This is the first of four reports on the crises that now beset Germany — what they are, the history that produced them, and how Germans think about finding their way forward once again.

I thank Eva–Maria Föllmer–Müller and Karl–Jürgen Müller of Bazenheid, Switzerland, for their unsparing assistance as I reported and wrote this series.

Of the many things said — insightful things, wise things, some foolish things — as the results of Germany’s national elections arrived on Sunday evening, Feb. 23, the most remarkable to me was the exclamation of the Federal Republic’s new chancellor-to-be: “We have won it,” Friedrich Merz declared before his supporters in Berlin as the exit polls, which proved accurate, gave the conservative Christian Democratic Union the largest share of the vote.

Merz is one of those political figures given to speaking before he thinks, and nobody seems to have taken this outburst as anything more than the election-night utterance of an exuberant victor. I heard it differently. To me, Merz’s four words betrayed a nation in crisis: its politics and economy in disarray, its visionless leadership, its pervasive malaise, the deepening fractures among Germany’s 83 million people — Germany’s inability, let’s say, to talk to itself or understand, even, what it means to say, “We have won it.”

The low-minded Merz’s “we” means the CDU, which he leads, and its longtime partner, the Christian Social Union. But how narrow a notion of winning is this for someone who purports to be not merely a national leader but a leader of Europe? The CDU/CSU won not quite 29% of the vote, just enough to form a new governing coalition. That leaves 71% of German voters who didn’t win anything.

The next chancellor’s “we,” to go straight to the larger significance of the German elections, should alarm all of us across the West, not only in Germany, given where Merz and his coalition partners intend to lead the Federal Republic. They have made their radical intent clear even before Merz formally assumes office. It is to dismantle the most advanced social democracy in Europe in favor of a swift, radical rearmament — shocking all by itself given Germany’s history — and a return to the Cold War’s ever-perilous hostilities. The speed of this turn appears to be taking everyone by surprise: On Monday, April 1, the Bundeswehr began stationing an armored brigade in Lithuania, the first long-term deployment of German troops abroad since World War II.

History, which I invoke throughout this series, haunts this transformative moment like a ghost. Many are they who saw in the postwar republic a promise that the trans–Atlantic world could take a new direction, that the West might cultivate — I’ll go to shorthand here — a more humanist, or humanized, form of democracy. In the 1960s, Ludwig Erhard, economics minister under Konrad Adenauer, fashioned the soziale Marktwirtschaft, the social market economy, a model considerably at variance with the free-market fundamentalism the United States was by then imposing upon the world. It made unions powerful and gave workers seats on corporate boards, among much else, and in so doing prompted the thought that Europe’s social-democratic tradition might at last tame capitalism’s excesses.

In the late 1960s, Willy Brandt, the Social Democratic foreign minister and subsequently chancellor, developed his long-celebrated Ostpolitik, a policy that opened the Federal Republic to its East Bloc neighbors and the Soviet Union. This was a rejection not only of Washington’s Cold War binary; more than this, it was a decisive reply to the anti–Russian animus that has scarred German history for a century.

To know this history now is to recognize the February elections as a defeat of considerable magnitude that extends, again, well beyond what was so recently Europe’s most powerful nation. Friedrich Merz and his coalition partners — who will include a Social Democratic Party that has cravenly repudiated the very tradition it once championed — has abandoned more, much more than the Federal Republic’s past. Anyone who entertained hope that the Continent might serve as a guide to a more orderly world is in some way bereft now, left with one less reason to hope the wandering West will find its way beyond the cycle of decline into which it has fallen.

Merz is a man of contradictions, which admittedly does not distinguish him among centrist politicians in Germany or anywhere else in the West. He will be distinguished now as the German people’s hopelessly contradictory leader. His most pressing domestic responsibility is to revive an economy the coalition of neoliberals led by his hapless predecessor, Olaf Scholz, has driven very nearly into the ground. Take your seats as this disaster in the making unfolds.

