elliot Abrams, President Trump’s special envoy, first for Venezuela and then for Iran. He was convicted of lying to Congress in the context of the Iran-Contra scandal during the Reagan administration. He even admitted in an interview to being seriously involved in the micro-management of the Contra death squads in El Salvador. President George H.W. Bush pardoned Abrams in 1992, who continued to provide his services to George W. Bush and now Trump.

      All this is public knowledge, which means mildly embarrassing but not compromising. It explains why a prominent member of President-elect Joe Biden’s transition team, Kelly Magsamen, can even today justify her active collaboration with Abrams in a now-deleted 2019 tweet visible here. Defending her work with Abrams on the Trump administration’s shambolic effort to provoke regime change in Venezuela, Magsamen explains: “I worked for Elliot Abrams as a civil servant. He is a fierce advocate for human rights and democracy. Yes, he made serious professional mistakes and was held accountable. I’m a liberal but I’m also fair. We have a lot of work to do in Venezuela. We share goals.”

      Goals justify everything. But mistakes happen, leading to accusations of “poor judgment.” Convictions also happen, sometimes followed by presidential pardons. That is what is called “being held accountable.” Most significantly, bygones become bygones.

      The elite has a job to do and solidarity is an essential part of that job.

      Historical note

      The capacity of elite networks to protect their members, especially when it involves national security (i.e., the intelligence community), has always been impressive. Not only can they accomplish enormous tasks that may or may not involve serious criminal activity — from massacres of civilian populations to assassinations of political leaders and even scientists — they are particularly skillful at covering them up, delaying and distorting the perception of truth and influencing the commercial media to disseminate their version of the “truth” while characterizing all other accounts as conspiracy theories.

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      Alex Acosta’s public explanations of his sweetheart deal for Jeffrey Epstein was anything but convincing, as any spectator should be able to notice. In response to the question raised by his own explanation that Epstein was an “intelligence asset,” he responded: “There’s been reporting to that effect, and let me say, there’s been reporting to a lot of effects … and I would hesitate to take this reporting as fact.” He then added: “I can’t address it directly because of our guidelines but I can tell you a lot of reporting is just going down rabbit holes.”

      The strategy is impeccable. Call the issue “reporting,” meaning it could just be hearsay. Then mention that other hearsay exists, suggesting that it is all equally incredible. Then invoke “guidelines” that no one understands but everyone accepts as being crucial to our common security. The final touch consists of asking for questions from another reporter to avoid follow-up questions to one’s evasive answers.

      History provides us with many examples of how the work of the elite to cover up its most public crimes produces effects that last decades and disqualify the truth, even when it finally emerges to the light of day.   

      Robert F. Kennedy was assassinated 52 years ago. The evidence that the bullet that killed the senator was fired by a second gunman is overwhelming. A lengthy interview half a century later with one of the forensic pathologists consulted for the autopsy (but not for the trial) not only presents that evidence but reveals how and why it was covered up at the time.

      This is just one startling example of how the media continue to create enough doubt about decades-old affairs to protect the elite of the past. It appears to be part of their job protecting today’s elite. Acosta has nothing to worry about.

      *[In the age of Oscar Wilde and Mark Twain, another American wit, the journalist Ambrose Bierce, produced a series of satirical definitions of commonly used terms, throwing light on their hidden meanings in real discourse. Bierce eventually collected and published them as a book, The Devil’s Dictionary, in 1911. We have shamelessly appropriated his title in the interest of continuing his wholesome pedagogical effort to enlighten generations of readers of the news. Read more of The Daily Devil’s Dictionary on Fair Observer.]

      The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect Fair Observer’s editorial policy. More

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      Coronavirus US: Texas governor orders all residents to wear masks – live

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      Greg Abbott issues executive order, marking reversal Herman Cain tests positive for virus after attending Trump rally Mnuchin: Trump administration has no regrets about reopening push Trump has ‘gone awol’ as president amid pandemic, says ex-CIA director Ghislaine Maxwell ‘assisted in abuse of minor girls’ says FBI co-head Sign up to our First Thing newsletter […] More