Making America Epstein Again [View all]

[justaprogressive]

Sen. Richard Blumenthal (D-CT) during a press conference with the Democratic members of the Senate Committee on Homeland Security and Governmental Affairs, July 30, 2025, in the Capitol in Washington. Senate Democrats hope to utilize a little-used rule to force the Department of Justice to release more files related to Jeffrey Epstein.

Dahud Ortiz is a post-traumatic Marine Corps veteran who traveled to Madrid to kill an attorney who’d been chatting with his wife and ended up killing an associate and two clients instead, setting fire to the office to cover his tracks. Vladimir Antonio Arevalo Chavez is a high-ranking MS-13 official who allegedly forged alliances with major Mexican drug organizations that ultimately cartelized the theretofore fragmented “coyote” business of migrating to the United States, putting poor border-crossers in debt to organized crime figures. Jose Hernandez Reyes is a low-level human smuggler and habitual drunk driver who until recently was scheduled to be deported a sixth time, after getting wasted and opening fire in a residential Texas neighborhood, then passing out in his car when he ran out of ammunition. Eric Adams allegedly took millions of dollars in direct bribes and illegal campaign contributions and is accused by a former police chief of transforming the New York Police Department into a “criminal enterprise” for enriching allies and illegally arresting and launching tabloid smear campaigns against political enemies. Imaad Zuberi was sentenced to 12 years’ imprisonment for illegally laundering millions of dollars from the Qatari royal family and other Gulf state oligarchs into American political campaigns.

Trump’s Justice Department commuted Zuberi’s 12-year prison sentence in May, in possible gratitude for the Qatari plane, though a long-ago $900,000 donation to Trump’s first inaugural committee was cited by the press for his reasoning. The agency dropped the Adams prosecution in February, in an explicit quid pro quo for agreeing to cooperate with extralegal immigration roundups. DOJ dismissed charges against MS-13 official Chavez in April as a favor to El Salvadoran dictator Nayib Bukele, whose secret back-channel alliances and negotiations with MS-13 had gotten him elected. It released Hernandez Reyes to a halfway house in June as a favor for agreeing to testify against Kilmar Abrego Garcia, whom the administration accidentally sent to the El Salvadoran gulag. And it negotiated Ortiz’s release from a Venezuelan prison as part of the deal that released 252 Venezuelan nationals from said El Salvadoran gulag.

The writer Whitney Webb, whose 2022 two-part book series One Nation Under Blackmail analyzes the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking enterprise in the context of earlier deep state–sanctioned organized crime networks like Iran-Contra and the Bank of Commerce and Credit International, observed on a recent podcast that Trump has long subscribed to his mentor and mafia lawyer Roy Cohn’s notion that every powerful man is the custodian of a “favor bank,” in which quid pro quos are brokered like loans and deposits. But banks (in theory anyway) have to lend out their reserves at a better rate of return than they pay on their deposits, and the bargains being made at this point lack any sense of reason or proportion.

Trump has long subscribed to his mentor and mafia lawyer Roy Cohn’s notion that every powerful man is the custodian of a “favor bank.”

https://prospect.org/power/2025-08-01-making-america-epstein-again/]