Merz is a virulent Russophobe — he is as vigorous in this as any postwar political figure, I am told — and he is strongly committed to escalating Germany’s support for the war in Ukraine. But bringing the German economy back to life simply cannot be done unless Germany determines to restore its dense, altogether natural interdependence with Russia, notably but not only on the energy side. The resort to building a trillion-euro war machine is a beyond-words act of political desperation: The extent to which it succeeds as economic stimulus will be the extent to which it destroys German social democracy while — not to be missed — burdening the government with enormous debt. As to the folly of the U.S.–inspired proxy war in Ukraine, each commitment the new government makes to continued support of the corrupt, Nazified regime in Kiev — financial support, military support, political support, diplomatic support — will alienate a greater proportion of the German citizenry.

Germany’s predicament is the West’s, cast merely in higher relief: It must change, it must find a new direction — its voters demand these things — but Germany as its leadership is currently constituted cannot change. Germany is arguably singular among the Western powers in that treading water — the ceaseless see-saw of the centrists, if I may mix metaphors — is no longer a workable dodge. The nation simply does not have time for that if it is to avoid an ever-increasing rate of decline.

A remarkable number of German voters switched in February from one party to another — voter migration, this phenomenon is called — in what looks to the naked eye like a perverse game of hopscotch. Most of the voters who abandoned the Social Democrats — and there were very many, as a collapse in the SPD’s support indicates — went to either the CDU/ CSU (the latter rooted in conservative and Catholic Bavaria) or — believe it or not — to the Alternativ für Deutschland, the populist, right-wing nemesis of the long-reigning Social Democrats.

It gets yet more odd, according to an analysis cited by an election-night commentator named Florian Rötzer. “Many from the CDU/CSU did indeed switch to the AfD,” Rötzer remarked as the results tallied, “but strangely enough also to The Left [Die Linke] and the BSW [the left-populist Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht]. The Left gained massively, but former [Die Linke] voters switched to the AfD to a lesser extent and to the BSW to a greater extent.” As to Die Grünen, the now-ridiculous Greens — along with the Social Democrats the big losers Feb. 23 — they surrendered voters to Die Linke, a predictable-enough move, but also to the AfD.

Some people worth citing this week. They speak of different matters, but when we put all their apples and oranges into a basket we discover they belong together, their bright colors confronting us with a challenge: It is time to do something — something very few of us have considered until now.

Rashid Khalidi, in a stinging opinion piece in The Guardian, asked, “Does Columbia still merit the name of a university?” Khalidi posed this question after the university where he taught for many years capitulated to the Trump regime’s demands that it compromise academic freedom, freedom of speech and freedom of association while submitting its programs of study to political purview. All this in response to charges that anti–Semitism is rife among students demonstrating against Israel’s genocide of the Palestinians of Gaza.

Khalidi — some poetic justice here — is the emeritus Edward Said professor of Arab Studies at Columbia. Among his books is The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine (Metropolitan, 2020). Here is part of what he published in The Guardian:

“It was never about eliminating antisemitism. It was always about silencing Palestine. That is what the gagging of protesting students, and now the gagging of faculty, was always meant to lead to….

This was always about protecting the monstrous, transparent lies that a genocidal 17–month Israeli-American war on the entire Palestinian people was just a war on Hamas, or that anything done on 7 October 2023 justifies the serial massacres of at least 50,000 people in Gaza, most of them women, children and old people, and the ethnic cleansing of the people of Palestine from their homeland….

These lies, generated by Israel and its enablers, which permeate our political system and our moneyed elites, were repeated ceaselessly by the Biden and Trump administrations, by The New York Times and Fox News, and have now been officially sanctioned by a once great university….”

When Immigration and Customs goons arrested Mahmoud Khalil, a leader of last year’s demonstrations at Columbia, Homeland Security initially said only that he “engaged in activities aligned with Hamas.” The State Department subsequently cited a provision in the 1798 Alien Enemies Act, asserting that his presence “would have potentially serious adverse foreign policy consequences for the United States.”

Sheer Charade

Last week the Trump regime added new allegations against Mahmoud Khalil, asserting that he withheld information on when he applied for permanent residency status last year. Even the Zionist-supervised New York Times sees through this ruse. “The Trump administration,” it reported, “appears to be using the new allegations in part to sidestep the First Amendment issues raised by Mr. Khalil’s case.”

