Re Ghislaine:
In adulthood she had no power without Epstein, who held all the purse strings. He had been embroiled financially with her father and it may be that Epstein bought her the fancy $5m townhouse in New York with Robert Maxwell’s own money, squirrelled away in anticipation of his looming bankruptcy.
If true – far fetched, obviously, so emphasis on the if there – then that means all her money belongs to that bankruptcy trustee.
I’m surprised, but pleased, there isn’t a statute of limitations.
I wonder if she’ll be the next one who’d suicide will come as nor surprise to anyone but her? If the accusations have any substance she’ll know as much about who did what with who as Epstein. The who’s best interests are served if she keeps what she knows to herself & quietly disappears from the public eye. But she won’t want to do that as a pauper. She holds the mutually-assured destruction deterrent.
My guess is the bankruptcy trustees won’t be investigating that story with any assiduousness. Nothing particularly in it for them, personally. Only little people’s money
l
Obviously Epstein’s death is suspicious as hell, but no one seems to have mentioned one aspect which should have made his murder less likely.
Surely copies of the dirt he had on the rich and powerful which supposedly protected him while he was alive would have been carefully stashed away with arrangements for it to be released should he suddenly find himself dead. If he wasn’t entirely stupid he would have made it crystal clear to those involved that killing him wouldn’t save them.
This is hardly an arcane idea. Virtually every book, film or TV show involving serious blackmail contains this threat.
JS–That is an interesting point. Maybe the dirt is on its way. Or perhaps they could only kill him after it was found and neutralised. Tho’ in this age of computers it would need some kind of “Race with the Devil” level conspiracy to stop all possible copies from reaching their targets.
The fact that she was photographed reading a book about the CIA is presumably her signalling “I know all about it and if you bump me off so will everyone else”.
I didn’t realise she was one of those Maxwells. Daughter of the Bouncing Czech.
Oh yes. The boat he fell off was named after her.
Met her once when she was at Oxford. The actual lasting memory was of the remarkable zit she had on her forehead that day….
Cap’n Bob was supposedly close to Mossad, wasn’t he?
1. There is an actual photograph – photographic evidence – of Trump and Epstein together in Florida about 15 years ago. They appear to have been fully clothed, but c’mon guys!
2. The father of Attorney General Barr was headmaster of a school which employed Epstein temporarily as a maths and science teacher about 45 years ago.
Talk about a smoking gun!
(issued on behalf of the Democratic National Conspiracy Centre)
@philip: apparently Barr senior had retired as Head when Epstein turned up. It’s not clear, however, whether Barr senior had made the hiring decision before he retired. Oooh, the excitement!!!!!!!!
Once you are in the smoke-and-mirrors-and-assassinations world of the CIA, Mossad, and the Clintons there’s little reason to believe what anyone says. Suppose you are the medical examiner who has to declare cause of death. Do you go for the option that keeps you, your spouse, and your children safest? Or do you opine “it is my belief that They done the man in”?
@JS – but if you had knew JE was going to blab all in order to save himself from dying in prison of natural causes, you might decide it’s worth intervening.
@ js
Every *recent* book. Charles Augustus Milverton did not arrange for posthumous publication according to Conan Doyle.
Not many idealists, plenty of survivalists in the human race.
@RichardT
I didn’t know, but I assumed she was R Maxwell’s daughter – uncommon Christian name and a nasty person.
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@Tim Worstall August 18, 2019 at 12:34 pm
Did you pop Ghislaine’s zit?
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@philip August 18, 2019 at 12:47 pm
Yep, and Trump has spoken about meeting Eps with no spin/excuses.
JS – been thinking about your “dead man’s switch” theory.
The problem with it is, it’s assuming the press would even report it. The movie version of Alan Moore’s WATCHMEN ended with this idea that the media would rush to embarrass the rich and powerful, Woodward and Bernstein style, if someone dropped the dox.
Well, would they?
Some real life examples:
* Treeza May used to be regularly photographed “going to Church”. Turned out the demented cow was simply hanging around outside a church (at a time when there were no services) for a quick photo opp before fucking off in her prime ministerial Jag. The media happily went along with the blatant fabrication. Yes, it’s a trivial thing – but if they can’t even tell the truth about minutae…
* Hillary Clinton collapsed at a public event and had to be tossed into a van like a side of beef. The media insisted only far-right lunatic conspiracy theorists could imagine she had health problems.
* Julian Assange has been monstered by the MSM as a rapist and a Russian spy for doing the sort of investigative reporting the press pretends to. And now he’s in jail.
What would happen if someone drops the Epstein files? Would they get published anywhere apart from Infowars.com (there’s a war on for your mind!), or would they simply be dismissed as a hoax / buried under a ton of other shit / driven off the mainstream Web by shadowbans and whatnot?
On the other hand, dead men don’t tell any tales to juries.
“Would they get published anywhere …”: in the tweets of Donald L.H. Trump?
Well, would they?
When a lack of evidence of something is presented as evidence of that something being hidden, you know you’re looking at a conspiracy theory.
The amusing thing about the Epstein case is that the earnest, fervent musings are coming from all sides. It’s Trump, Putin, the Clinton death machine, the CIA, Mossad. Has David Ike piped up yet about the shape shifting lizard people (Royal family) protecting Prince Andrew?
Whoever did it was really clever waiting until Epstein was secured in a Federal prison instead of quietly offing him during the many easy opportunities over the years. That way the conspiracy is hidden amongst all the conspiracy theories. Genius.
Dearieme – That idea is so crazy it’ll probably happen.
