Programming note: Join me tomorrow, Saturday, for the latest episode of our Serenade Radio weekend music show, On the Town. It starts at 5pm Greenwich Mean Time - which is 6pm in Western Europe and 12 midday North American Eastern. You can listen from almost anywhere on the planet by clicking the button at top right here.
~American government is corrupt. Stinkingly corrupt - on a scale unimaginable in, say, Norway. It remains an open question whether new leadership or even mass firings can overcome that.
The Jeffrey Epstein case is merely the most obvious example. On July 6th 2019, after giving him the kid-glove treatment for the previous decade-and-a-half, the feds chose to renege on their own sweetheart deal and arrest their chum when he landed at Teterboro (preferred New York airport of the non-rube class). Epstein was taken to the Metropolitan Correction Center, where the highest-value prisoner in America was put in a cell with an NYPD policeman [CORRECTION: from Briarcliff Manor, just north of the city] awaiting trial for four murders.
A fortnight later, to the mystification of his cellmate, he was found on the floor with marks around his neck, and placed on "suicide watch", which required him to be checked on every thirty minutes. On August 9th, he was not checked every thirty minutes because the guard fell asleep. Fortunately, there was a second guard. Unfortunately, he also fell asleep. Fortunately, there was a camera. Unfortunately, it malfunctioned. Fortunately, there was a second camera. Unfortunately, that also malfunctioned...
So, a month after arrest by the FBI, the highest-value prisoner in America was dead.
My own legal tribulations in the District of Columbia are about to enter their fourteenth year. So I'll confess there are moments when I envy the unusually swift and efficacious disposition of United States vs Epstein.
Eventually, a trial was held. Of Jeffrey's girlfriend - a foreign socialite entirely unknown in the US except to former presidents, governors, senators and billionaires: see picture at top right of Ghislaine relaxing déshabillé with Democrat high-roller Laurene Powell, widow of Steve Jobs and owner of The Atlantic. Miss Maxwell was convicted of "sex trafficking" - including of a minor transported for the purpose of "criminal sexual activity". She was banged up for twenty years.
Gee, that must have been a lot of sex trafficking. Yet the United States Department of Justice remains totally uninterested in all the Americans "with great power and privilege" (as one witness put it) that Miss Maxwell was trafficking the girls to. Yeah, I was just working on my Presidential Library fundraising letter when, out of the blue, Ghislaine dropped a weekend's worth of fourteen-year-old jailbait on my doorstep... Could happen to anybody.
So the paedo mastermind is dead and the only two people to pay any price for their association with him are a couple of hoity-toity snot-nosed Brits - Miss Maxwell plus a son of the late Queen who made the mistake of giving an exclusive interview to the BBC that subsequently won that year's Emmy for Best Train-Wreck. It's almost like no Americans were involved in this thing at all...
And in the fullness of time a new administration took office and ordered the release of the "complete files related to Jeffrey Epstein". That happened yesterday: all - stand well back! - two hundred pages of documents.
Two hundred pages, huh? Back in 2017, a colleague and I were interviewed at length by the FBI in connection with a comparatively low-key "matter" (as James Comey likes to call these things): no paedos, no princes, no politicians. The lead G-man - actually a G-woman - took copious notes. I can confidently say that were the Attorney-General to order the release of the Steyn file it would run to more words than that of the late Mr Epstein.
Odd that.
So, after yesterday's damp squib, there was a late-breaking development. The new Attorney-General wrote to the new FBI director:
Dear Director Patel,
Before you came into office, I requested the full and complete files related to Jeffrey Epstein. In response to this request, I received approximately 200 pages of documents, which consisted primarily of flight logs, Epstein's list of contacts, and a list of victims' names and phone numbers.
I repeatedly questioned whether this was the full set of documents responsive to my request and was repeatedly assured by the FBI that we had received the full set of documents. Late yesterday, I learned from a source that the FBI Field Office inNew York was in possession of thousands of pages of documents related to the investigation and indictment of Epstein. Despite my repeated requests, the FBI never disclosed the existence of these files. 'When you and I spoke yesterday, you were just as surprised as I was to learn this new information.
By 8:00 a.m. tomorrow, February 28, the FBI will deliver the full and complete Epstein files to my office~ including all records, documents, audio and video recordings, and materials related to Jeffrey Epstein and his clients, regardless of how such information was obtained. There will be no withholdings or limitations to my or your access...
I am also directing you to conduct an immediate investigation into why my order to the FBI was not followed. You will deliver to me a comprehensive report of your findings and proposed personnel action within 14 days.
The permanent bureaucracy is in more or less open revolt against its political masters. The Democrats and the media have openly taken the side of the resistance, cheering on bureaucrats who find workarounds for Trump's tranny directives or bemoaning Pete Hegseth's termination of the Pentagon's corrupt beribboned buffoons and denouncing the very idea of civilian control of the military as dangerously fascistic. But the FBI's insubordination takes it to a whole new level: Will even CNN and The New York Times be willing to go to bat for people who enjoy statutory rape with underage girls?
Corruption is prevalent, to one degree or another, in most countries. Two decades back, when I drove a rental car from Jordan into Iraq, I took it for granted that I would need meaningful amounts of the folding stuff - not to get into Iraq, which had affable US infantrymen manning the border, but to get out of Jordan, where the customs post was controlled by the usual deadbeats on the take. Historically speaking, mostly corruption-free government has been largely the province of northern Europe and the Britannic settler nations.
But the brazenness of the FBI's actions on the Epstein file is on a scale far beyond the average Bangladeshi or Ukrainian shakedown artist. Who was Jeffrey Epstein? How did he get so rich? Why, even after his initial conviction as a paedophile, did he still command the flattery of senior US and foreign government figures?
No-one knows. Because of a statistically improbable combination of technical dysfunction and mass narcolepsy in a New York jailhouse.
But we do know this, courtesy of Pam Bondi's letter - that the most lavishly funded "law enforcement" agency on earth has its reasons for not telling us.
And that's not good.
~In this eighth year of The Mark Steyn Club, we're very appreciative of all those who signed up in our first flush and are still eager to be here as we cruise on towards our first decade. We thank you all. For more information on the Club, see here.
