Dirty all the way down
From the United States House of Representatives to the Ohio House of Representatives, Republican legislators are doing their part to stymy a transparent release into the Epstein Files.
It’s not going well for Donald Trump’s efforts to distance himself from his longtime friend, the late and disgraced pedophile Jeffrey Epstein.
On Tuesday, Trump called the Epstein files “a Democrat hoax that never ends.”
Back in July, Speaker of the House Mike Johnson (R-LA) recessed the lower legislative body in an attempt to muzzle the efforts of Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY) to force the release of the Epstein files.
The ploy didn’t do much to diffuse Massie’s ongoing feud with the White House. Massie and three other Republicans have signed the discharge petition when the House resumed activity this week.
That came hours before revelations right-wing provocateur James O’Keefe III did something useful for the first time in his life by honeypotting a senior Department of Justice official and secretly recording him admitting his colleagues planned to edit Republicans from the files and only release Democratic names.
It’s curious, then, that Ohio’s entire Republican Congressional delegation refused to sign Massie’s discharge petition.
That includes Congressman Max Miller (R-Bay Village), who apparently has had a change of heart since July when he co-sponsored Massie’s Epstein List legislation:
I want to ask our beautiful Congressmen if, when they got into politics, they did so to protect a shadowy cabal of the world’s most affluent and well-connected pedophiles.
I imagine they would look at me as if I had proposed a quick jaunt to an unregulated brothel to protract a raging case of syphilis.
But it’s not an unfair question to ask because that’s exactly what Ohio’s Republican Congressmen did yesterday, all in their never-ending quest to suck Trump’s toes in the most humiliating ways possible.
And they did that after Epstein victims showed them what courage looks like by rallying outside the Capitol on Wednesday.
From wsyx.com:
Annie Farmer was one of several survivors who addressed reporters gathered outside the US Capitol building, urging lawmakers to pass the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Farmer said she was just 16 when she was flown to Epstein's ranch in New Mexico, where she and her sister were assaulted. She added that many people knew about Epstein's abuses, saying they enabled his lifestyle and looked the other way.
"When people say, you know, 'Please share names,' ... there are names that are very well known, like that of Les Wexner, who everyone knows supplied an enormous amount of Epstein's, you know, financial wealth, and allowed this operation to happen," she said. "So it's, I think, confusing to many of us why there have not been more ramifications for him, and he's been seen as a victim when clearly, I believe there's more to it."
I want to think I speak for most everyday Ohioans when I say that we’re confused, too, Ms. Farmer.
But it’s good to see Ohio’s premier anorexia merchant starting to catch heat. It’s not that long ago that corporate Columbus media wouldn’t have touched a story about an Epstein victim throwing Ohio’s richest toddler-sized man under the bus.
Better late than never in that regard.
Because with the Ohio Legislature set to return in October, I’ve got Speaker Matt Huffman’s entire leadership team on the hook for the Republican House Caucus accepting a $10,000 donation from Wexner, as well as House Finance chairman Brian Stewart (R-Ashville) for taking $5,000 from the thong salesman.
A conservative might argue that a combined $15,000 from a guy like Wexner is more of an insult. But that’d also be true if Wexner had made a maximum donation to the House Caucus and Chairman Stewart.
It’s about access to a billionaire more than anything, which is why Wexner would still probably receive a handwritten thank-you note if he had donated $10 instead of $10,000.
Because this issue in October will be yet another example of the biggest beef I have about the Statehouse media environment: The unwritten agreement between the politicians and the editorial class at legacy outlets, where reporters aren’t allowed to pursue politicians in the hallways.
If someone like Chairman Stewart doesn’t want to discuss the Wexner donation, he can say, “No comment,” and put an end to any pursuit of that question.
It’s a policy that prevents state legislators from having to do the “walk of shame,” that infamous act that Americans of any political stripe can instantly recognize: A politician looking guilty while refusing to answer professional, albeit hostile questioning.
I’m a blogger. I make my living by typing deranged sentences into the internet for the entertainment of strangers. But even I have come to realize that, for better or worse, we’re in a video world.
Video moves the needle, especially among the normally apolitical crowd, in ways that words cannot. It’s one thing to read about a politician declining to comment on a political donation from Jeffrey Epstein’s best friend.
It’s another thing to see them sweaty, shuffling silently through the halls of power while looking like a stranger just shoved a rabid gerbil up their asshole for an excruciating 90 seconds (and 90 seconds is all it takes, folks) because raw video footage is bipartisan in ways that words are not.
You can see what I mean in this video from July, featuring Rep. Gary Click (R-Vickery). It’s something you don’t see anywhere else in the Statehouse media, thanks to archaic editorial rules:
I try not to tip my hand about future lines of questioning because it allows Republican legislators to coordinate a defense. But I’m making an exception this time, because the entire House Republican Caucus is on the hook over the Wexner donation, with Chairman Stewart doubly so.
And I plan to press that question throughout the fall session on multiple legislators. Because I don’t think any of them got into politics with the specific goal of protecting pedophiles—well, maybe everyone besides Rep. Click—but that’s what they’re doing with their silence and complicity in taking Wexner’s dirty money.
And sure, I wear my biases on my sleeve. I’m a card-carrying member of the Radical Left. But by now, I’ve shown that if the parties were reversed in the Statehouse dynamic, I’d go to war on the Democrats all the same.
It’s not much, but it’s honest work, which is more than most of these bums can say anymore.
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