Hey there, I’ve been doing my best to keep up with the news while also wrapping up my book. I’ll be back to doing some more investigative work once I’m through this bottleneck. Meantime, you can support my work holding the American right accountable through independent, adversarial journalism with a paid subscription (discount here) or a contribution to American Doom. Your support keeps this newsletter free for all comers.

It’s all pretty obvious: reeling from the blowback from the decision not to release the Epstein files — after years of revving his supporters up with the prospect — Trump is now in peak distraction mode.

His surrogates have been all over right-wing media in recent days pimping theories and possible indictments of Obama- and Biden-era officials, including the two ex-presidents themselves. Obviously, these indictments will never happen but some version of cooked-up “investigations” are sure to make the rounds in congressional committees overseen by the likes of James Comer and other Trump mouthpieces.

This is all a desperate attempt to distract from the obvious: as part of its investigation into Epstein — which spanned the previous Trump administration and Biden’s term in office — the Justice Department surely found a ton of ties between Trump and Epstein. They found these ties for the very obvious reason that they quite clearly exist, as has been well reported publicly, and because they are investigators whose job it is to dig stuff up.

There is plenty to be dug when it comes to Trump and Epstein, as last week’s Wall Street Journal story based on these investigative findings made clear. After Trump was re-elected, Attorney General Pam Bondi and others began going through the Justice Department’s files on Epstein and found all those mentions of Trump — the ones that Bondi and Trump had hundreds and maybe thousands of agents across the country flag in the voluminous material that the government had compiled on Epstein.

All of this brings us to the reason why Trump can’t release the files in bulk, as he and many others in his administration have repeatedly promised: Trump is all over the files. To fully explain how all of this is a Democratic “hoax,” Trump would have to do a lot of explaining about his appearance in the files. That’s not likely something he’d be able to do very well, which is why you get people like Rep. Tim Burchett explaining away Trump’s appearance on the Epstein flight logs.

You see, rich folks fly on private jets all the time, Burchett explained on CNN the other day. And when one of their planes breaks down, they just hitch a ride on another rich person’s plane! That’s probably what happened with Trump and Epstein, Burchett claimed.

No mention of their decades-long friendship or any of the many, many instances of ties between the two men. No, Burchett wants America to reserve its judgment on Trump and give him the presumption of innocence. Trump is now going even further, insisting that he’s innocent and that Obama, Biden and other Democrats are guilty of an ever-expanding number of crimes that Trump’s Justice Department is now going to prosecute them over.

Except they won’t, because this is all one big, desperate deflection of the very uncomfortable truth.

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