Amid these legal maneuvers President Donald Trump declared on social media, “We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti–Semitic, anti–American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.”

Since then ICE officials — masked ICE officials—have arrested a Tufts University student, Rumeysa Ozturk, on the same grounds: A DHS spokesperson explained this week that “Ozturk engaged in activities in support of Hamas, a foreign terrorist organization that relishes the killing of Americans.” Tufts officials have been told Ozturk’s visa has been revoked.

I read now that a doctoral candidate at the University of Alabama was arrested Tuesday and similarly charged. Alireza Doroudi is an Iranian in the U.S. on a student visa.

Consider these events and what Trump regime officials say about them.

The imperatives imposed by the Zionist lobbies in the U.S. long, long ago destroyed what integrity remained among U.S. mainstream media. Now they are destroying institutions of higher learning, the Justice and Homeland Security departments and altogether American law.

And all of these institutions proceed, or pretend to proceed, as if nothing at all is amiss. The Justice Department pretends it is just, Homeland Security pretends it protects the homeland, the Trump regime pretends it acts lawfully, Columbia’s administrators — and here come numerous other capitulationists like them — pretend they are guardians of free intellectual inquiry and an uncensored discourse on their campuses.

To what extent has America embarked on a departure from reality that may be unprecedented in history but for empires in their waning decades? The fact that this is a serious question, and I consider it so, is suggestion enough that this perverse national journey has begun.

I think of an essay Arthur Miller published in the Dec. 30, 1974, edition of New York Magazine. “The Year It Came Apart” was a long, anguished look back to 1949, when, the noted playwright considered, postwar America began to lose its way. “Nothing any longer could be what it seemed,” Miller wrote. This is among the phrases that comes to mind now: Nothing in our public life can any longer be taken as being what it pretends to be — as authentically itself, this is to say.

Here is the full passage in Miller’s piece to which I refer. The ellipses are mine:

“An inner fabric began to tear apart…. We would be entering a period of what the Puritan theology call Spectral Evidence….

An era can be said to end when its basic illusions are exhausted… A retreat began from the old confidence in reason itself; nothing any longer could be what it seemed… A sort of political surrealism came dancing through the ruins of what had nearly been a beautifully moral and rational world… The whole place was becoming inhuman, not only because an unaccustomed fear was spreading so fast, but more because nobody would admit to being afraid.”

I come to Simius Cognitius, who publishes a private blog from his farm in central Massachusetts (fortunate fellow). He wrote the other day:

“For all sane and rational people, what is now being officially and legally defined as ‘anti–Semitism’ in our once proud but now pitiably fallen nation, has now been elevated to a Moral Imperative.

The only way for any individual to maintain her or his sanity in our morally broken nation, which now officially declares that it is illegal to express any criticism, any at ALL, of a group of people who are wantonly murdering tens of thousands of innocent people, including tens of thousands of children and babies, right out in broad daylight, right before our very eyes… the only way to stay sane in such a morally depraved and insane nation, is to criticize that group more vigorously.

Once more, for emphasis … If criticizing Jewish people [CN: Zionist leaders] for their utter moral depravity, for actual mass-murder of even children and babies, is anti–Semitic, then it becomes a Moral Imperative to openly express one’s anti–Semitism.”

During Donald Trump’s first four years in the White House, the stranger to Washington’s infernal ways got nothing done: That cabal of various Deep State appendages — the Democratic Party’s upper echelons, the intelligence apparatus, the Justice Department and the F.B.I., and corporate media — made sure of that.

Trump seems to have thought this through during his four years playing golf at Mar-a–Lago. He returned to the White House two months ago this week with a full-dress plan to get done what he couldn’t first time around.

And now look. Donald Trump the subverted, we have to conclude, was better than Donald Trump the empowered. Who’d’a thunk it? The more Trump does this time around the more one looks back with a weird fondness to the subterfuge of the Trump I regime, unlawful and corrosive of our ailing republic as all that was.

Simplicius, the always stimulating commentator who takes his name from the sixth century Neoplatonist, posted an interesting summation of the present state of affairs the other day. “Trump,” he wrote, “now wallows in a post-euphoric doldrums phase of his floundering second term, when virtually every one of his campaign promises has faltered or flopped.”

