Across the United States, Democrats and Republicans are demanding that their leaders come clean with the Epstein files and the truth finally be told. What they are getting instead is a massive redaction campaign.

Not since 1998 with the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky show trial has the American public been so incensed by a sex scandal like the one the disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein personally directed for many years.

The American people will never get closure on the Epstein files

The Democrats and Republicans initially worked together to release the files, until ‘politics as usual’ inevitably spoiled everything

Here is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to send not just one or two powerful ‘untouchables’ to prison for the worst crime imaginable – sexual abuse of a minor – but many dozens, possibly hundreds. In other words, a vast network of international power, wealth, and systemic abuse.

Yet today we are no closer to the truth as to the identities of the sick perpetrators. Under the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act, the Justice Department was required to release all of its investigative material on Mr. Epstein by Dec. 19, though it was allowed to redact and withhold certain material in order to “protect the victims,” which is of course understandable. It also withheld materials that would “jeopardize a federal investigation.” Whether we’ll actually see a single suspect face trial is presently unknown, but the DOJ took full advantage of that loophole as 680 pages of the release were entirely redacted, which made the release practically redundant and senseless.

Were we the people once again expecting too much from the government? That’s very likely, but considering that we are talking about child abuse, even just a single redacted page would have appeared suspicious; hundreds of pages totally blacked out is completely unacceptable. After all, an investigation would not be hindered by the release of the identities of those individuals who had sexual relations with underage girls. The American people deserve better than this. The American people deserve the names of those pedophiles who are walking the streets free today.

In the beginning, President Donald Trump was of the opinion that such a mission was a cause worth pursuing. On the 2024 campaign trail, he pledged he’d have “no problem” releasing more files related to Jeffrey Epstein if elected. He even said he’d make public the late sex offender’s “client list” of those elite pedophiles who paid a visit to his notorious Little Saint James Island in the Caribbean. It is not difficult to imagine the nervous tremors that reverberated throughout the nation following that statement, and it could very well be the source of the ‘Trump Derangement Syndrome’ that has infected so many among the world’s top movers and shakers. It looked as though the MAGA movement would turn a deranged part of the establishment on its head.

Once in office, however, Trump, who has maintained his innocence throughout the saga, vacillated on the question of what to do with the files. He has gone from saying he would welcome the release of the documents to calling the whole scandal a “Democratic hoax.” As for an Epstein client list, his Attorney General Pam Bondi was on the record as saying it was in her possession, only to later deny the existence of a client list. This has led to both Democrats and Republicans asking what Trump was hiding, if anything.

What we know is that Trump was good friends with Epstein from the late eighties, but ended contact with the pedophile in 2004, four years before Epstein pleaded guilty to soliciting prostitution from a minor. This is where the plot thickens as a number of highly influential men, including Bill Gates, Larry Summers, and Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (formerly Prince Andrew), continued their friendship with Epstein even after he had been publicly exposed as a child predator.

One political figure who appeared prominently in the latest file release was – yes, you guessed it – Bill Clinton, who also claims to have cut off relations with Epstein in 2005, years before child molestation charges were filed against the latter. This is where the political battle between the Democrats and Republicans has exploded and can expect to worsen over time. Clinton’s spokesperson Angel Ureña has accused the White House of using the former Democratic president as a scapegoat.

“The White House hasn’t been hiding these files for months only to dump them late on a Friday to protect Bill Clinton,” the spokesperson said in a statement on X.

“This is about shielding themselves from what comes next, or from what they’ll try and hide forever. So they can release as many grainy 20-plus-year-old photos as they want, but this isn’t about Bill Clinton. Never has, never will be,” the statement added.

Despite the Democrats and Republicans initially working together to release the files, it was inevitable that ‘politics as usual’ would spoil the party. In fact, it is truly a spectacle to watch powerful, influential men doing everything possible – short of murder – to conceal their guilt in Epstein’s extensive pedophilia ring. Actually, scratch the murder part. Regardless of what the FBI would have us believe, there is simply no way that Jeffrey Epstein was able to commit suicide inside of his jail cell, which did not come specially equipped with convenient hooks in the ceiling from which to hang oneself. Prison cells are built specifically to be suicide proof.

But I digress.

It would be nice to think that there will be some sort of political price to be paid for these crimes against society’s most vulnerable segment, and that could very well happen in the 2026 midterm elections. Although we can expect there to be no smoking guns, no bombshell revelations, no crack-of-dawn arrests for the child molesters, there very well could be a political backlash against Trump and the Republican Party for keeping the country in the dark when it comes to Mr. Epstein and his massive closet of skeletons. A large part of that backlash could come from within MAGA itself, which had such high hopes for Trump cracking down on the sexual predators.

https://www.rt.com/news/630021-epstein-files-never-closure/

YOURDEMOCRACY.NET RECORDS HISTORY AS IT SHOULD BE — NOT AS THE WESTERN MEDIA WRONGLY REPORTS IT — SINCE 2005.

         Gus Leonisky

         POLITICAL CARTOONIST SINCE 1951.