Federal judge orders documents naming Jeffrey Epstein's associates to be unsealed More than 150 people are expected to be identified in early January.

 

Federal judge orders documents naming Jeffrey Epstein's associates to be unsealed

More than 150 people are expected to be identified in early January.

A federal judge in New York has ordered a vast unsealing of court documents in early 2024 that will make public the names of scores of Jeffrey Epstein's associates.

The documents are part of a settled civil lawsuit alleging Epstein's one-time paramour Ghislaine Maxwell facilitated the sexual abuse of Virginia Giuffre. Terms of the 2017 settlement were not disclosed.

Maxwell is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence after she was convicted of sex trafficking and procuring girls for Epstein, who died by suicide in 2019 in a Manhattan jail while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.

Jeffrey Epstein in a photo released by the New York State Division of Criminal Justice.

New York State Sex Offender Registry, FILE

MORE: Jeffrey Epstein's suicide: New details revealed

Anyone who did not successfully fight to keep their name out of the civil case could see their name become public -- including Epstein's victims, co-conspirators and innocent associates.

Judge Loretta Preska set the release for Jan. 1, giving anyone who objects to their documents becoming public time to object. Her ruling, though, said that since some of the individuals have given media interviews their names should not stay private.

The documents may not make clear why a certain individual became associated with Giuffre's lawsuit, but more than 150 people are expected to be identified in hundreds of files that may expose more about Epstein's sex trafficking of women and girls in New York, New Mexico, the U.S. Virgin Islands and elsewhere. Some of the names may simply have been included in depositions, email or legal documents.

Jeffrey Epstein attends Launch of RADAR MAGAZINE at Hotel QT on May 18, 2005.

Patrick Mcmullan/Getty Images, FILE

Some of the people have already been publicly associated with Epstein. For instance, Harvard law professor Alan Dershowitz is publicly named in the judge's order. Certain minor victims will remain redacted.

Maxwell, a longtime associate of Epstein, was convicted in 2021 of conspiring with Epstein to recruit, groom and abuse minors. In February, she asked the court to overturn her conviction and 20-year prison sentence.

Prosecutors subsequently urged a federal appeals court in June to uphold the conviction.

MORE: Ghislaine Maxwell's conviction should stand, prosecutors say

From 1994 to 2004, Maxwell and Epstein worked together to identify girls, groom them and then entice them to travel and transport them to Epstein's properties in New York, Florida, New Mexico, and elsewhere, prosecutors said. The girls -- some of whom were as young as 14 years old -- were then sexually abused, often under the guise of a "massage," they said.

Giuffre alleged in her lawsuit against Maxwell that Maxwell recruited her at the age of 16 to years of sexual servitude to Epstein. She also accused Maxwell and Epstein of directing her, between 2000 to 2002, to have sex with a number of their prominent associates, most famously Britain's Prince Andrew. The lawsuit was settled in May 2017, just before a trial was to begin.

Prince Andrew had repeatedly denied the allegations and attacked Giuffre's credibility and motives. He agreed to settle a sexual assault lawsuit from Giuffre last year for an undisclosed sum.

"Prince Andrew has never intended to malign Ms. Giuffre's character, and he accepts that she has suffered both as an established victim of abuse and as a result of unfair public attacks," according to a letter filed from Giuffre's lawyer. "It is known that Jeffrey Epstein trafficked countless young girls over many years. Prince Andrew regrets his association with Epstein, and commends the bravery of Ms. Giuffre and other survivors in standing up for themselves and others."

Colorado Supreme Court bans Trump from the state’s ballot under Constitution’s insurrection clause

 

Colorado Supreme Court bans Trump from the state’s ballot under Constitution’s insurrection clause

DENVER (AP) — The Colorado Supreme Court on Tuesday declared former President Donald Trump ineligible for the White House under the U.S. Constitution’s insurrection clause and removed him from the state’s presidential primary ballot, setting up a likely showdown in the nation’s highest court to decide whether the front-runner for the GOP nomination can remain in the race.

The decision from a court whose justices were all appointed by Democratic governors marks the first time in history that Section 3 of the 14th Amendment has been used to disqualify a presidential candidate.

“A majority of the court holds that Trump is disqualified from holding the office of president under Section 3 of the 14th Amendment,” the court wrote in its 4-3 decision.

Colorado’s highest court overturned a ruling from a district court judge who found that Trump incited an insurrection for his role in the Jan. 6, 2021, attack on the Capitol, but said he could not be barred from the ballot because it was unclear that the provision was intended to cover the presidency.

https://apnews.com/article/trump-insurrection-14th-amendment-2024-colorado-d16dd8f354eeaf450558378c65fd79a2

A Warning

 

A Warning

America survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious damage. A second term, if there is one, will be much worse.

