Jeffery Epstein, friend to POTUS 42 and POTUS 45, arrested

Is Desmond being raped or sex trafficked, you fucking moron?

Totes the same, you mouth-breather.

My God. I checked in to see if this had gotten any better, and it has gotten worse.

The two biggest stories in the Epstein world today are, without argument or exception:

1) Barr's refusal to recuse himself from the investigation despite his close ties to Epstein (he worked for a law firm that represented Epstein, and his father hired Epstein as a high school teacher in the 1970s)

2) Acosta's continued employment as Secretary of Labor and his defense of his conduct

And here he has you all assessing the relative culpability of a reporter whose article was spiked 15 years ago.

This is a Breitbart forum. I want no part of that.

I understand the earnest effort from a number of you, but it's a lost cause. Taking an outside view, I'd even say it's embarrassing to be a part of.

Ugh.

A discussion in only interesting if there is some point of disagreement. 

Everyone here agrees that Acosta made a bad deal. It should be investigated, to see if there are unknown reasons why he did so.

In the absence of that, I'm not sure what you want. 20 pages of everyone agreeing to this? 

Barr? I haven't read enough to know about the reasoning, but I would make the broad assumption that once you decide to recuse yourself, you probably should not reverse that decision.

Who here disagrees with that?

As to Ward, yes, the relative culpability was what I was interested in. Folks are rightly pointing out all the people who ignored Epstein's activities, enabled them, excused them, downplayed them, or covered them up.

Does Ward not belong in this discussion? Does she bear no responsibility at all? 

And, this is what bugs you guys, and why a simple thing comes to dominate the discussion: when no one is willing to acknowledge the obvious, yes, I'm going to make a bigger deal out of it. 

Everyone has an opinion. Everyone is certain that Acosta and Vance and Maxwell and Dershowitz and whoever else deserve our scorn, and are culpable in some way either for helping Epstein commit his crimes, or in letting him get off. 

But, when it comes to Ward, who says she knew in 2003 what he was up to, and did nothing about it, Double Down and MC and everyone else can't bring themselves to utter an unkind word.

Why? Because she's a fucking journalist? Is that it? Is it something else? Does no one really think she could have done nothing else in the years between 2003 and his conviction than simply sit on her knowledge?

Someone please explain it to me, because right now, you all look like a bunch of cops, instituting some kind of Blue Wall of Silence, which you would all claim outrage over. 

My issue is in part where you make huge leaps in logic to fit your “media is bad” narrative. For all we know, she did not have the goods. She did not have any documents to back up what she said. I’m a defender, generally, of investigative journalism as a profession, particularly magazine journalism which is where I have some experience, but I don’t make a habit of defending bad journalism. You don’t know what it takes to clear the bar — one that not only keeps you from getting sued, but one that keeps you from getting scammed — but it’s a lot higher than “some people said this.” It sounds to me like ten Herald reporter worked a lot harder than Ward. Sounds like she chickened out, and now wants credit for “Ah ha! I knew this!” Either way, your fantasy where if you were in her shoes, you’d go to the cops is a very heroic of yourself, but again, we know that even when the cops did have the information, and enough evidence to prosecute, they tried to make it go away.

I know after having 100 of these same debates that you just keep moving the goal posts every time. You’d like to blame the reporter here, over one of the most famous and highly respected editors of this era in magazines, a publication that has tremendous influence and ad dollars and clout and credibility, because why again? She wanted it in the story! Carter is the one who killed it. Is it because you need a distraction from Acosta’a non-apology today? Or the fact that the justice department already argued in court last week that they were not going to revisit the lenient sentence?

Dear god man. Sure let’s string up the real villain here, the initial reporter who took a standard financial profile of a secretive socialite and tried to do real reporting and had it killed by powerful forces, either because what she has wasn’t good enough, or what she had was too good.

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Is this real? Is there a link? Or is this how you’d imagine an interview with her would go? Link please.

It's imagined. He's arguing that she had other recourses to protect young girls other than just publishing a story in Vanity Fair magazine.