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Posted on 08/08/2025 6:44:07 AM PDT by MtnClimber
CIA Director John Ratcliffe told the press that officials from the Barack Obama administration—including former CIA chief John Brennan and FBI Director James Comey—may be charged for their role in Russiagate, the spy operation designed to topple the first Donald Trump administration. With FBI Director Kash Patel reportedly overseeing a criminal conspiracy case involving Brennan, Comey, and others, there’s reason for optimism that those who targeted the president, his aides, and supporters from 2016 to 2024 will finally be held accountable.
Naturally, those with the most to lose, such as former Obama officials implicated in the biggest political scandal in U.S. history, and the media that served as their willing accomplices, are playing to block. And the instrument they’ve chosen to protect themselves is another anti-Trump conspiracy theory, this one holding that the administration is hiding information about Jeffrey Epstein to protect Trump from being implicated in his crimes. Call it Epsteingate.
Perhaps the most senior former Obama official pushing Epsteingate is Susan Rice, the onetime national security adviser whose Jan. 5, 2017, email may implicate Obama in the anti-Trump conspiracy. In an X post over a New York Times op-ed by Brennan and Obama’s director of national intelligence, James Clapper, she wrote that the Trump administration’s Russiagate disclosures are a “shameless, dishonest, defamatory scheme to distract from EPSTEIN EPSTEIN EPSTEIN.” She also reposted an interview with author Michael Wolff who claims that after he published Epstein’s comments on Trump in his 2019 book, Siege, the financier called to say he was worried he might have said too much. Wolff suggests that Trump had Epstein arrested.
The media has a substantial corporate interest in obfuscating the Trump administration’s efforts to bring Russiagate to light, since it may also illuminate the role of the press in publishing leaks of classified intelligence to advance known falsehoods undergirding a criminal conspiracy. The specter of civil suits alone is enough to keep media executives up at night. And thus, according to The New York Times, the administration’s release of documents showing the FBI supported a 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign plot to smear the president as a Russian agent comes “as the Trump team seeks to distract from the Jeffrey Epstein files.”
The president says Democrats started what he calls the Epstein hoax, but that’s not entirely right. They’re using it to defend themselves from Russiagate, but it was a MAGA-aligned cohort led by Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon who weaponized the Epstein narrative, and now parts of the right are as giddy with anti-Trump animus as first-term Never Trumpers are.
“This Epstein thing is probably going to bring President Trump down,” said Douglas Macgregor, a prominent figure on the MAGA podcast circuit who worked in the Pentagon during Trump’s first term. The problem then isn’t just that Russiagate revelations aren’t breaking through to the rest of the electorate but also that podcasters ostensibly aligned with Trump are employing the ghost of a dead sex offender to fracture his base and hobble him, with help from Democrats, after the 2026 midterms, just as Russiagate hobbled Trump’s first term.
After Trump ignored Bannon and Carlson’s warnings against joining Israel in a campaign against Iran’s nuclear weapons facilities, they seized on the White House’s clumsy rollout of the Epstein case to target the president. The administration had promised too much regarding the Epstein case. As civilians, Patel and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino told podcast audiences there was lots more to what Epstein was up to—but it turned out there wasn’t. In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi hosted an Epstein event at the White House and promised the full scoop. When she instead handed MAGA influencers thin binders containing nothing new on the dead sex offender, Trump supporters were rightly upset.
The problem is that nothing the administration produces now will satisfy this faction of MAGA, because Bannon and Carlson are not interested in transparency or accountability. Rather, they’ve rigged the Epstein story to damage Trump. In their telling, Epstein wasn’t just a predator; he was also a spy, an operative using American teenagers as bait to compromise powerful liberal elites on behalf of the Mossad. They’ve framed the affair so that only confirmation of their mad conspiracy theory will put Epstein’s ghost to rest.
“It’s extremely obvious to anyone who watches that [Epstein] had direct connections to a foreign government,” Carlson told a Florida audience last month in one of his most public perorations unfolding the Epstein conspiracy theory. “No one’s allowed to say that that foreign government is Israel because we have been somehow cowed into thinking that that’s naughty.” Bannon is also given to manful straight talk: “The Epstein story leads to the intelligence services of this country and of Israel,” he told his podcast audience last month. “Let’s be blunt. That’s why all the Israel First guys say there’s nothing to see.”
The logic is that if Trump doesn’t release the evidence that he’s shielding Israel, it’s evidence that he’s owned by Israel. The setup is as crazy and destructive as Russiagate because it’s the Russiagate playbook, except in this reboot, Netanyahu plays Putin’s part, and it’s not Moscow that controls Trump’s brain, but the Jews.
Trump indicated in a Truth Social post that he’s cut off his “past supporters”—presumably meaning Bannon and Carlson—and in another said his polls have gone up since the Epstein hoax. But other polls suggest he’s been hurt by it. A Rasmussen poll found that 56 percent of likely voters don’t believe the FBI and DOJ are telling the truth about Epstein. According to a The Economist/YouGov poll, 67 percent of Americans believe the government is covering up evidence related to Epstein, including 59 percent of Trump voters.
