Jonathan Neale

This is the first of several articles that put the protests in Minneapolis in the context of swiftly moving changes and ruptures in the global system. This article argues that the conflict over the Epstein files is the largest single confrontation so far in a long global struggle against sexual violence by the powerful. It is also a direct threat to Donald Trump personally.

By early January Trump was cornered. He embarked upon a manic Killer Klown tour that has visited grief on Venezuela, Iran, Greenland and several American cities. One reason was to distract attention from the Epstein files. The other was to display enough power and kill enough people to terrify both the Epstein survivors and their supporters.

The next article will argue that the resistance in Minnesota is the continuation of a mass confrontations between the people and the police on the streets of more than thirty countries since 2010. In Article 3 I look at the global international alliance of extreme racist movements led by Trump, Putin, Modi, Netanyahu and many more. Article 4 is about tariffs, Greenland, NATO, Ukraine and the crumbling of American imperial power.

But this article is all about the Epstein files. Here I will break two long established rules of method in the study of international relations. The first is that international politics should only be explained by international relations. “Domestic issues” are not fundamentally important in great power conflicts.

The second silly rule of method is that sexual violence is wrong, but it is not important. Or rather, of course sexual violence is important. But it is not important in the way that oil, profits, the arms trade or global financial markets are important.

In this way of thinking, paying attention to struggles over the sexual abuse of young people is not only harrowing. It’s icky. It’s about scandal. Fundamentally, there is a hierarchy of seriousness, and rape is dreadful, but it is not serious.

Now let’s transgress those two silly rules.

Back in December, the late Nancy Lindisfarne and I wrote a longish article about Epstein for Anne Bonny Pirate. Here I just want to briefly summarize what we said there.

We argued several things. First, that the conflict over the Epstein files was a class struggle. On the one side were both Republican and Democratic administrations, two American presidents, Bill Gates and other billionaires, distinguished Harvard professors, the negotiator of the Good Friday agreement, the former prime minister of Israel Ehud Barak and dozens of other powerful men.

On the other side of the class struggle were survivors, many of whom were once working class girls with no money at Royal Palm Beach High School. In December those girls, confronting all the powers of the world, were winning, and the Harvard professors were losing.

This was possible, we argued, because the Epstein survivors were the latest part of a great global movement against sexual violence by the powerful men and the institutions which protected them.

The high points of this movement so far have been the worldwide resistance to the protection of abusers by the Catholic Church, the great protest against police inaction in Delhi in 2012, and the Me Too movement across the world that followed the exposure of Harvey Weinstein by the women who worked for him.

The Epstein files now matter globally for several reasons. The case is very big. It goes right to the top in many different ways. Dozens of powerful men are involved. The files expose influential men across the political spectrum, in Chomsky to Clinton to Trump to Bannon. That will make them far more destabilizing for the whole system. And everyone in the world sees what happens in the United States.

If the files are released, that would give a bit more courage to every survivor in the world, be they a Dalit in an Indian village, a former altar boy in Dublin, or a student in a Chinese university. Millions of managers, politicians, lawyers, generals, bishops, cops and the whole army of enablers would take note, and many would tremble.

The release of those files would change the world. The files also matter, in a very personal way, to Donald Trump. He’s all over those files. Look no further than his desperate attempts to conceal them – attempts which are already costing him dearly.    

WHY TRUMP CAN’T DESTROY THE FILES

And Trump can’t simply destroy those files. It’s important here to understand what those files are, and who knows about them. There are millions of documents. Some of them are the email files, documents and bric-a-brac that Epstein had accumulated. Those files are now controlled by his estate. A portion of these have been released to Congress.

Then there are the government documents, emails and secret grand jury testimony generated during the investigations in Florida from 2005. That investigation ended with a plea deal that buried all that information. But the Department of Justice sill has those files.

There’s all the testimony and documents in at least 25 civil cases brought by Epstein survivors against their abusers, like Virginia Giuffre’s case against Andrew. Almost all of these cases were settled before they went to trial and the records were then sealed. But they can be reopened any time in response to a ruling by a judge.

The largest tranche of documents, though, come from the investigations by more than 500 FBI agents into Epstein before his death, and into Ghislaine Maxwell and many others after his death. You know how in detective shows on TV they have all those boxes and the photos up on the board with arrows between them? That stuff. It includes all the FBI agent’s emails, their notes each day, and all the tapes of interviews with witnesses.

