Much-discussed documents in Jeffrey Epstein affair don’t live up to the hype.
Carlo Allegri / Reuters
Over roughly the past month, coverage of Bill Clinton's travels with financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein have made their way from a thick stack of court documents into something approaching political mythology, propelled by a string of innuendo-laced reports hinting that the former president must have been in some way complicit when he voyaged with a billionaire known for preying on underage girls.
It's a story with plenty to gape at, from horrific and excruciatingly detailed allegations against Epstein to the frequent presence of a former president who was, after all, nearly chased from office for a (consensual) affair with an intern.
But sometimes stories that seem too good to be true — just might be. A detailed review by a team of BuzzFeed News reporters of more than 2,000 pages of pleadings, depositions, affidavits, police reports, flight logs, and other documents filed in state and federal court found that many of the most provocative allegations about Clinton have little to no factual foundation and are exaggerated at best; that the documents — which appear to be the source for nearly all current reporting on this subject — themselves never suggest that Clinton was doing more than using his wealthy friend as a kind of global taxi service; and that many of the most lurid insinuations have been floated without any visible support from verifiable information.
While it's still possible that some Rosetta stone of Clintonian depravity will surface from a pair of ongoing lawsuits involving Epstein, the fact that nothing even close to that has been dug up over the course of a half-dozen years of heated litigation should not be encouraging for Republican operatives and other Clinton critics hotly anticipating the very worst.
One sign that the connection is a bit weak: The lawyers who have used the Clinton link to help publicize their cases have been markedly vague on details.
When asked to present actual proof, Jack Scarola, the Florida attorney responsible for filing some of the most attention-grabbing documents that have come to light in recent weeks, warned darkly in an email of "extortionate threats, power, wealth or political pressure."
"The time will come when all your questions will be answered," said Scarola, who represents another trial attorney suing Epstein in Palm Beach County Court. "But that time is not now."
Unwilling to wait, perhaps, publications on both sides of the Atlantic have gleefully dipped into those documents to publish breathless descriptions of Epstein's "black book," which contains a host of Clinton phone numbers (along with just about every other powerful figure in the Western world); dissections of handwritten flight logs for the financier's private 727 aircraft that frequently capture Bubba at 30,000 feet; and extensive allegations from a woman, Virginia Roberts, who claims she was Epstein's sex slave as a teenager and whose recollection places the former commander-in-chief on "Orgy Island" in 2002 to participate in a sexual romp, possibly with women who were not yet of age.
National Enquirer
Tellingly, many of those articles — which have notably increased in tempo in recent weeks following Roberts' late December accusation that noted attorney Alan Dershowitz was one of the men she was forced to have sex with — contain language underscoring the fact that none of this proves anything. "It should at this stage be stressed that the Mail has no evidence to corroborate this and other claims made by Virginia Roberts," the Daily Mail wrote in April. "Though her LinkedIn page claims a certificate in Swedish massage, there is no evidence that she ever actually treated Epstein to one," Gawker (in the most straightforward and clearest reporting on the documents to date) wrote last week. And the National Enquirer did not appear to rely on the court record for its conclusions, instead to the interpretation of an unnamed source who noted that "Bill's name is all over the legal papers, which are chock-full of sordid claims."
Clinton's discretion on matters of sexual restraint has attained permanent notoriety, so maybe it's natural to assume that particular leopard doesn't change his spots. But at this point, there is simply nothing to back those sordid claims up.
Here's what we do know:
Jeffrey Epstein is a secretive billionaire financier and Democratic donor who says he never attended college but whose "background is in physics." He owns properties in New York, Florida, New Mexico, London, and Paris and also owns an island in the U.S. Virgin Islands. He has at least two private jets, including the 727.
He has known Bill Clinton since about 1995, and his relationship with him grew stronger after he left office. There is no question they were friendly. Epstein's so-called "black book," which is less like something out of the Heidi Fleiss affair and more what most people would call a "phone directory," contains 21 numbers for getting in touch with Clinton, as well as emails and addresses.
But that 92-page directory also contains exactly the range of eye-poppingly famous and powerful contacts one might expect of an incredibly rich, connected person who owns Manhattan's largest private residence, from Tony Blair to Elie Wiesel to Courtney Love.
Epstein was long rumored to be a sexual libertine; "It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do," real estate personality Donald Trump once said of his old friend. "And many of them are on the younger side."
Source BuzzFeed - Politics http://ift.tt/1BrVE4j
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