Conspiracy and Cover-Up: From Dallas to Jeffrey Epstein

Acute mistrust of the official narrative of the deceased financier/trafficker now complements the cynicism still resonating from Dealey Plaza

The Jeffrey Epstein conspiracy has now mushroomed into a bigger political and social episode than the JFK assassination in the American imagination. Or maybe the Epstein conspiracy is just Part Two in the great, multi-generational American eruption of distrust in The Official Story that the ambush in Dallas initiated more than 60 years ago.

The Kennedy assassination changed the course of American political history, and society, arguably provoking Congress to pass the Civil Rights Act of 1964, leading to the expanded rights situation that has now given rise to the MAGA backlash against DEI, led by Project 2025, which seeks to systematically weaken the 1964 law.

The long-term effects of the Epstein affair on our politics is not yet clear. In the short term, it helped get Trump elected. Trump and his strategists relied heavily on the specter of elitist liberal pedophiles preying on innocent young women — to juice and motivate voters. It was a winning strategy: a significant number of religious Americans accept the idea that Trump was put on Earth to avenge pedophiles.

The mythology — that Trump was not an Epstein pal but a literal savior of children abused by elite perverts — was laughable to anyone with any awareness of Trump’s habitat and mores in the 1980s and 1990s, to anyone who’d seen the many photographs of Trump, Epstein and young women at the time. The images and stories seemed to barely penetrate the understanding of the MAGA base.

Now though, in the wake of the Trump administration’s closing of the case, even the Murdoch-owned Wall Street Journal is on the hunt, dropping a group 50th birthday card to Epstein signed by Trump, who wrote “We have certain things in common, Jeffrey,” wishing that “every day be another wonderful secret.”

(Trump, predictably, has lodged a lawsuit against the Journal over the story.)

Most of what the MAGA base is waking up to right now was obvious to anyone paying attention to the Epstein story over the years. I know a little more than most, having come to it on the day a judge released hundreds of pages of witness depositions from a defamation case that Epstein victim Virginia Roberts Giuffre had filed against Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein procuress and partner. The pages are full of the shocking accounts of behavior by big men, some of whose names were redacted. The testimony is not just from dozens of young women but also household help and other witnesses in and around Epstein’s coterie.

‘Closest Friend’

Later I worked on a three-part series on Ghislaine Maxwell for Peacock and came to understand that some kind of criminal conspiracy might very well be at the core of the story. The evidence strongly suggests Epstein’s industrial scale sex trafficking operation was about high-level influence and blackmail as much as satisfying the carnal desires of corrupt elites.

Like the JFK assassination, the possibility of intelligence agency involvement is also part of the Epstein saga: ex-CIA agents we interviewed for the documentary told us Epstein’s M.O. had the marks of an op; Tucker Carlson has gone on record suggesting he was linked to the Mossad; and even Alex Acosta, the then-prosecutor who cut the infamous deal with Epstein in his first trafficking case, has said he was told Epstein “belonged to intelligence” and to “leave it alone.”

Over the years, evidence of the Trump-Epstein relationship has trickled into the public domain — but weirdly, until now, with barely a ripple. Ivana Trump, it turns out, was pals with Ghislaine Maxwell. A woman recalled being shown off like a piece of meat by Epstein to Trump as a 14-year-old. “She’s good isn’t she?” he said.

A former model named Stacy Williams came forward last year to describe her then-boyfriend Epstein introducing her to Trump, who groped her in front of his friend, an episode she felt was “part of a game” between the men.

In October last year, Michael Wolff released some of the tapes he made of talks he had with Epstein some months before he was arrested and died in prison, in which Epstein described sharing women with his pal competing for the hottest ones, “sharing” the same one and competing even over mistreating them.

Epstein called Trump his “closest friend” before they fell out — not over Trump’s claimed moral disgust but over a real estate deal. And Wolff — ominously — suggested he thought Epstein was “afraid” of Trump as President.

All of that was out there, public, easily accessible, not even buried in the online swamps of conspiracy fever. And yet. Mostly crickets. There might be some social psychology term for this phenomenon: when something is widely apparent but not accepted as true — until a moment of critical mass allows it to be known. Examples abound in public policy, most having to do with wars initiated and then regretted.

We now appear to have arrived at that moment with respect to the real Trump-Epstein story. Many of Trump’s supporters believed him and his agents and influencers who promised that he would open the federal records on the Epstein case, and expose whatever he was really up to, and with whom. The promise, of course, was to expose the depravity of a long list of liberals — Clinton, Gates, rich Democratic donors — on a long-rumored Epstein “client list.”

Instead, as we now know, the Trump Justice Department announced the equivalent of “nothing to see here” on July 7 and tried to close the case. Thanks to a letter from Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Illinois) to the Justice Department Friday, we now know there was something to see: when Attorney General Pam Bondi ordered a thousand FBI agents to spend a thousand hours scouring 100,000 Epstein documents, the order came with a proviso to “flag” anything to do with Trump.

Trump supporters and MAGA influencers have reacted with fury. Their vehemence has put the White House on the back foot. Trump’s seemed tense and even more verbally challenged than usual; his health might be suffering from the stress. Even press secretary Karoline Leavitt appears rattled, her normally impregnable, steely cheerleader confidence cracking.

The outrage of his base has forced the President to backpedal and ask Justice to open sealed grand jury testimony. That order only sounds revelatory. In fact it’s a red herring, as the true crown jewels of the case are whatever lies in the FBI vaults — including probably photographs, video and clues to the financial mysteries of Epstein’s vast fortune.

The victims of Trump’s long-running Epstein con now have two choices. Double down on his deception or walk away from their hero. To Trump’s consternation, more than a few seem to be willing to walk away or at least talk back. Some of the biggest influencers in the MAGA coalition have been turning on the President.

“Timcast” — the right-wing influencer and sometime Russian money-taker Tim Pool — Tweeted “Trump is trying to nuke his base.” Influencer Theo Von re-upped a snippet from his own interview with JD Vance, in which the then-vice presidential candidate vowed to “release the Epstein list.” Von headlined the clip, “Yeah, what happened?”

“The base is unhappy, and I think that this issue isn’t going to go away,” said MAGA conspiracist Laura Loomer. “When people voted for President Trump, releasing the Epstein files was something that was promised to the base.”

The once useful Epstein conspiracy theory is now kryptonite for Trump, threatening to disarm his superpower hold on the white voters who resent amoral elites and re-elected him in spite of his own record as, well, an amoral elite.

Such a break could create an opening for a larger and more genuinely all-American uprising against the corrupt overlords racing against time to demolish what’s left of the Great Society — a society itself created in the wake of the last great generation-defining conspiracy theory.

AUTHOR NOTE: This essay was originally posted at JFK FACTS.