A lot of their donors as well.

…or they’re friends with child rapists, or owe favors to child rapists. Those three are the only answers that make sense.

Yup.

Clintons were very good friends with Biden but also trump.

Neoliberals poisoned the party so much that during Epstein’s hey day the letter by a name didn’t matter, trump himself was a big donor to the Dem party back then.

Neither Biden or trump could release just the names of people they don’t like, because they’d snitch on the people they liked and then you’re on the hook for protecting the ones you liked.

Someone like AOC is the only shot at a president that would actually release it. We need more politicians who have a loyalty to voters over a party.

Party leadership changes, and we got a rare window right now the party won’t block someone like AOC. We can’t count on that being true in 2032 if she doesn’t feel ready in 2028.

Ready or not, it’s time.

That’s my thinking, US citizens are prisoners of the immorality of the richest regardless of their political contributions. Trump has masterfully exploited this with the “devide and empire” maxime.

Note how normal people have no issue saying that Democrats may be (or likely are) in the Epstein files, but MAGAs are like “The files are a hoax but if they exist he is not in them but if he’s in them it’s just a juvenile mistake, who cares”

That’s not the question.

Virginia Giuffre would argue otherwise. BTW, she just died. By “suicide”. After being struck with a bus at 110km/h, which would’ve killed most. (Fun fact, police didn’t want to send help to the accident scene).

https://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/americas/virginia-giuffre-father-death-cause-b2743303.html

Did they cover the part about how Biden’s DOJ had absolutely no fucking excuse to take that long to prosecute?

I very much get the first point. Victims need to be protected at all costs. Even if it means the public doesn’t get to know things.

To the second point, the way Trump handled it felt very much like “case closed, nothing to see here”. This does not feel like justice is going to be served.

If you have ‘faves’ you are a weirdo .

But it is quid pro quo.

One of the recurring themes I keep coming back to in all this is that the US has a uniquely bad situation with regard to its Constitution. We worship it as an infallible and complete guide to running a democratic republic, but really it’s extremely old, extremely vague, and depends on goodwill and sensible interpretation to function. We have neither the explicit understanding that everything is old AF and cobbled together and dependent upon custom and moderating tyrannical sensibilities like the British, nor the unwieldy but straightforward comprehensiveness of EU treaties and certain other lengthy modern written constitutions.

To me, him just telling Pamela Bondi what to do in such a delicate matter feels just wrong, as in lacking the due seriousness on the matter, utterly sloppy and populist in a bad manner.

This feeling you have is exactly how presidents of either party would have felt for the last 80-100 years. The idea of a largely independent Department of Justice was considered eminently sensible and moral and even to the realpolitik set it provided outer bounds of what was politically possible and so they would nudge and tug at the edges, but never blow right past it, lest they suffer Nixon’s fate. I think we make a mistake to say that Trump is stupid in a binary yes/no sense, but he is deeply uncurious about things that don’t interest him, like democratic norms, so when people tell him “The Constitution doesn’t actually say that,” his eyes gleam and he just does whatever he might get away with. And because we have a Supreme Court dominated by the idea that the US Constitution is more akin to a piece of computer code than a framework for sensible governance, they simply throw up their hands and say, “whelp, it didn’t SAY that the administration of justice should be handled with integrity, so guess we makin’ a fascism now.” Better vote them out, except oh wait the Constitution also doesn’t say you can’t fuck with the elections either.

One of my anxious worries lately is that at the end of this term, Trump will look at our term limits amendment and parse the verbiage with a simple literalism and Clarence Thomas et al will back him up. It says you can’t be elected president more than twice, so why not simply run for VP and then have your patsy resign five minutes after swearing in? After all, we’re mindless textualists now. We didn’t want an FDR type getting overly entrenched in the machinery of power, but we clearly meant to allow loopholes that are significantly less democratic!

the president of the US doesn’t have as much power as our current one thinks he has. It’s just that no one involved in the checks and balances procedure has the balls to stand up to him and say “no,” or they don’t have the power to do so in a way that would impact anything. And the ones that do decided just before the 2024 election that a sitting president can’t be charged with any illegal shit he did as president, so even the ones that CAN say no to him just get brushed off or outright told “fuck you”

Yes and no.

In the US the Judicial branch is responsible for the the courts and interpretation of the law / constitution, but the Executive branch is responsible for the execution / enforcement of the law. I think that in other parts of the world it is common for the AG to be part of the Judicial branch, but here they are part of the Executive branch.

As I understand it, there are parts of these investigations/prosecutions that the AG can release under their own authority (or by direction of the President) but other parts that are under seal and require authorization from the courts.

I’m my country, it works be the sole decision of the AG

It works like that… but the problem is effectively we give the president the power to fire and replace the AG. So… in short, the AG is hand picked by the president and then approved by congress.

With a crazy president like this that effectively has 100% of his party members in congress intimidated to back every one of his picks, the AG is basically his hand picked employee.

Or 4. none of this is up to any of those people it is not their job or within their right.

That’s a decidedly generous interpretation of events

Reminder, when you don’t do things by the book, the perp wins in court on technicalities or wins on appeal. For example, see Harvey Weinstein.

So, no hiring hackers to actually change votes to Biden/Harris votes, but anything short of that? I dunno, if that were their standard they would have released the Epstein stuff. My real guess is that some Democratic politicians are also on the list. Even if it’s only a couple, they might have figured running against a convicted felon gave them such good odds there was no need to throw any of their own under the bus. And apparently none of them said, “Well but what if he hires hackers to change votes to Trump votes?”