Joe Scarborough mentioned a name that hasn’t pissed the lips of journalists in quite some time this week: Jeffrey Epstein.
Friday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” host Joe Scarborough warned that the association between former President Bill Clinton and convicted sex offender billionaire Jeffrey Epstein will be something the media will be forced to focus on if Republican presidential front-runner Donald Trump chooses to discuss it. And that could be a “big problem” for his wife Democratic presidential front-runner Hillary Clinton, Scarborough said.
According to Scarborough, previous allegations of Bill Clinton’s indiscretions, particularly in the 2008 presidential cycle when Hillary Clinton ran against Barack Obama, were not discussed in public forums. However, this time will be different because of Trump’s ability to promote a story line and force the media to talk about it.
“By the way, we’ll do what other news shows don’t do,” Scarborough said. “What we do all the time and we’ll actually say what people say off the air and not saying off the air and not attribute anything to the — I am talking about over the past — since 2008. Leading into 2008, everybody that came on the air talked about the same three women that Bill Clinton was having an affair with in 2008 and said, ‘It’s going to destroy his campaign.’ And, ‘It’s going to this and it’s going to that and it’s going to come out and everybody can repeat, give the three women’s names, where they’re from, their positions. That’s the thing that’s kind of remained quiet. The same thing with John Edwards and the affair he was having.”
“You’re right,” he continued. “Everybody was too gentile. There are some people that were smooching Hillary Clinton left-and-right right now that were running around the Washington bureau saying this is going to blow up. It’s kill her campaign. Nobody ever talked about it because everybody played by the rules. The same thing has happened in the lead up to this campaign. Everybody’s talking about, I don’t know this Jeffrey Epstein guy. Is that his right name? People in the know always talk about Jeffrey Epstein, Jeffrey Epstein. I don’t even know who that dude is but I know that people in the know that are in this media area that don’t do what I do which is go to work and go home and hang out with their kids, they talk about Jeffrey Epstein.”
Who is Jeffrey Epstein? As the Observer noted:
For those of you who haven’t heard much about the Jeffrey Epstein, he is a 62-year-old billionaire and major donor to the Democratic Party. The story erupted after Virginia Roberts gave a sworn statement in a federal court filing that claimed (as reported here by Radar) that that under Mr. Epstein’s tutelage she “was a teen sex slave forced to have sex with Prince Andrew” and that she also saw Bill Clinton on Mr. Epstein’s “orgy island.”
Mr. Epstein’s current predicament is hardly a shock. Back in 2008, at a time he had also been indicted (he was subsequently jailed for about a year) in Florida for sex crimes, Philip Weiss wrote an astonishing story about Mr. Epstein in New York magazine that showed that his legal problems back then had not, surprisingly, made him more “sober and reserved.” Much to the contrary, the allegations against him (from, among others, a 14-year-old girl) had made him more “sparkling and ingenuous.”
What does this have to do with the Clintons?
For its part, Gawker recently wrote an interesting story titled, Flight Logs Put Clinton, Dershowitz on Pedophile Billionaire’s Sex Jet.” It discussed Mr. Epstein’s “predatory past, and his now-inconvenient relationships with a Who’s Who of the Davos set,” and reported that Bill Clinton had repeatedly flown on the “Lolita Express,” Mr. Epstein’s private jet, “with an actress in softcore porn movies whose name appears in Mr. Epstein’s address book under an entry for ‘massages’.”
What all this means is that Hillary Clinton’s husband has already been implicated in the Epstein scandal and that his dubious private behavior, which has already once distracted the entire nation from more important business, could do so again if Ms. Clinton does indeed run for president.
What’s worse, at least from my personal standpoint, is that if Ms. Clinton were to become the Democratic nominee I still might vote for her because the likely Republican candidates have retrograde and vile public views about race, class, gender and gay rights, and those are important to me, and especially because the two main parties are virtually indistinguishable when it comes to fundamental economic policy. Because both are bought and paid for by Wall Street and financiers like Jeffrey Epstein, as well as other powerful interests who overwhelmingly fund our political campaigns.
The media can continue to ignore this story, but it’s not likely that Trump or any other Republican candidate worth his salt will.
AAN Staff
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