Floundering presidents tend to make messes. The mess to which Simplicius refers concerns the Ukraine war and Washington’s relations with Moscow. Ending the former and repairing the latter was the biggest of Trump’s many big promises during last year’s campaign season.

Trump has been all over the place on this key question. The man who stood squarely against the war has now resumed supplying Ukraine with weapons and battlefield intelligence. This past week he had Marco Rubio, who comes over more as a schoolboy than a secretary of state, offering Moscow a ceasefire deal with the Kiev regime as if — one either laughs or does the other thing — the U.S. is the honest broker rather than the principal belligerent in the proxy war former President Joe Biden recklessly provoked.

It is the same wherever one looks — north to Canada, south to Mexico, across the Atlantic to Europe, across the Pacific to China. Altering the direction of policy is one thing, very often what is warranted; creating crises is another, and usually the mark of diplomatic incompetence.

Tariffs that have people recalling the consequences of the Smoot–Hawley Act back in the 1930s, relations with Beijing drifting from tension to hostility, the silly talk of owning Greenland, invading Mexico, repossessing the Panama Canal, and on and on: It is tempting to say Trump is starting to make Joe Biden look good — a feat that would surpass all men’s believing.

But no, we must turn to Israel and the Zionists’ campaign of terror against the Palestinians of Gaza and now the West Bank. And as we do we must forget about anyone making Joe Biden look good — not now, not in the histories yet to be written.

Taking Over From Biden on Israel

With the Israelis Trump is not floundering. He is picking up just where his genocidal predecessor left off and so getting done exactly what he wants. The two of them are just the same as they face “the Jewish state.” Just as Joe Biden was, Trump is acutely careful never to put a foot wrong with the Zionists.

Steven Witkoff, Trump’s “special envoy” in West Asia — in real life another property developer from New York with no apparent idea of how to conduct diplomacy — supposedly brokered a multi-phased ceasefire between Israel and Hamas soon after Trump took office. I say “supposedly” because we do not know what transpired between Witkoff and the Israelis and we may never. We have an official account with curb appeal for Trump as he poses as statesman for peace.

Since then Witkoff has organized — let’s stay with “supposedly,” as Tel Aviv probably dictated its terms — a seven-week extension of this first phase just as the second phase was due to start. This is not diplomacy, in my read: It is sequenced choreography.

Net: Trump’s man got a ceasefire signed, then arranged for its breach as the Israelis openly plan to resume their campaign of terror. It only looks like floundering, as I say.

Israel has resumed blocking humanitarian aid into Gaza, this time water as well as food, tents and other essentials to survival. I read over the weekend that Israel is now preventing record numbers of doctors and aid workers from entering the Strip.

From the White House in response to these straight-out war crimes: No sound.

Over the weekend Trump authorized large-scale airstrikes against Yemen; Reuters reports this is the most extensive U.S. military operation since Trump assumed office. Trump, you will recall, once opposed America’s military escapades abroad. Yemen, you will also recall, is one theater in the “seven-front war” to which Bibi Netanyahu committed Israel last year.

I think of these things and then think of the numerous reports we have had over many months that Trump accepted $100 million during his 2024 political campaign from Miriam Adelson, who carries on the arch–Zionist activities of her late husband. Trump’s ties — his debts, indeed — to the Adelsons and other Israel-über-alles obsessives like them lie beyond question.

And lately I think of something else — something it is time we all thought more about.

Mahmoud Khalil & the Attack on Universities

I know few people who have not been shocked by the arrest without charge — there being nothing to charge — of Mahmoud Khalil, the recent graduate of the School of International and Public Affairs at Columbia University, S.I.P.A., and the spokesman of those who have demonstrated against Israel’s genocide and America’s support of it this past year. Those who stand for the Palestinian cause, constitutional lawyers, ordinarily toothless media commentators: All view Khalil’s detention and the Trump administration’s plan to deport him as egregiously over the line.

The Khalil arrest is part of a full-scale attack on Columbia and the opening shot of a campaign against numerous other universities. Trump cut off $400 million in established government grants more or less simultaneously as Immigration and Customs cops stuffed Khalil into a van weekend before last.

