IT ISN’T JUST MEMBERS OF THE MAGA FAITHFUL WHO ARE FEELING LET DOWN.
When the F.B.I. released a memo last month stating that it could find no evidence that the late financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein possessed a “client list” of prominent individuals for whom he procured underage girls, nor that he had blackmailed said men, the response from sections of the right was livid. “I just think that it’s a punch in the gut when regular people go to jail all the time, when they mess up and do something wrong, and then it always seems the rich, powerful elites escape,” Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene, one of the loudest conservative critics to decry the Trump administration’s refusal to release more documents related to the case, told The Times. (A U.S. District Court judge on Wednesday denied the Department of Justice’s request to release more Epstein grand jury materials.)
One can understand, if not sympathize, with Ms. Greene’s predicament. As a woman who came to elected politics by way of the QAnon conspiracy theory and once denied that a plane struck the Pentagon on Sept. 11, 2001, she was bound to be disappointed by anything other than a story combining elements of the Jimmy Savile pedophilia scandal, “The Protocols of the Elders of Zion” and Oliver Stone’s feverish (and fallacious) reimagining of the Kennedy assassination, the 1991 film “JFK.”
Responding to the concerns expressed by Ms. Greene and other prominent voices on the right, the House Oversight Committee chairman James Comer issued a raft of subpoenas to President Trump’s former attorney general Bill Barr (who was deposed on Monday), Bill and Hillary Clinton, the last three Democratic attorneys general and other former public officials.
It isn’t just members of the MAGA faithful who are feeling let down by the lack of vindication for their theories regarding an international pedophile ring. “Do you stand with America’s children and survivors of abuse or with the wealthy and powerful who are being protected?” Representative Ro Khanna, a California Democrat and co-sponsor of a bipartisan bill to release the Epstein files, said last month. “The public deserves to know the truth and the survivors and their families deserve justice.”
Six years ago, the Democratic National Committee denounced “baseless conspiracy theories” surrounding Mr. Epstein’s death by suicide in a Manhattan jail cell. Today many Democrats accuse the Trump administration of “hiding the Epstein list” and insinuate that the files will reveal that Mr. Trump himself engaged in illegal activity.
That elements of the MAGA right and the #Resistance left have converged on the Epstein case in a coalition of the credulous makes sense. For the conspiratorially inclined, Mr. Epstein’s abuse of hundreds of girls and women is insufficiently horrific. Such a monstrous crime is explainable only if a shadowy cabal of international power brokers were involved.
To be sure, Democratic hyping of the Epstein story is motivated less by conspiratorial conviction than by rank political opportunism; if Democrats truly believed that Mr. Trump was implicated in the files, they would have released them when Joe Biden was president. And it’s no coincidence that Mr. Khanna, one of the most publicity-hungry members of Congress, whose name is already being bruited about as a 2028 presidential candidate, has emerged as the loudest Democratic voice on this issue. Regardless of their motives, both parties are contributing to an atmosphere of growing paranoia and distrust.
Amid all the speculation and innuendo, it’s important to state some simple facts that frustrate conspiracy theorists. Aside from that used to convict his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell (currently serving a 20-year prison sentence) and charge the French modeling scout Jean-Luc Brunel (who killed himself before his case could come to court), I have found no evidence to support the claim that Mr. Epstein trafficked underage girls for anyone other than himself. One of the main sources of the allegations that he controlled a harem of “sex slaves” for powerful men, a victim of Mr. Epstein named Virginia Giuffre, recorded them in what her own lawyers described as a “fictionalized account” before she took her own life in April.
That the Epstein case has become a bipartisan flytrap for conspiratorial minds is in large part because of years of reckless hyperbolizing and outright lying by leaders on both sides of the partisan divide. If you trust Mr. Trump’s claim that the 2020 election was “stolen” from him, you are likely more susceptible to some of the more outré theories surrounding Mr. Epstein.
But the same applies to those who were constantly told that Mr. Trump was a dedicated, conscious agent of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia. For years, Democratic politicians and liberal media figures told their voters that Mr. Trump was an “asset” of Russia or a personal agent of Mr. Putin himself. During Mr. Trump’s embattled first administration, Rachel Maddow devoted several episodes of her hourlong MSNBC program to endorsing aspects of the notorious Steele dossier, later characterized by The Times as “a compendium of rumors and unproven assertions.”
Perhaps the worst offender in this regard was Adam Schiff, then a congressman and now a senator. A ubiquitous talking head at the time, Mr. Schiff exploited his position as the ranking Democrat on the House Intelligence Committee to inform the American people that he had access to secret information proving that the president of the United States colluded with the Russian government to win the 2016 election. Speaking in dulcet tones and with lawyerly precision, he appeared the furthest thing from a wild-eyed fanatic while casting his aspersions.
But when the D.O.J. released the former F.B.I. director Robert Mueller’s report in April of 2019, it contained insufficient evidence of collusion. His claims exposed that not only did Mr. Schiff act as if nothing had changed; he dug in further. If McCarthyism is defined as an abuse of power involving reckless accusations of subservience to Russia based upon insinuation and hearsay, then Mr. Schiff was certainly guilty of using McCarthyite tactics.
The amplification of conspiracy theories and other forms of falsehood can have serious consequences. In 2016, allegations that Democratic political figures were running a child sex-trafficking ring out of the basement of a Washington, D.C., pizza parlor led a North Carolina man to travel to the restaurant and fire three shots before being arrested. Claims that the 2020 election was stolen inspired the riot of Jan. 6, 2021. Rhetoric accusing health insurance executives of “killing” American citizens has led some on the left to laud Luigi Mangione, the man accused of killing the UnitedHealthcare chief executive Brian Thompson, as a folk hero. Beyond the victims of these terrible acts, untold millions of Americans have lost faith in the democratic process and resorted to apathy in part because of the hyperbolic nature of our political discourse.
Using one’s position of authority and influence to deceive well-meaning people breeds cynicism, disillusionment and despair. Lying and demonization are hardly new features of American politics. Rhetoric in the early American Republic could be as vicious as anything heard on a podcast or read on a social media platform. But the stakes are higher when incendiary accusations and outright falsehoods can spread so easily, and in a country armed to the teeth.
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This article originally appeared in The New York Times.
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