Beyond her laughable attempt to overcome years of her own history with Jeffrey Epstein – thoroughly documented both privately and in the media – by simply ordering discussion of it to stop, Mrs. Trump has called for a hearing not for the perpetrators, nor for Epstein’s co-conspirators, but a hearing in which the survivors testify.
I wish I were joking, but no. The linked BBC article, which focuses more on Mrs. Trump’s well-established, undeniable ties to both Epstein and Maxwell, also has information on this proposed hearing:
In a surprise announcement on Thursday, the first lady called for congressional hearings for survivors of Epstein’s sex trafficking.
Melania Trump on Thursday additionally called on lawmakers to “give these victims their opportunity to testify under oath in front of Congress with the power of sworn testimony”.
“Each and every woman should have her day to tell her story in public if she wishes, and then her testimony should be permanently entered into the congressional record,” she said. “Then, and only then, we will have the truth.”
Family of Epstein accuser Virginia Giuffre, Sky and Amanda Roberts, and other survivors told BBC Newsnight that they "have already shown extraordinary courage by coming forward, filing reports, and giving testimony.
“Asking more of them now is a deflection of responsibility, not justice,” they said in a statement. They accused the first lady of protecting “those with power”, including members of her husband’s administration who they said still have not released all of the investigative files related to Epstein.
“Survivors have done their part,” they said. “Now it’s time for those in power to do theirs.”
I’ve had another theory about this.
This could have been a clever jump scare. We know she didn’t get here for her brains, so someone got to her, knowing she would knee jerk like this, and now she’s out in the open and implicated herself way deeper than she ever would have been if she had just stayed silent under the rubble of the east wing.
Or they found a way to drag or pin Barron into or near this and tugged her mother protection mechanism.
But the most important lesson I take away from this: it seems like the maffia Trump family, bullying and threatening anyone up to entire civilisations, are both acting like they are being actively blackmailed.
And there happens to be this one guy, who was overlooked by Trump during the recent cease fire negotiations. He might be getting frustrated with the ineffectiveness of blackmail on some ageing dude with dementia, and pivoted to his wife.
Ok, I’ve run out of tin foil again.
No tinfoil needed, because what we put out into the world in terms of behavior and choices and the way we interact with others comes back to us, and everything you said simply matches what they regularly put out. They both thrive on chaos, and he especially goes out of his way to blow up whatever just quietly works, using kindness and the goodwill of others as an opening through which to exploit and destroy, so whatever comes back to them both – especially in terms of their ongoing antisocial and criminal behaviors and associations – is not going to be sane, stable, or predictable. What you wrote is prescient, not crazy.
are both acting like they are being actively blackmailed.
Yes, and imagine how much, and by how many. Think about all the parties they went to twenty-thirty years ago; all the illegal, immoral, and repugnant shit they did when none of it seemed to matter. Imagine them being quizzed by their attorneys, "Are you sure you’ve told me everything?" and having to say no because even if they do remember some of what they did, they did far too much over too long a period of time to remember any of the specifics now. Picture the moment they realize that Epstein’s penchant for having secret cameras everywhere (including tissue boxes, apparently) in addition to the cameras of paparazzi as well as the straight media means they literally have NO idea what old evils will surface next, or from where or when, or with what proof.
In that context, an individual blackmailer that comes forward with a specific demand is almost a mercy, lol.
I think you’re probably more right than you know when you surmise that their evil is coming back to them in ways and from directions they never imagined, and cannot now control. But it’s not like they are people that spared the children and family members of others, or value that kind of morality in the people they associate with, so they shouldn’t be too offended when that’s how their own actions return to them.
Imagine them being quizzed by their attorneys, “Are you sure you’ve told me *everything?”*
Thanks Chunk, that made me spit out my coffee.
I suppose you’re right. This fits in a similar category as climate change data: we simply don’t want to be right about something that devastatingly true.
Given that the survivors at every turn are asking for privacy, for protection, and that their own names be redacted from the process, this is, in my own opinion, nothing short of a brutally insane twisting of the judicial process to force the victims to carry the weight of it all.
Also, Mrs. Trump’s statement becomes even more farcical for anyone aware of the Congressional Record of which she speaks.
“Each and every woman should have her day to tell her story in public if she wishes, and then her testimony should be permanently entered into the congressional record,” she said.
Yeah, no. As any historian will tell you, if you want truth, the Congressional Record is not the first place you go look for it. From Wikipedia,
By custom and the rules of each house, members also frequently “revise and extend” their remarks made on the floor before the debates are published in the Congressional Record.
What this means in practice is that there is a certain amount of time during which any member can edit and even remove whatever they want from the official record of what they said, among other allowed changes. Thus it is not nearly so much a record of what was actually said, as it is a record of what a member would have liked to say.