But probably the most damaging evidence was found in Epstein’s New York mansion. Using unobtrusive cameras, Epstein had all the sex sessions on his premised filmed and photographed. The FBI confiscated all that material. As Virginia Giuffre said in her book, where is that stuff? It’s somewhere, and one photo of Trump with a naked 15 year old would finish him.

Yet surely Trump can delete those files and burn the photos? No, he can’t.

First, he can’t physically do it himself. He would have to get many other people to do it for him. And that’s dangerous.

President Nixon’s Watergate scandal was a long time ago. But powerful people went to jail. What Wasdhington insiders learned from that is that it’s hard to prove you did a crime, but it’s easy to prove you were part of a cover up.

So Trump would have to tell someone to tell someone to tell lots of people to destroy evidence. Somebody is likely to blow the whistle or leak the documents. But other people will ask for written orders to cover their backs. And still other people will follow verbal orders, but could break ranks and testify later.

There are also the large number of people who gathered those notes and the large number who have already read the emails. There are many FBI agents who are proud of their work, know what they put in their notes, and are furious that the investigations were stopped under President Biden and then concealed under Trump. Those investigators will know if their notes have been altered or deleted.

In total, there are thousands of those people. It might take only one or two of them to blow the whistle or leak the worst documents.

Ro Khanna, Thomas Massie and Marjory Taylor Greene are three of the many members of the House of Representatives who have read a lot of the files. All three of them have threatened to name at least twenty of Epstein’s most high profile friends and customers on the floor of the House – something they can do with parliamentary immunity. Some of the survivors have threatened to collectively name the names they know.

None of them have done that yet. I think it’s because they’re scared. Julie K. Brown, the best and most reliable reporter on Epstein over almost a decade, says the survivors and scared, and she’s talked to a lot of them. rownB is sure that Epstein was killed to shut him up. Her word is good enough for me, but her arguments are also compelling. [https://substack.com/@jkbjournalist/p-184805088]

Khanna and Moore did manage to introduce a bill into Congress compelling the administration to release the files, publicly, to the internet, with no redactions to protect anybody, aside from victims. Trump held that bill at bay for weeks. But then Khanna and Moore said to the Republican representatives who were backing Trump:  

In 2030 Trump will be gone, but you will be up for re-election and your opponent will run TV ads saying you voted to cover up the Epstein files.

That persuaded about 60 Republicans in the House to switch their votes so the bill would pass. At that point, facing humiliation, Trump publicly told the other Republicans in the House to vote for the bill, and all but one crusty did.

It passed the Senate easily, and Trump had to sign it. The administration had a month’s grace to release the documents. After a month they published a tiny minority of the evidence, with extensive redactions.

Trump was cornered and stalling. So he changed the subject and launched Operation Killer Klown Klusterfuck.

It was one astonishing brazen act after another. Look at my videos of fisherman being executed from the sky. Look – I’m bombing Venezuela. I’m going to bomb Iran, and the Israelis will help me. I’m going to invade Greenland. Look, icebergs, polar bears, Inuit, JD Vance. Over there Nato is chewing off it’s own feet. Masked men without warrants grabbing people from their homes. Oh look, they’re shooting down a nurse on the street. Ten bullets to the head.

All of this was ludicrous, performative, camp, way over the top. It also had real consequences. Many people died, most of them in Iran, and millions were terrified.

Trump required that fear to keep the files secret. And he had to appear all powerful, forcing world leaders to grovel in public. But then many world leaders stopped grovelling. And the people of Minneapolis began to look after each other and ask “Are you OK?”

Trump now seems to be in retreat in Minnesota. There will very likely be more distraction, more death, somewhere else. But you can feel the tide turning.

The files may still not be opened. But if they are, the people of Minnesota will have played a part in making all of us, everywhere, less likely to be raped and abused with impunity. Because an injury to one is an injury to all, and every struggle connects to every other struggle.

It’s getting harder and harder to share this kind of politics on social media. If you put your email in the box below, I’ll send you notification of each new post and nothing else. It’s all free.

My next article will be about how the resistance in Minnesota fits into the mass revolts on the streets of more than thirty countries over the last fifteen years – and how the genocide in Gaza was intended to terrify those movements.