The New York Times ran a curious commentary on Trump’s now-obvious blitz against higher education in its Sunday editions. Meghan O’Rourke lectures in English at Yale. This is the pith of the argument she makes under the headline, “The End of the University as We Know It”:

“What is really happening here is an attack on the American faith in knowledge as a value and a public good that has served us well….

If the battle over universities were only about budgets, the fight might be different. But what is being targeted is something more profound: the ability of institutions to sustain the freedoms that form the foundation of our democracy.”

Mahmoud Khalil, 30–year-old holder of a green card permitting him permanently to live and work in the United States, spouse of an American, lettered in his field after study at an Ivy League university, with nothing on his record to suggest criminal activity of any kind: Mahmoud Khalil is now under arrest and awaiting deportation at an Immigration and Customs Enforcement detention facility in Jena, a town of 4,100 in the Louisiana boondocks.

Mahmoud Khalil was arrested last Saturday evening at his apartment near Columbia University, where he recently earned a graduate degree. Mahmoud Khalil’s crime — sorry, no crime, let me try again — Mahmoud Khalil’s offense — no again — Mahmoud Khalil has simply exercised his free-speech rights while leading demonstrations, beginning in the spring of 2024, against Zionist Israel’s campaign of terror in Gaza. Mahmoud Khalil, to be noted, is Palestinian, born and was raised in a refugee camp in Syria. He is formally a citizen of Algeria.

For a time after his arrest, Mahmoud Khalil’s family was unable to contact him and did not know where he was. Now they know but cannot see him. Were this one of the Latin American dictatorships of the 1970s and 1980s—Pinochet in Chile, Videla and his junta of colonels in Argentina—we would say Mahmoud Khalil has been “disappeared.” At writing he has been prevented from consulting with his attorneys.

Here is what President Trump put out on Truth Social, his sludgy social media platform, just after Khalil was arrested:

This is the first arrest of many to come. We know there are more students at Columbia and other Universities across the Country who have engaged in pro-terrorist, anti–Semitic, anti–American activity, and the Trump Administration will not tolerate it.

And here is Michelle Goldberg, The New York Times’s poseur “leftist,” in an opinion column that appeared in Tuesday’s editions under the headline, “This Is the Greatest Threat to Free Speech Since the Red Scare”:

If someone legally in the United States can be grabbed from his home for engaging in constitutionally protected political activity, we are in a drastically different country from the one we inhabited before Trump’s inauguration.

You have to say “Amen” to this. Goldberg immediately followed this observation with a quotation from an interview with Brian Hauss, an attorney at the American Civil Liberties Union:

This seems like one of the biggest threats, if not the biggest threats [sic] to First Amendment freedoms in 50 years. It’s a direct attempt to punish speech because of the viewpoint it espouses.

These two give the Khalil arrest an amplitude it warrants, although Goldberg ought to tell us which Red Scare she means — the first, in the 1920s, or the 1950s version, cultivated in the mulch of McCarthyist Cold War paranoia. The arrest and sequestration of Mahmoud Khalil exceeds Trump’s numerous excesses by many times. Every civil-liberties lawyer in New York and Washington ought to be on this case. If Trump actually puts Mahmoud Khalil on a plane to who knows where, to say nothing of the many more deportations he threatens, we are in deeper doo-doo than George H.W. ever imagined when he coined this phrase amid his political perils in the late 1980s. We witness in real time an extravagant exercise of censorship and the Executive Branch’s open abuse of law and the foundational institutions of justice charged with interpreting and enforcing it. I hope the Khalil affair proves a step too far for Trump and marks the beginning of this objectionable incompetent’s end.

Yes, standing against the Trump regime’s swift, Draconian action against Mahmoud Khalil is like shooting at the side of a barn. I am queasily reminded of the Reich’s idea of law-enforcement in the 1930s, or the Israelis’ in the West Bank as we speak. What’s right is right, what’s wrong, wrong: It is there before our eyes. There is no room for ambivalence here. The case is black and white.

And then the mind starts thinking about all the gray and advances into that familiar zone of ambivalence.

