It may be the most wasteful fool’s errand in the history of American law: Nearly all of the 200 federal prosecutors in the Southern District of New York, the nation’s most important US Attorney’s Office, now spend their days reading through millions of pages of Jeffrey Epstein documents, redacting the names and other identifying information of alleged victims so that the full “Epstein files” can be publicly released.
All because of an insane social-media hysteria that began on the right and are now fed by the left, including top Democrats in Congress: the insistence that sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein and his paramour/procurer Ghislaine Maxwell entrapped and blackmailed many of the world’s billionaires and power brokers — with it all covered up in an elaborate plot.
As with all conspiracy theories, anything that fails to prove the “truth” — especially anything that debunks it — just becomes more proof of the plotters’ reach: The believers will never be convinced otherwise.
It was absolutely the fever-swamp right that fed the initial hysteria, but Democrats last year started jumping in with both feet, obsessively speculating that President Donald Trump himself is named in the supposed Epstein “client list.”
With Trump himself supporting full disclosure to remove any doubts (in rational minds, anyway), a new law compels rapid release of the feds’ vast stockpile of Epstein-related documents — redacted to protect anyone who might claim victim status.
And so the SDNY — the most prestigious and important district in the federal justice system — has had to put other work on hold to try to satisfy an unsatisfiable demand.
Venezuelan strongman Nicolas Maduro and his wife are in jail awaiting trial on immensely complex charges; you’d hope that the US Attorney Jay Clayton could assign adequate coverage to that case . . . but Epstein.
Alleged health-exec assassin Luigi Mangione’s federal death-penalty charges now rest on delicate questions about the definition of stalking; too bad SDNY is swamped with work addressing the down-the-rabbit-hole preoccupations of Epstein fanatics.
Conspiracists and cynical pols alike call everything else going on in America a “distraction” staged to further the great cover-up. Immigration enforcement, Greenland, tariffs, Ukraine: all ginned-up fake issues to keep people from finding out the truth.
Yet the Biden White House had full access to all this supposedly explosive Epstein material for four years; if anything about Trump was there, the folks who went through his wife’s underwear drawer would’ve found a way to at least leak it, if not assign a special prosecutor to try to imprison him for it.
Reality check: Epstein was a deviant, but not a bit of evidence has ever surfaced to indicate he ran a sinister “Eyes Wide Shut” sex cult.
Yet many of the nation’s top legal minds are wasting endless hours to try convincing people who’ll never be convinced of the truth; what a sick gift to the criminals the SDNY should be prosecuting.
This story originally appeared on NYPost
