Trump-Epstein Round 2: Still a Nothingburger

Running with wild claims on weak evidence never ends well for conservatives.

I don’t know about you, but few things leave me more pessimistic about our chances of making America sane again than a day of one’s allies circling the wagons around the exact same standards and tactics we had previously banded together to oppose.

I had hoped that no more would need to be said about the futility of trying to tie Donald Trump to Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes after Friday’s column, but on Monday, another batch of documents was released that set imaginations on fire.

Per the Daily Mail, the documents include emails that Epstein victim Sarah Ransome sent journalist Maureen Callahan (who was with the New York Post at the time but now works for the Mail) in 2016. Ransome claimed that the dead predator kept blackmail videos of several famous friends, including Trump, having sex with “many girls” including one specific friend of hers “on regular occasions.”

In one email, Ransome describes details of Trump’s alleged sexual tastes that, without going into detail here, would if true indicate at a minimum that Trump was, shall we say, rough to the point of disregarding his partner’s pleasure, comfort, and general well-being. Which would not be surprising; it’s well known that the man is a pig and spent years as a general sexual degenerate. Ransome does not, however, allege the alleged sex was non-consensual, nor does she say whether her friend was underage at the time. (Elsewhere she declares, “I will make sure that neither that evil bitch Hillary or that Paedophile Trump gets elected,” but without specifics backing up the descriptor.)

So before going any further, taking all this at face value all we have is another story about Trump doing what everybody already knew he did, give or take a couple intimate details. Disgusting, but not new, criminal, or pedophilic.

That should have been enough for anti-Trump conservatives to take one look, grimace, and return to talking about all the real reasons why Trump should never be nominated or elected again. But it turns out the full story is even weaker.

In October of 2016, Ransome wrote to Callahan, “I would like to retract everything I have said to you and walk away from this”:

I shouldn't have contacted you and I'm sorry I wasted your time. It's not worth coming forward and I will never be heard anyhow and only bad things will happen as a consequence of me going public.

This will just create pain for my family and I and they have already helped me pick up the pieces once before. I can't ask them to do that again.

Three years later, in a piece about attorney Alan Dershowitz’s role in the sick saga, the New Yorker’s Connie Bruck spoke with Ransome and reported the following:

In the fall of 2016, she had suggested to the New York Post that she had sex tapes of half a dozen prominent people, including Bill Clinton and Donald Trump—but couldn’t provide the tapes when asked. (Ransome told me that she had invented the tapes to draw attention to Epstein’s behavior, and to make him believe that she had “evidence that would come out if he harmed me.”)

And no alleged tapes, copies of which prosecutors and the FBI surely would have in their possession by now, have ever seen the light of day.

“That doesn’t matter,” online warriors insisted Monday. “The 2016 walkback sounds coerced! Of course a powerful pedophile like Epstein would have threatened her!” Maybe. But she stood by, and added an explanation for, that walkback in the story published July 29, 2019—weeks after Epstein was arrested on the charges for which his goose was well and truly cooked (so much so that he infamously killed himself just twelve days later). Was she still afraid then?

Moreover, practically speaking it doesn’t matter why an accusation is recanted; once it’s recanted it’s ultimately useless in proving guilt. It might as well not exist. How does anyone expect to nail Trump as a pedophile on the basis of videos that (a) aren’t alleged to show force or coercion, (b) aren’t specifically alleged to include minors, (c) nobody has ever seen, and (d) the original source no longer says even exist?

And just as with last week’s nothingburger, the ultimate tell is once again the simple fact that if the videos were real, Democrats would have found and used them for maximum impact years ago. The name Sarah Ransome would be every bit as well-known as Christine Blasey Ford.

On Tuesday, the day after most of this column was written, Ransome appeared on Good Morning Britain to retract the retractions, claiming she was threatened, that her original story was true all along, and that she is “willing to testify in court” about it. The question still remains as to why she didn’t say anything at all in the more than four years between Epstein’s death and now, but now we can see if she does, if she shares or directs authorities to any tapes, whether her testimony withstands cross-examination, and what if anything an ensuing investigation turns up. Then we can see if the evidence supports the thesis that Trump raped minors. Not before.

Unless and until that happens, at best anti-Trump conservatives who run with this are wasting their time on something that hasn’t and may not ever be vindicated; at worst, they are risking damage to their own credibility in the minds of otherwise-reachable people.

And we all should remember what happened to the last group that promised to release a Kraken that never showed up.