■

Last Friday, the day before Mahmoud Khalil’s arrest, another opinion piece in The New York Times caught my eye. The concern of Erwin Chemerinsky, a constitutional law scholar and dean of the law school at the University of California, Berkeley, was, and surely remains, the condition of America’s judicial system. Yet more now than when he wrote, this is a matter warranting all the attention we can give it. The headline atop his essay is, “The One Question That Really Matters: If Trump Defies the Courts, Then What?”

This is a good question. And it is magnitudes more salient now than it was last Friday, as the arrest of Khalil, along with Trump’s just-declared deportation program, has already gone before the courts. Whether Trump honors or ignores America’s judicial authorities in this and numerous other cases matters big time — no arguing this. The presence of even a fleck of doubt as to Trump’s acceptance of the judicial branch’s purview is a measure of just how heavily this question looms over the single most essential of all our governing institutions. There ought to be none. The Khalil case, given the apparent illegalities of Trump’s move, drops this truth upon us like a brick.

But just a minute, Dean Chemerinsky. How Trump respects or disrespects the law and America’s courts is not “the one question,” the only question that “really matters.” I vigorously object to these phrases. In what condition was our judiciary before Donald Trump took office not quite two months ago? How dare the law dean leave out this question. And how, by whose hand, did our judicial system come to this pre–Trump condition? This is another question that must not be left out. Right off the bat that makes three to Chemerinsky’s one.

And so to what Michelle Goldberg has to say about the Khalil case. Read again the above snippet from her column: “… we are in a drastically different country from the one we inhabited before Trump’s inauguration.” Oh? As different as all that, Ms. Goldberg? And then the ACLU attorney: Trump’s move on Khalil is the gravest attack on the First Amendment in half a century. Half a century? Nothing untoward occurred in between — during, let’s say, Trump’s first term and Joe Biden’s first and last?

We have here three cases, among countless others like them, of sheer sophistry. You get a lot of this from the liberal class these days, Trump Derangement Syndrome having roared back among us. President Trump is doing some very worrisome things — yes, certainly. And if it weren’t for Trump, everything would be copacetic, we are invited to think, we must must think, because nobody was doing anything worrisome before Trump came along.

You see this, a cynically dishonest glide over recent history, in all sorts of contexts. It is a standard resort among the liberals. Russia started the war in Ukraine, which began only in 2022: This a glow-in-the-dark example of what I mean. Chemerinsky, Goldberg, et al, and there are countless et als at this point, attempt the same damn thing, if more subtly, when they date the threat to the American judiciary to the doings of Donald Trump.

Dean Chemerinsky is a grand enough man to get column inches on The Times’s rigorously policed opinion page. Here is his lead paragraph:

Eleven days ago, U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi hyped her office’s imminent release of files related to the apparently sprawling empire of vice that Jeffrey Epstein ran for many years — a scandal that has percolated at or just below public awareness for over a decade.

What followed Bondi’s considerable drum roll was 200 pages of nothing new. Amid her escalating embarrassment as her document release flopped, Bondi cited an F.B.I. whistleblower to claim that she had been misled by the agency’s New York field office.

The whistleblower asserted that the New York office had kept thousands of other Epstein-related documents from her. Bondi then vowed to obtain the hidden cache and fire those who had withheld them in defiance of her order.

Now there is more. On Monday Bondi announced triumphantly on Fox Newsthat thousands of previously unreleased documents and other forms of evidence pertinent to the Epstein affair have at last been delivered to her office at the Justice Department.

At the same time, she admitted that these new files will be redacted before they are made public — for reasons including, she said a little ominously, reasons of “national security.”

What Went on Here?

It is important to consider this bizarre turn of events as more than internecine bureaucratic warfare. We may be looking at an honest attempt by the Trump administration to bring the Epstein case to light as part of its cleanup of the deeply corrupt F.B.I..

But we may instead be looking at the limits of the Trump regime’s commitment to disclosure and transparency.

Did Bondi run headlong into the still-resistant Deep State, undiminished in its determination to stonewall Trump and his people just as it did during his first term? Is President Trump now on notice — along with the rest of us — that the same organs of covert power that launched Russiagate against Trump all those years ago will now hold out, countering every order Trump or his senior officials issue?