PJF – When a lack of evidence of something is presented as evidence of that something being hidden, you know you’re looking at a conspiracy theory.
Sure, but:
a) I didn’t present it as evidence of anything
b) I dunno* where this assumption that conspiracy theories are inherently nutty comes from. Humans default to conspiracy. Given that they’re quasi-rational actors, it would be weird if they didn’t.
Many of the major events in our history were kicked off by conspiracies, from the Gunpowder Plot to the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, to Blair and Brown’s clandestine agreement at Granita.
The Iraq War was a conspiracy (blatantly obvious bullshit about WMD) and yet nobody went to jail. It’s not irrational to observe that TPTB had zero qualms about murdering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis based on a fraud, and therefore it’s unlikely the same sort of people would lose sleep over killing a paedophile.
Haven’t we seen various conspiracies to thwart Brexit unfold over the last 3 years? (wake up sheeple etc.)
Whoever did it was really clever waiting until Epstein was secured in a Federal prison
Until he was completely vulnerable without his private armed security force (guy was a shady billionaire, member)? Until it became certain he wasn’t going to weasel out of testifying?
Yes.
Because he very obviously wasn’t “secured”, since he’s fucking dead.
WWLTCD? (What Would Lt. Columbo Do?)
He’d observe that some very powerful people had the means, motive, and evidently the opportunity to kill Epstein. Then he’d keep asking questions until either William Shatner or Ricardo Montalban slipped up.
*I lied, it comes from underestimating how corrupt and shitty people at the top of our social hierarchy actually are. Which is weird, because many of them were good pals with Jeffrey Epstein.
Steve,
“I dunno* where this assumption that conspiracy theories are inherently nutty comes from. Humans default to conspiracy. Given that they’re quasi-rational actors, it would be weird if they didn’t.”
Yeah, there’s nothing wrong with them in principle. The biggest problem with most of them is incentives. It makes no sense for Phil the Greek to kill Princess Di, when she was trashing her reputation.
a) I didn’t present it as evidence of anything
Steve, your whole post of 7.48 pm was presenting scenarios that would explain the absence of a file of incriminating information. All of which involved yet more people being involved in a conspiracy.
He’d observe that some very powerful people had the means, motive, and evidently the opportunity to kill Epstein.
“Evidently the opportunity”? I’d like to think Lt Columbo would not regard your conspiracy theory as evidence.
The Iraq War was a conspiracy (blatantly obvious bullshit about WMD) and yet nobody went to jail. It’s not irrational to observe that TPTB had zero qualms about murdering hundreds of thousands of Iraqis based on a fraud…
It’s not Steve as in Steve Bell, is it?
ISTR that Arsehinge was all over the BBC/grauniad etc until he was arrested on suspicion of rape and then skipped bail.
(BTW the reaction of all the right-on that guaranteed his bail was delicious. Almost up there with the Brexit referendum result being announced, or Killery’s victory party receiving the good news)
“it comes from underestimating how corrupt and shitty people at the top of our social hierarchy actually are”
The more one reads about the behaviours of our elites, the more one wonders if David Icke doesn’t have a point………..not so much that they really are lizards in human form, more a metaphorical way of looking at the fact that it seems that the elites in society are self selecting for extreme human character traits, and that self selection has effectively meant the elites are now a different species to everyone else.
That is to say it now appears that the only way you get to the top of the tree in society today , whether in business, politics, media, whatever, you will have to have a certain specific set of personality traits, some good (ability to work hard for example) and some very bad (psychopathic tendencies, narcissism etc), and thus as a section of society they are all cut from very similar cloth.
So while if you took a sample of people from elsewhere in society (all dentists for example) you’d find people with very differing personalities, the lazy, the hardworking, the kind, the borderline sadists, etc etc, when you’re looking holders of top jobs they all have one set of personality traits, they are effectively one person, just with different names.
And of course it feeds on itself. As the competition ramps up, the winners are the ones with increasingly extreme personalities. Ie when the candidates for top job A were mainly normal people you didn’t have to be too much of a psycho to land the job. But when all the candidates are psychopaths, the winner will be the extremest of the bunch.
Its a bit like pedigree dogs – when the breed becomes too inbred genetic diseases become rife, the entire breed is weakened. The only way to save it is to introduce new genes, to sweep away the inbreeding. So one assumes that the only way to save Western society is to somehow introduce new blood into the elite in a way that allows it to sweep away the diseased parts. Perhaps the time has come for some sort of government by lot – if the important jobs were given to people at random, new thinking would be brought to the table, and the old destroyed. Would a boss of RBS who turned up every day drunk and never did any work at all have be any worse than Fred Goodwin for example?
@Jim
Oddly meritocracy may exaggerate that “they’re all weird and all the same” effect more than a largely hereditary elite would do. The traits needed to become, from scratch, a billionaire seem likely to be far more extreme than the equivalent for becoming a mere tens-of-millionaire. The traits needed to be a billionaire’s grandchild need not be so extreme because of regression to the mean.
“Oddly meritocracy may exaggerate that “they’re all weird and all the same” effect more than a largely hereditary elite would do.”
Yes, thats kind of my ‘You get good kings and bad kings, but you always get arsehole politicians’ argument…….selecting by who your father was means you get some variation in personality types, selecting by external criteria (wealth/ability to win elections/whatever) means you always get the personality types that succeed at that metric…
Jim
Excellent analogy. A bad tempered toy dog breed (obviously not one of any useful value)? Could be a thread all by itself “Which dog breed…”.
MBE
+1
@Steve
Sorry, forgot the /blockqoute