By Wayne Allensworth
Fight, fight, fight?
I’ve written about the Epstein case and the Trump administration here and here. Some more thoughts follow.
In 2014 — 11 years seems like a lifetime in the social media/Internet age — The Times of Israel reported that Israeli intelligence had penetrated White House communications in the 1990s and was monitoring President Bill Clinton’s phone calls. Among them were salacious conversations with White House intern Monica Lewinsky. Citing Daniel Halper’s book Clinton Inc.: The Audacious Rebuilding of a Political Machine, the newspaper reported that the Israelis let Clinton know they had recordings of those conversations and used them to pressure him to release Israeli spy Jonathan Pollard. During talks between the Israelis and the Palestinian Authority in Maryland in 1998, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu — who else? — pulled Clinton aside to pressure him to release Pollard. Netanyahu was subtle, telling the US president that the Israelis had overheard his conversations, but had thrown the recordings away. Just the mention of the taped conversations was enough for Clinton to get the message, the Times of Israel reported. Clinton brought up Pollard’s release with then CIA Director George Tenet, but backed off when Tenet, a longtime Clinton loyalist, threatened to resign if Clinton released Pollard, a former Naval intelligence analyst. Pollard was eventually set free in 2015 and emigrated to Israel, where he was greeted as a hero. In 2000, The Times of Israel noted, Insight magazine had claimed that Israel had “penetrated four White House telephone lines and relayed real-time conversations on those lines from a remote site outside the White House directly to Israel for listening and recording.” Halper reported that the British, Russians, and Israelis had penetrated White House communications. British author Gordon Thomas, The Times of Israel further observed, claimed that the Mossad had collected 30 hours of Clinton-Lewinsky conversations and had used them to blackmail the United States or to protect an Israeli mole in the White House.
One wonders just what American intelligence was doing while this was going on. And whether some elements of the US intelligence community were privy to the Israelis’ spying. If anything, these stories, along with the attempt to use a sex tape to discredit journalist Glenn Greenwald, who had asserted that Epstein was working for the Mossad and possibly the CIA, make Greenwald’s claims more plausible. Tucker Carlson has supported those claims.
I remind readers that the Israelis reportedly passed the information gathered by their espionage operations in the US to the Soviet Union during the Cold War in return for Moscow allowing the emigration of Soviet Jews to Israel. That’s apart from the notorious Israeli attack on the USS Liberty and the outsized influence the Zionist lobby has on US policy. It really does seem that, as Pat Buchanan once quipped, that Capitol Hill — add the White House — are Israeli-occupied territories. Any one of these stories should have been enough, if American politics were operating truly in American interests, to reassess our special relationship with “our most reliable ally.” Even more so as the Cold War ended nearly 35 years ago. As noted in previous articles, the U.S. does not have vital interests in the Middle East. Our struggle, the only one that matters, is here.
Which brings me to President Donald Trump, who keeps digging the hole he is in regarding the Epstein Affair deeper by defending Attorney General Pam Bondi That, too, is a possible intelligence matter linked to Israel, as Tucker Carlson has suggested. In a breathtaking reversal, Bondi suddenly claimed that there was nothing to the reports about Epstein using his pimping of underage girls to elites for blackmail. She has mentioned “disgusting” Epstein video tapes, evidently of pedophiles having sex with young girls. The perpetrators were likely prominent public figures. Who, exactly? If there was no list of Epstein’s clients, then surely the records of flights to “Epstein Island” would yield plenty of names. In February, Bondi mentioned flight logs containing those names and said they would be released. She claimed that the FBI was withholding some of the Epstein documents and forced out the head of the FBI field office in New York to gain access to them. What about the search warrants in the legal proceedings against Epstein and his partner in crime, girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell? The warrants would show what law enforcement sought. And one of the prosecutors in the 2008 Epstein sex-trafficking case reportedly stated that Epstein was let off the hook with a slap on the wrist because he was connected to intelligence operations. What about justice for the girls who were exploited by Epstein and company? Then there’s that video allegedly proving Epstein committed suicide. Apart from the infamous missing minute, forensic video specialists told Wired that the video had been “modified.”
Now Trump is claiming that the Biden administration and its allies created the “Epstein list,” as they had concocted the “Russiagate” scandal earlier. Really? The first case against Epstein was back in 2007-2008. What’s more, if Trump’s political opponents had created a fake list, why? The most ready answer would be to use it against Trump, which they did not do.Trump’s implausible assertions only make matters worse for him and his administration. Mark Mitchell, chief pollster for Rasmussen, has emphasized that the White House’s refusal to come clean on the Epstein affair has angered Trump’s base, and his job approval numbers are taking a serious hit.The Epstein affair, noted Mitchell, will not go away. Americans see elites getting away with major crimes yet again. Trump promised to “Drain the Swamp,” to hold elites accountable, and he is breaking his promise. It’s not unreasonable to assume that he is, at least in part, protecting Israel. Israeli Prime Minister Netanyahu has recently made a series of visits to Washington, and even says he has nominated Donald Trump for a Nobel Peace Prize. Please excuse us for being suspicious. Was Bibi rewarding Trump for the cover up?
The Trump movement might be our last opportunity to salvage something from the mess we are in. But it could easily be defanged by the very foreign entanglements Trump himself has denounced. The American evangelical Christian obsession with and Trump’s apparent passionate personal attachment to Israel is MAGA’s Achilles heel . Trump has resisted committing America to a boots-on-the ground war against Iran, but as long as the U.S. has a presence in the region, we could be sucked into one whether he wants it or not. The special interests that have controlled our politics — globalist trans-national business, the neocons and neo-liberals, the Zionist lobby, the military industrial complex, the Deep State, the Swamp bureaucracy — have zero interest in winding up the American Empire to deal with our own problems. All want the United States to remain the Blob’s aircraft carrier, capable of world-wide force projection. And that means that they will act in concert, as there is considerable overlap among the strands of the web of special interests that run Washington DC, to sabotage the MAGA agenda if it makes too much headway. Releasing a complete and unredacted version of the Epstein material would go a long way toward weakening that web of deceit and duplicity and convincing Americans that the Trump administration is serious about strengthening public trust in government.
The time is now to act decisively on immigration, for instance, to curtail legal immigration as well as to carry out large scale deportations. Without that, the “great replacement” of the American core population will continue. It’s past time to curb foreign influence in our government, and to decisively weaken the power of the permanent bureaucracy. Those actions face fierce resistance by the Blob’s agents. We now hear stories that Trump is being pressured to sign an amnesty for the tens of millions of illegals who remain in this country. Trump has done nothing about the southwest border drug cartels. Yet Border CzarTom Homan vowed to “wipe them off the face of the earth.”
If Donald Trump does not want to be neutered and co-opted by the Blob, he must decide how he wants history to remember him. Should MAGA run out of steam in the first year of Trump’s second presidential term, the Blob will bide its time and come back with a vengeance. It’s not too late to reverse some of the damage done by the Epstein affair, which has outraged the MAGA base. You raised your fist and pledged to fight, fight, fight for America. When does the real fight start, Mr. President?
Chronicles contributor Wayne Allensworth is the author of The Russian Question: Nationalism, Modernization, and Post-Communist Russia, and a novel, Field of Blood.
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