Jeffrey Epstein’s Sex Trafficking Operation Might’ve Been Bigger Than We Think

Permanent Musical Accompaniment to the Last Post of the Week from the Blog’s Favourite Living Canadian

Of all the endless stories about the relationship between the president and dead child-raping sex-trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, this one seems to have scooted under the radar a bit. As the preposterous White House denials pile up, and the attempts at deflection are getting more and more baroque, the work of Senator Ron Wyden, Democrat of Oregon, stands out as conspicuously unspinnable. From The New York Times:

Senator Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the powerful Senate Finance Committee, has been digging into Mr. Epstein’s financial network for the past three years. Some members of his staff have viewed confidential files that shed light on the immense sums of money that, they say, Mr. Epstein moved through the banking system to fuel his vast sex-trafficking network.

In particular, filings by four big banks flagged more than $1.5 billion in transactions—including thousands of wire transfers for the purchase and sale of artwork for rich friends, fees paid to Mr. Epstein by wealthy individuals, and payments to numerous women, the senator’s office found. The filings came after Mr. Epstein was arrested in 2019 on federal sex trafficking charges.

Large money transfers to individuals, foreign countries, or obscure companies are the kind of things banks are supposed to be examining as potentially suspicious. Some of the Epstein money transfers disclosed in a report from JP Morgan Chase involved accounts at two Russian banks before those institutions were subject to U.S. sanctions. A few transactions red-flagged were for as much as $100 million.

Interesting enough on its own, but there is hidden treasure in there, too. From KPTV:

[Wyden] said investigators found links between Epstein and sanctioned Russian banks, and payments tied to women and girls from countries like Russia, Belarus, Turkey, and Turkmenistan. “These are not conspiracy theories,” Wyden said. “These are real leads pointing to an international sex trafficking operation.”

Wyden accused the Trump administration, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, of blocking access to the full file, despite previously campaigning on transparency. He said repeated requests to review the material were denied. “I don’t know why Trump wants this to go away, but we’re not letting it,” Wyden said. “No one gets to sweep this under the rug.”

I have a guess why the president wants this to go away under the rug but, then again, I am possessed of a suspicious mind. Wyden revealed that the Treasury Department has a report describing over 4,700 money transfers connected to Epstein totaling over $1.1 billion-with-a-b. Four thousand money transfers? I wonder what other names might be in that report.

My favorite moment in the shameful capitulation of Paramount-CBS to a White House shakedown has to be the reaction of Matt Stone and Trey Parker, who brought South Park back with a vengeance after a two-and-a-half year absence.

On Monday, the two signed a new deal with Paramount for a billion-and-a-half dollars. On Wednesday, in the wake of Paramount’s cancellation of Stephen Colbert and The Late Show, Stone and Parker cranked up the Enola Gay on the president and his White House. I don’t want to spoil anything if you haven’t checked the episode yet, but let us say that the two of them did not respect the president’s authoritah (!).

Most wonderfully, Parker and Stone caught Paramount-CBS in their own trap. The company could wait out a lawsuit from the president, or it could try to wriggle out of its new contract with the two producers, which would have resulted in a billion-dollar lawsuit. However, Paramount did get what it wanted; its merger with Skydance sailed through the FCC this week. Predictably, the White House birthed a bovine over the episode. From The Associated Press:

“This show hasn’t been relevant for over 20 years and is hanging on by a thread with uninspired ideas in a desperate attempt for attention,” White House spokesperson Taylor Rogers said in the statement. “President Trump has delivered on more promises in just six months than any other president in our country’s history – and no fourth-rate show can derail President Trump’s hot streak.”

Personally, I’d like to hang on a billion-dollar thread for a while.

Weekly WWOZ Pick to Click: “My Man Is an Undertaker” – Judith Owen

Yeah, I still pretty much love New Orleans.

Weekly Visit To The Pathé Archives

Here, from 1945, President Harry Truman arrives at Potsdam to finalize the surrender demands that the Allies—the U.S., U.K., and China—would hand to Japan, lest the latter suffer “the prompt and utter destruction” of their country, which meant a helluva lot more than Truman was willing to say. The day before this film was made, the atomic bomb was successfully tested in New Mexico. History is so cool, but not always pretty.