For Bannon and Carlson, Epsteingate is part of a larger effort to drive down support for Israel among younger Trump voters. After all, if the Israeli government violated U.S. sovereignty to traffic girls and steal American secrets, it can’t be a good ally. Maybe GOP youth want to believe in an American version of an Arab-world style legend—look out for the Mossad dolphins!—to distinguish themselves from the traditionally pro-Israel GOP establishment. But Bannon and Carlson’s gambit also puts them at odds with the president while aligning them with the party that pushed the Russia collusion hoax.
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Your logic is flawed.
I am discussing the public facing part of the Epstein files.
Bondi created that.
That is totally separate from the actual substance of the Epstein files.
It’s not my logic that’s flawed - it’s your sense of priority.
You just admitted there’s no substance to the Epstein issue - which is exactly what Trump, Bondi, Patel and Bongino have been trying to tell you for months now.
Listen to them - there are big fish to fry.
Benz ties it all together fairly well
The Blob
I am making no claims on what is in the files—or the importance or lack of importance of it.
That is a totally separate issue from the Bondi problem.
There is no Bondi problem.
The problem is the “Epstein client list” thingie turned out to be a bust - and some people can’t accept that - so it has to be a coverup - and Bondi is part of the coverup.
.. or if they finally accept it was a bust and there was never a client list - they feel foolish and now they need someone to blame for that - so that must be Bondi’s fault too.
Sometimes I’m embarrassed to be a FReeper.
Bondi could not shut up about this topic.
That is a fact.
Everything else is speculation.
Me as well.
The point is team Trump came in promising to expose all sorts of corruption and coverups - including Epstein client list - what’s wrong with that?
And what’s wrong with them doing a 180° when they realized there was no there there?
Since we don’t know what is in the files it is speculation to discuss anyone’s motives at this point.
The article is speculation—and most comments on this topic remain speculation.
I want just the facts—I have zero interest in anyone’s opinion on this topic.
Good article! Leave it to Susan Rice to bring up the trash in Wolff’s trash book. I feared it being cited here and people getting all fooled and riled up.
“I want just the facts—I have zero interest in anyone’s opinion on this topic.“
Great, and since we have no facts, maybe we can all give this tiresome dead-end subject a rest - as President Trump and his team have suggested.
Agreed for now.
This is like a game of poker where only some of the cards are visible.
Eventually we will find out who has the cards and who is bluffing.
The difference is that in a game of poker, you know there are cards being withheld. You even know, by deduction, which cards are hidden from view.
In this game of Epstein - the belief that there is anything salacious being withheld is pure speculation.
One can’t prove a negative, but yet I constantly hear people demanding just that: “until you release the client list (which you deny exists) we will have to assume you are on the list”.
This is no better than drowning a midwife to prove she’s not a witch.
Maybe cgbg found out that Pam Bondi believes that we landed on the Moon back in July 1969, which I recently discovered is ardently disputed by a certain faction of FR.
So if Pam is “hiding the truth” about The Moon Landing being totally fake, there is no limit to the dastardly extremes that she will go to in order to deceive us.
One cannot be too vigilant.
LOL!!
I can’t prove it wasn’t fake, but as my father used to point out - it would be far cheaper and easier to actually land there than to fake it.
| There is no Bondi problem. The problem is the “Epstein client list” thingie turned out to be a bust - and some people can’t accept that... * * * Yes. Beautifully enumerated. Trump and his team have perfectly flipped the justice agenda, shifting all its energy to the much bigger Obama Russiagate treason story. The MAGA base really cared about the Epstein case. And it took a couple weeks and a timely Trump Truth Social post to get MAGA to rethink the Epstein case -- and realize that pursuing it might harm innocent people, including Trump himself. But what really put the Epstein case in the back seat was the strength of the Obama treason case that Tulsi Gabbard brought to the fore. Hard evidence and key documents found in burn bags have got the MAGA team as excited as ever to go after Obama, Comey, Brennan, and the rest. So after a couple weeks of hand wringing, MAGA is back aboard the Trump Train. Meanwhile in New Hampshire, Tucker Carlson is chasing wild geese from his garden. |
Perfectly designed graphic. Well one, Show It Right :- )
Rummychick, you and the other Trump haters, this is you:
“It was a MAGA-aligned cohort led by Tucker Carlson and Steve Bannon who weaponized the Epstein narrative, and now parts of the right are as giddy with anti-Trump animus as first-term Never Trumpers are.”
This is also you and the other Trump haters
“nothing the administration produces now will satisfy this faction of MAGA, because Bannon and Carlson are not interested in transparency or accountability. Rather, they’ve rigged the Epstein story to damage Trump. In their telling, Epstein wasn’t just a predator; he was also a spy, an operative using American teenagers as bait to compromise powerful liberal elites on behalf of the Mossad. They’ve framed the affair so that only confirmation of their mad conspiracy theory will put Epstein’s ghost to rest.”
And this? It’s also you, Trump haters
“The logic is that if Trump doesn’t release the evidence that he’s shielding Israel, it’s evidence that he’s owned by Israel. The setup is as crazy and destructive as Russiagate because it’s the Russiagate playbook, except in this reboot, Netanyahu plays Putin’s part, and it’s not Moscow that controls Trump’s brain, but the Jews.”
That’s why you can’t answer any simple question about ways to get to the truth.
You don’t want the truth.
You just want to target Trump and destroy him so you and your comrades can snuggle back into your RINO, America Last (and probably Deep State) nests.
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