Add to this the fact that the other Epstein-related depositions have been conducted privately and under very different rules via subpoenas issued by the House Oversight Committee, and any survivor would be unwise, at best, to engage in any part of this charade: they would have no protection whatsoever not only from the public, but from the very members of the Committee they would be testifying in front of, or whatever body of Congress actually conducts this circus.
To put it bluntly, for every Ro Khanna or Thomas Massie who genuinely wants to see the truth come out, there are a hundred Gym Jordans and James Comers and Lindsey Grahams who desperately want the survivors to shut the fuck up, and will do whatever immoral, illegal act they have to do to make sure that happens.
If Melania Trump had set out to victimize the survivors further, she literally could not have done a better job than this.
Voidzilla is also puzzled by it https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sp8y65JRyBg
No confusion. She’s only about self preservation and likely trying to head off investigation into her own efforts to bring young ‘models’ from Eastern Europe to Epstein.
You never go wrong assuming the worst with this awful person.
Yes! I saw that after I posted, it’s short and well worth the watch. I think he put his finger directly on it by dissecting the actual language of her statement: it is crafted to be specific to the elements of a successful defamation case. In other words, the way he sees it, it’s a very carefully worded warning to whoever is about to release some immensely damning story on her. Excellent recommendation.
For myself, what I noticed when Voidzilla dissected her speech was her repetitive mention of photos, pictures, images, meaning that if she’s trying to get ahead of something by shooting a “you know who you are” legal warning across the bow of someone about to publish, then whatever they have it’s pretty bad, and it includes photographic evidence, just going by the content and direction of her own statement.
But I saw something else as well that you might find interesting: a brief appearance by Rep. Ro Khanna on MS NOW where, after the host shows a bunch of happy group pictures of Melania not being friends with Epstein and Maxwell, he discusses one of the bizarre statements she made – “Epstein did not act alone,” which is in direct contradiction to the government line that it’s all a “hoax” and nothing to investigate – with Rep. Khanna.
Rep. Khanna’s position is simply that Melania could not have said that unless she has relevant information, and if she has relevant information, she should testify under oath before the committee. If the standard for appearance that was applied to Hillary Clinton – “I don’t know him” – is the bar for requiring someone to testify under oath in regard to their relationship with Epstein, then Melania by all means should also be among those who do. I agree.
It’s truly puzzling, but I think she knows something is up, maybe also senses Donald may not be able to protect her? Throw her under the bus?
But faster than light she’s bringing the focus back to this.
I wonder if she will get subpoenaed.
I did not know this when I posted the above, but apparently the press conference itself was both unexpected and highly unusual, or as Heather Cox Richardson put it more than once this evening, “bizarre.”
Apparently Melania walked out of the White House, stood behind the presidential seal – in itself a huge breach of White House protocol and tradition, not that they care – and spoke for several minutes in the place of the president, who was possibly unaware that she was even doing this, and made her statement direct to camera before walking back in without another word to any of the reporters assembled for it.
Meanwhile, no one has any real idea why she did this, nor why today, nor what denying the mountains of proof of her interactions with both Epstein and Maxwell was meant to accomplish. From the NYT: (archive link)
In remarks that lasted just under six minutes, she said she wanted to clear “my good name.” She addressed rumors about the origin story of how she met her husband, the president of the United States. And she called on Congress to give a hearing to victims of Mr. Epstein’s crimes. “The lies linking me with the disgraceful Jeffrey Epstein need to end today,” Mrs. Trump said. She talked about “numerous fake images and statements about Epstein and me” that “have been percolating on social media for years now.”
It was not clear why she chose to speak out now, or to what reports she was referring.
A spokesperson for Mrs. Trump said the president knew that the first lady planned to make a statement, but later said it was not clear if Mr. Trump was aware of the topic of her remarks. In a phone call with an MS Now reporter, Mr. Trump said he had no prior knowledge of what she had planned to say.
The White House did not respond to questions about what the president knew on the matter and when.
Another pundit, George Conway, believes it is possible that she did it because she knows something that is about to come out, but no one has any real idea. Even the NYT is flummoxed, ending their article with,
And then she turned on her stiletto heels and stalked out as the dazed reporters started shouting after her: “Why now!? Why now!?”
No one knows. So if anyone can bring a cloud of confusion to a duststorm of conflicting reports and call it a job done, that’s apparently what she has accomplished today.
Note: I am aware there are problems with archive.world, but it has the content. If you have a better alternative, feel free to post it.
The answer to the why now is either a hit piece coming out, or she’s been warned she’s in the datasets that have been queued for release for a month now by the DOJ is one of the more final sets where she is one of the people who will be ‘unredacted’ now.