The Epstein document dump circus

One thing I’ve learned from following politics for more than 60 years is that when both political parties agree on a proposal or policy, it’s very likely that the proposal or policy is a bad idea. Jason Willick shows this proposition to be true in the case of the Epstein files.

Only one member of the U.S. House, Clay Higgins (R-Louisiana), voted against the Epstein files legislation. It requires the Justice Department to release any information in its possession, real or fake, confirmed or unconfirmed, related to Jeffrey Epstein and any material about anyone “referenced” in legal proceedings involving Epstein and any “entities” with “ties” to Epstein’s “networks.”

Willick convincingly argues that Higgins was right to vote against this bill for the following reasons:

First, the legislation overrides grand jury secrecy and witness expectations of privacy. Rep. Higgins wasn’t exaggerating when he objected that “the indiscriminate release of investigative material to the public “abandons 250 years of criminal justice procedure in America.”

Second, the Epstein legislation “has waylaid massive Justice Department resources.” According to the Washington Post, “the laborious process to review and redact what may be as many as a million pages of documents has required about 200 attorneys from the Justice Department’s National Security Division to work around-the-clock since Thanksgiving.” These resources would be better spent investigating current criminal activity and dealing with issues of concern to national security than rummaging around for documents with which to smear people who, as discussed below, probably have not committed any crime.

Third, the document search has led to and/or fed bogus allegations. Willick points out:

The New Yorker published an article describing a letter in the files purportedly sent by Epstein to imprisoned sexual abuser Larry Nassar. The forged letter made reference to President Donald Trump. The New Yorker acknowledged that it was probably fake, but averred: “The case for this President’s indecency hardly requires putting a dubious letter into evidence.” How’s that for a drive-by smear?

Fourth, the Epstein document dumps are probably making it harder for authorities to prosecute similar crimes in the future. Willick explains why:

As former federal prosecutor Elizabeth Geddes wrote in the New York Times last month: “Informants often demand confidentiality before speaking with investigators, fearing reputational harm and retribution from the accused. Wholesale disclosure of the Epstein files will discourage potential informants in other high-profile cases, prompting them to question any assurances that their information will be treated as confidential. Investigators and prosecutors, too, will second-guess every step they take if they believe that their files might be broadly disclosed, leading to long investigative delays and the termination of some investigations before they even begin.”

At least one woman who reported Epstein to the authorities was inadvertently identified in the Justice Department’s releases, according to CNN. Meanwhile, the department is being attacked for not releasing the files fast enough, but reduced vetting to accelerate the process would make such slips more likely.

As for previously unknown participants in Epstein’s crimes, none have been identified. If the Justice Department had enough evidence to prosecute others, it presumably would have done so (either in Attorney General William P. Barr’s Justice Department, or Merrick Garland’s, or Pam Bondi’s). If other people are now under criminal investigation, their identities can be withheld for that reason, per the legislation. So if anyone’s reputation is tarnished in this process, it will most likely be for non-crimes. It’s hardly a great achievement for Congress to repurpose the mighty FBI and Justice Department as vehicles for tarnishing reputations rather than charging crimes (as tempting as that might be if the people tarnished are political opponents or generally unsavory).

(Emphasis added)

Why, then, did both political parties agree nearly unanimously to force the Epstein document dump. One reason is that the circus provides an opportunity for politicians like the ambitious Rep. Ro Khanna to grandstand. And grandstand, Khanna has.

A more fundamental reason is that both parties used the Epstein scandal to attack their political adversaries, specifically their adversaries in the Biden and Trump Justice Department’s. By insisting on the existence of a massive coverup, first by Team Biden and then by Team Trump, they cast doubt on the DOJ’s handling of the matter.

The doubt was not unreasonable. Wrongdoing by the rich and powerful sometimes gets covered up, and neither the Biden/Garland DOJ nor the Trump/Bondi version has been a paragon of integrity.

Some of the conspiracy theorizing is over-the-top, however. Far right groups contend that a cabal of satanic child molesters, in league with the deep state, is operating a global child sex trafficking ring. On the left, “the case for [Trump’s] indecency” (to use the New Yorker’s turn of phrase) leads to the irrational conviction, or at least hope, that there has to be evidence Trump committed crimes alongside Epstein. And the Democrats demonstrated with the Russia collusion hoax that they are willing to push almost any anti-Trump conspiracy theory.

But regardless of whether, or to what extent, the Justice Department can be trusted, Willick has shown that the Epstein document release legislation overrides established notions of fairness, absorbs huge amounts of DOJ resources, feeds meritless accusations, and (most importantly) will make it more difficult to prosecute similar cases in the future.

Furthermore, if the DOJ is so intent on covering up Epstein-related wrongdoing by favored individuals, what reason is there to think it will release documents demonstrating wrongdoing by these same individuals? This gets us to a final problem with the legislation, which Willick states this way:

It’s entirely predictable that the release of more Epstein information would do nothing to temper the fixation and would in fact intensify it. Most conspiratorial thinking is kept in check not by disclosure but by the fact that only one party pushes any given conspiratorial idea to its extreme. . . .

The notion of a vast cover-up of Epstein-related criminality has been nurtured by the right and left alike for political gain, so there’s no longer any penalty for joining the mania. The only thing worse for getting at the truth than partisanship is conformity.

BY THE WAY:

On the day the Post ran Willick’s op-ed, the other two op-eds were by Jim Geraghty and Ramesh Ponnuru. None of these op-eds is particularly conservative in content, but it’s still notable that the only op-ed writers that day are conservative.

You would probably have to go back to the late 1950s to find a day in which all Post op-eds were by non-liberals, never mind conservatives.