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It was a famous question that Howard Baker asked as the Watergate scandal was enveloping Richard Nixon.
“What did the president know and when did he know it?” the Tennessee senator proclaimed.
Plenty, as it turned out, and Nixon resigned rather than face certain impeachment and conviction.
Now, more than half a century later, the same question is being asked about another president.
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It’s important to say upfront that the long-awaited Jeffrey Epstein files have produced not a scintilla of evidence that Donald Trump personally engaged in sexual misconduct.
But he knew a helluva lot more than he’s let on.
Thanks to the relentless reporting of the Miami Herald’s Julie Brown, who has blanketed this story since the sweetheart sentencing deal that Epstein finagled in 2008, Trump knew exactly what was going on between the reprehensible pedophile and underage girls.
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The scoop is based in part on a 2019 FBI interview with the former Palm Beach police chief, Michael Reiter.
In the summer of 2006, Reiter said, Trump called him and said everyone in Palm Beach and New York knew about Epstein’s sexual activities with minors.
He also said that Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s enabler and onetime girlfriend, now serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking, was “evil” and to focus on her.
“Thank goodness you’re stopping this, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” Reiter recalled Trump saying, referring to an Epstein probe the chief had launched three years earlier.
What’s more, the chief says Trump told him “he was around Epstein once when teenagers were present and he ‘got the hell out of there.’”
During this period, a woman had called authorities and said her 14-year-old stepdaughter had been molested by Epstein, as had other girls at the same high school, who allegedly were giving Epstein massages or being subjected to assault or rape, according to this account.
Reiter brought the case to the state’s attorney, which declined to prosecute, and then to the FBI.
In a 2019 email before his suicide in prison, Epstein wrote: “Of course he knew about the girls, as he begged Ghislaine to stop.”
That same year, asked by reporters if he knew about Epstein’s depraved pedophilia, the president said: “No, I had no idea. I had no idea.”
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The absurd deal: prosecutors gave Epstein federal immunity in exchange for pleading guilty to two counts of solicitation, one involving a minor. He served all of 13 months.
Meanwhile, Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who is working with Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, yesterday named six people whose files were inexplicably redacted. That shielded them from public disclosure.
“There were six wealthy, powerful men that the DOJ hid for no apparent reason,” Khanna said.
Khanna and Massie were allowed to review the unredacted files for two hours.
Khanna named them on the House floor, where he has immunity:
“Salvatore Nuara, Zurab Mikeladze, Leonic Leonov, Nicola Caputo, Sultan Ahmed Bin Sulayem, CEO of Dubai Ports World, and billionaire businessman Leslie Wexner, who was labeled as a co-conspirator by the FBI.
“Now my question is, why did it take Thomas Massie and me going to the Justice Department to get these six men’s identities to become public? And if we found six men that they were hiding in two hours, imagine how many men they are covering up for in those 3 million files.”
That is indeed the question. Why were they shielded from public exposure? How many more are there?
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Maxwell, summoned by Republican James Comer’s Oversight Committee, invoked her Fifth Amendment right against self-incrimination, and indicated she would continue to do that unless Trump granted her clemency.
Trump had dropped hints when he and Epstein were still friendly. In a 2002 interview with New York Magazine, Trump called him a “terrific guy…it is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
The Epstein files have been politically toxic for Trump since the start of his second term. And now the plot is thickening.
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