🔒 Epstein Was Never the Head of the Conspiracy. The Reality is Worse. (Part 2)

Releasing the Epstein emails in the manner that they did was considerably worse than not releasing them at all. I’m not even convinced that releasing them was a good idea in the first place and there, I’ve said it.

 Right up to the point that they actually did it, I thought this was going to go one of two ways: Either they wouldn’t release anything, and would just continue along in the same tradition of “you and what army?” that they’ve thrown at every attempt the law has made to force them to do anything. The other plausible scenario was that they would release a ton of stuff that makes Bill Clinton look bad and keep pretty much everything else sealed.

 What they did do, actually, should have been the most foreseeable thing—they released the files incompetently. It's here, if you want to play around with it. All these millions of emails just dumped in an unsorted decontextualized mass for the public to sort through, just rooting through a mountain of slop and trying to find meaning in whatever your hand happens to pull out. Names have been redacted, or not redacted, seemingly at random. In some documents a name is redacted in one place but openly appears elsewhere. A ton of emails have multiple, differently redacted copies, so you can see all the names if you compare them. Some of the redacted names are “Jeffrey Epstein.”

They did it incompetently because they are a breathtakingly incompetent administration, staffed by TV personalities based on how much loyalty they showed Trump in public. He put a Fox news anchor in charge of the military. He put two podcasters in charge of the FBI. To run the entire health and medical apparatus he appointed a guy whose only knowledge of medicine is that he’s an anti-vaxxer, as well as Doctor fucking Oz. Of course this was done incompetently. The reason the Biden administration didn’t release them wasn’t because they were covering them up, it was because they knew that what would happen is exactly what is happening now: Conspiracism and panic.

 Of course the Department of Justice wouldn’t ordinarily just dump a decade of one criminal suspect’s personal correspondence on the world and invite everyone to go hog wild on it. They had to pass a law through congress to make this happen—to carve out an exception for this specific case. They did that because the incompetent MAGA apparatus campaigned on it to get elected and then couldn’t walk back the mania they had triggered once they realized how stupid it was.

 Why do I think it was such a bad idea? Because I remember “Pizzagate.” And so do you, if you’re reading this, because Pizzagate was only ten years ago! And this is a lot more of the same thing!

 Now, I know people will object here on one important point: Pizzagate was based on an imaginary child trafficking scandal, while Epstein is based on a real one. That is a very important distinction! Last week, I wrote about why I don’t think Epstein was running a massive pedophile ring (though I don’t discount he may have been running a smaller one) but we can actually put the entire child molestation thing aside when we talk about why releasing the Epstein Files was a bad idea.

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