I’m not a conspiracy theorist. I’ve seen so many of them over the years they tend to bore me. I’m more obsessed with the cold facts and the search for objective truth.
The Jeffrey Epstein saga is all about conspiracy theories. In the MAGA world, it’s the conspiracy par excellence, the nefarious drama that has it all—child abuse, celebrities, a client list, wealth, sex, politics, a suspicious suicide, a malfunctioning camera, even a Jewish name for the bad guy.
Trump’s election promised to open up that can of worms and reveal the truth. His Attorney General Pam Bondi had hinted they would, so did Trump. The two top guys at the FBI fed the conspiracy theories in their previous lives.
Now, everyone is saying “nothing to see here.” No conspiracy theories. No client list. Everything the authorities said was true.
Trump is angry because the stubborn scandal is causing a rift inside his party and taking attention away from his recent victories. Democrats are feasting. The media can’t get enough.
Meanwhile, I’m thinking about the jail cell.
“You’d have to be a midget and work really hard to try to hang yourself and I don’t think you could accomplish it,” Michael Franzese, who was once housed in the same cell Jeffrey Epstein died in, told NewsNation. “There’s just no way you are able to commit suicide. There’s no way to hang yourself, there’s nothing from the ceiling, there’s nothing from the bed.”
As we all know, Epstein’s death was ruled a suicide by hanging as he awaited trial on child sex-trafficking charges in August 2019.
He had been placed on suicide watch after an apparent attempt to take his own life behind bars just days earlier. He was moved to a more heavily monitored unit after that, where guards were supposed to regularly check on him.
But evidently the guards fell asleep on duty the night Epstein died and later doctored their logbooks to hide it. At the same time, the cameras watching the cellblock apparently malfunctioned and turned off.
Franzese is not buying any of it.
“As far as the cameras being off, I haven’t experienced that — I did eight years in prison and I haven’t experienced cameras being broken and a perfect storm of correctional officers not walking those cells,” he told NewsNation.
Franzene is hardly the only skeptic.
A Rasmussen poll of 1,164 likely voters conducted on July 8-10 found that just 21% believe the Trump FBI and DOJ are telling the truth about Epstein. And while FBI Director Kash Patel and deputy Dan Bongino insist that Epstein committed suicide, only 31% of voters believe them.
“You can’t just say ‘Trust me, bro,’ ” says Mark Mitchell, Rasmussen’s head pollster.
So, although I’m no conspiracy theorist and I have no dog in this fight, something doesn’t smell right with the official story of how this notorious sex offender died. We need better explanations than the lame cliche, “there’s no evidence to suggest…”
There are many juicy angles to this sorry saga, among them a purported “client list” of famous names and the possibility that some of those names were compromised and are being protected. There are also the political implications for Trump and Democrats and a sense that justice has failed the victims of this tawdry case.
Those are important angles, but let’s not forget the jail cell. The night Epstein died is what triggered the conspiracy theories in the first place. So before we jump to those wild places, let’s get that core story right.
The scandal will continue to haunt Trump until he orders a complete and credible disclosure of all the cold facts about what happened in that jail cell.