By Jeffrey Goldberg December 4, 2023

Like many reporters, I’ve been operating in Casaubon mode for much of the past eight years, searching for the key to Donald Trump’s mythologies. No single explanation of Trump is fully satisfactory, although Atlantic staff writer Adam Serwer came closest when he observed that the cruelty is the point. Another person who helped me unscramble the mystery of Trump was his son-in-law Jared Kushner. Early in the Trump presidency, I had lunch with Kushner in his White House office. We were meant to be discussing Middle East peace (more on that another time), but I was particularly curious to hear Kushner talk about his father-in-law’s behavior. I was not inured then—and am not inured even now—to the many rococo manifestations of Trump’s defective character. One of the first moments of real shock for me came in the summer of 2015, when Trump, then an implausible candidate for the Republican presidential nomination, said of Senator John McCain, “He’s not a war hero … I like people who weren’t captured, okay?”

I did not understand how so many ostensibly patriotic voters could subsequently embrace Trump, but mainly I couldn’t understand his soul sickness: How does a person come to such a rotten, depraved thought?

That day in the White House, I mentioned to Kushner one of Trump’s more recent calumnies and told him that, in my view, his father-in-law’s incivility was damaging the country. Strangely, Kushner seemed to agree with me: “No one can go as low as the president,” he said. “You shouldn’t even try.”

I was confused at first. But then I understood: Kushner wasn’t insulting his father-in-law. He was paying him a compliment.

Perverse, of course. But revelatory as well, and more than a little prophetic. Because Trump, in the intervening years, has gone lower, and lower, and lower. If there is a bottom—no sure thing—he’s getting closer. Tom Nichols, who writes The Atlantic’s daily newsletter and is one of our in-house experts on authoritarianism, argued in mid-November that Trump has finally earned the epithet “fascist.”

“For weeks, Trump has been ramping up his rhetoric,” Nichols wrote. “Early last month, he echoed the vile and obsessively germophobic language of Adolf Hitler by describing immigrants as disease-ridden terrorists and psychiatric patients who are ‘poisoning the blood of our country.’ ” In a separate speech, Trump, Nichols wrote, “melded religious and political rhetoric to aim not at foreign nations or immigrants, but at his fellow citizens. This is when he crossed one of the last remaining lines that separated his usual authoritarian bluster from recognizable fascism.”

Trump’s rhetoric has numbed us in its hyperbole and frequency. As David A. Graham, one of our magazine’s chroniclers of the Trump era, wrote recently, “The former president continues to produce substantive ideas—which is not to say they are wise or prudent, but they are certainly more than gibberish. In fact, much of what Trump is discussing is un-American, not merely in the sense of being antithetical to some imagined national set of mores, but in that his ideas contravene basic principles of the Constitution or other bedrock bases of American government.”

There was a time when it seemed impossible to imagine that Trump would once again be a candidate for president. That moment lasted from the night of January 6, 2021, until the afternoon of January 28, 2021, when the then-leader of the House Republican caucus, Kevin McCarthy, visited Trump at Mar-a-Lago and welcomed him back into the fold.

And so here we are. It is not a sure thing that Trump will win the Republican nomination again, but as I write this, he’s the prohibitive front-runner. Which is why we felt it necessary to share with our readers our collective understanding of what could take place in a second Trump term. I encourage you to read all of the articles in this special issue carefully (though perhaps not in one sitting, for reasons of mental hygiene). Our team of brilliant writers makes a convincingly dispositive case that both Trump and Trumpism pose an existential threat to America and to the ideas that animate it. The country survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious damage. A second term, if there is one, will be much worse.

The Atlantic, as our loyal readers know, is deliberately not a partisan magazine. “Of no party or clique” is our original 1857 motto, and it is true today. Our concern with Trump is not that he is a Republican, or that he embraces—when convenient—certain conservative ideas. We believe that a democracy needs, among other things, a strong liberal party and a strong conservative party in order to flourish. Our concern is that the Republican Party has mortgaged itself to an antidemocratic demagogue, one who is completely devoid of decency.

THEATLANTIC.COM

A Warning

America survived the first Trump term, though not without sustaining serious dam

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2024/01/warning-second-trump-term/676117/

US Capitol Arrest Update: Anthony Sargent SENTENCED

 

IDENTIFY, INVESTIGATE, PROSECUTE, INCARCERATE DOMESTIC TERRORISTS to keep Americans safe!

MIKE JOHNSON wants to blur faces to protect DOMESTIC TERRORISTS from criminal charges!

Anthony Sargent was sentenced for his participation in the January 6, 2021 attack and attempted insurrection at the United States Capitol.

GO REST YE, WEARY CONGRESSMEN - Greg Trafidlo & Don Caron

 

 

Parody of God Rest Ye Merry, Gentlemen with lyrics by Greg Trafidlo and performance by Don Caron presented in the style of Post Modern Jukebox Executive Producers Don Caron and Jerry Pender