So it seems. But what emerges from these recent events is a blurry picture. There appears to be a good chance that Trump and his people have concluded that there is a fine line between attacking the Deep State and going along with it.

To turn this messy affair another way, was all this a PR stunt gone wrong due to incompetence at the top of the Justice Department, saved at the last moment by a whistleblower? If Bondi knew the first round of documents was a 200–page nothingburger, why did she hype their disclosure during a national TV spot the night before their publication?

Why not complain that she had been given scraps, preparing the public for what was to come? Did she not yet know enough about the Epstein case to realize that these documents had been public for years? Or was she intentionally deceptive for some other reason?

A Mere Power Struggle?

It is possible Trump and his circle are using the Epstein affair to wrench control from the innards of the institutions that once opposed him — not for the sake of justice or transparency, but simply to exert administrative and bureaucratic authority.

Bondi’s acknowledgement to Hannity that any Epstein-related documents judged to compromise “national security” will be sanitized is a flashing yellow light of the kind that should blink whenever we hear invocations of “national security.”

It may turn out to be that Trump and his cabinet are committed, after all, to protecting — irony of ironies — the reputation of the intelligence apparatus, along with a wide array of plutocrats, and America’s greatest ally, according to Trump, Bondi, and the rest of the cabinet: Israel.

Let us consider: What issues of “national security” would require redaction in regard to a deceased sex-trafficker or his underage victims, unless our government or close allies had been involved in said sex-trafficking ring?

Sean Hannity’s interview with Bondi on Fox News appeared angled toward preparing the audience for heavy redactions, as he repeatedly returned to the topic. Indeed, he went so far as to introduce the prospect of national security redactions—a thought Bondi readily embraced. Green room rehearsals, anyone?

I do not, I will say at this point, like the smell of all this.

Bondi’s Monday night announcement that she had obtained new evidence coincided with the resignation of James Dennehy, head of the F.B.I.’s New York outpost. Dennehy’s resignation letter indicated he was forced to resign, but it of course included no suggestion that this was related to a coverup of pertinent Epstein files. It is nonetheless hard to miss the apparent implications of Dennehy’s timing.

Epstein died in custody at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City in August 2019, one month after he was arrested on federal charges of sex-trafficking minors. His partner-cum-pimp, Ghislaine Maxwell, was later convicted of sex trafficking minors and was eventually sentenced to twenty years in prison. Prior to his arrest Epstein had received a highly lenient, highly objectionable plea deal in 2008 for earlier charges of procuring a child for prostitution.

The 2008 deal was so astoundingly soft that Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who offered it to Epstein, subsequently had to defend himself while being confirmed as Trump’s labor secretary. Acosta said of the case: “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”

Remember also that there is still zero discussion from Bondi, Hannity, or anyone from the Trump administration regarding prosecutions for Epstein’s clients or associates beyond the already-convicted Maxwell.

Interestingly enough, Bondi claimed in the Hannity interview that the DoJ was treating the release of both the Kennedy (John F.) and Martin Luther King, Jr., assassination files with the same dedication to transparency. Americans “have the right to know,” she (unoriginally) insisted.

In the context as we have it, we have to ask what this portends. And in this same connection, Bondi made no mention of the F.B.I.’s files on the murder of Seth Rich, the Democratic Party computer technician murdered shortly after the party’s mail was pilfered in 2016. The agency is still withholding those files, with a deadline from a court order to release them coming on Monday.

Bondi, Patel, and the Trump administration purport to be making every effort to clean house at Justice and the F.B.I. These developments in the Epstein case suggest — and no more at this point — this may be otherwise.

There appears little chance, to put this point another way, that those constituencies with an interest in keeping the Epstein case well-buried will simply roll over. Out of the question, in my view.

Who or What Are We Protecting?

If we were to see the publication of a massive trove of Epstein evidence and documentation, what might we find?

Assuming that a great deal of that documentation had not been destroyed or otherwise been made unavailable — and that it wouldn’t be curated dishonestly prior to being made public — there’s a broad spectrum of individuals, organizations and state agencies in multiple countries that could be implicated in sex trafficking of children, ultimately for the sake of blackmail.

There might also be the revelations regarding Epstein’s murky financial dealings.