On Epstein, Even MAGA World Can Smell That Trump Is Hiding Something [View all]

We’re four weeks into the current iteration of the Epstein scandal. And there is no way it’s going away.

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Acosta’s involvement in the matter is particularly intriguing here. If the Trump administration and congressional Republicans’ allies like Comer really wanted to get to the bottom of the Epstein matter, they’d all be demanding that Acosta come forward and tell us everything he knows. He was the prosecutor! (A very bad one, but he was.) Think about it: If Trump genuinely knew he was innocent of any wrongdoing, why wouldn’t he personally demand that Acosta step forth and spill? What cleaner exoneration could there be than the personal word of the man who presumably has read every Epstein-related document the government has?

Justin Baragona of The Independent flagged on July 22 that this has created an embarrassing situation for the network because one of its hosts, Greg Kelly, keeps talking about how great Acosta is without revealing that he’s on the board.

Beyond that, we might well wonder why, of all the people Newsmax could have chosen for its board, it landed on Acosta. That was in March, though his appointment wasn’t officially announced until June. Then, in July, Newsmax announced a deal with—get this—the Trump Media and Technology Group to be partners in a new global streaming platform called Truth+. In other words, a network that covers the president is now in business with the president. And the one person in the world who knows more about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes than anyone else is on the network’s board, and thus could quasi-plausibly claim, if pressed, that he is “ethically” barred from making public utterances that would hurt Newsmax’s position. Convenient, eh?

I hear a lot of people on cable news talk about how poorly the Trump people have handled this situation. Of course that’s true, but it seems to me reasonable for us to conclude that they’re handling it the way they’re handling it because it’s probably the only choice they have: to stonewall and lie and try to put things off.

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https://newrepublic.com/article/198931/epstein-maga-world-trump-hiding-something