There already is some serious chicanery going on regarding the 2026 midterms, which may be the last chance to stop the madness. Down in Texas, the test-track for all terrible political ideas, the Republican legislature is warming up to gerrymander its brains out, and in the middle of a decade. From the Texas Observer:

Governor Greg Abbott has put redistricting on his call for the current special legislative session, which convened Monday, citing the need to address constitutional concerns around a few specific racially gerrymandered congressional districts in Houston and DFW (something Trump’s Department of Justice quite conveniently chose to criticize and about which the Texas GOP has never before cared). There are reports that Republicans will try to redraw as many as five currently Democratic districts—from South Texas and Houston to Dallas and possibly Austin—to favor the GOP to flip in the upcoming midterms.

This is being directed straight from the White House, not that Abbott needs either a nod or a wink from the president to ratfck under color of law. Things are getting very tense. And nationally, the Democrats are handicapped by their own dedication to good government. In many states where they have the potential to do what Texas is doing, they fought for, and won, independent redistricting commissions dedicated to minimizing the potential for egregious gerrymandering. And if that’s not the classic Democratic Party conundrum, I don’t know what is. As former congressman Steve Israel told The New York Times:

“Republicans are just more ruthless than Democrats. They play to break the rules, and Democrats play to enshrine the rules with fairer processes in places like California."

Hard to argue with that, damn it.

On Wednesday, continuing its establishment of the unitary executive here in the United States, the Supreme Court gave the president the power to remove the Democratic members of the Consumer Products Safety Commission, opening the door for the Grifter-in-Chief to lard the agency up with corporate lickspittles. Over at Slate, Mark Joseph Stern surveys the wreckage:

What’s perhaps most galling about Wednesday’s decision, aside from the fact that it makes us all less safe, is SCOTUS’s reprimand of lower courts that try to stop Trump’s abuses of power. The majority scolded these courts for failing to interpret the smoke signals it has sent up on the shadow docket and, instead, daring to enforce existing precedent that limits executive authority. It seems the Republican-appointed justices are determined to radically rewrite the law—without admitting what they’re doing or offering any explanation—while demanding that lower courts somehow read their minds and fall in line. These justices are increasingly embracing the Trump administration’s scornful attitude toward any judge who stands in its way. Yet they do not appear to recognize that by undermining lower courts, they are putting their own independence at risk as well.

If we ever pull out of this death spiral, reforming the Supreme Court, especially its misuse of the “shadow docket,” is at the top of the list.

Discovery Corner

Hey, look what we found!

Petra is one of the most famous ancient sites in the world. Hewn out of the side of a mountain, it was one of the stars of Indiana Jones and the Last Crusade, in which it played the last resting place of the Holy Grail. Now, it seems, it’s given up another one of its treasures. From Popular Mechanics:

Discovery Channel’s popular show Expedition Unknown was on site to document the discovery of twelve human skeletons and artifacts dating back at least 2,000 years, which had all been long hidden beneath the famed Khazneh (or “Treasury”) in Petra. The colossal find was accomplished by a team lead by archaeologist Pearce Paul Creasman. Along with the twelve sets of skeletal remains—several of the bones from which had mold, thanks to the porous sandstone allowing moisture into the space in the flood-prone area—the team found a mix of bronze, iron, and ceramic artifacts. This included one ceramic chalice tucked in the arms of one of the deceased, ironically reminiscent of the “Holy Grail” depicted in The Last Crusade. “It really was this awesome moment,” Gates said, “of history imitating art.” An actual cup? Not a grail-shaped beacon nor Audrey Tautou? Very strange.

Hey, LiveScience. Is it a good day for dinosaur news? It’s always a good day for dinosaur news!

Researchers believe that the dinosaurs showed off to potential mates by jabbing their claws deep into the sand, dragging their feet and kicking up sand behind them. Buntin noted that the animals would alternate between their two feet when kicking up sand and had different moves.

“We can tell they had two moves so far, one walking backwards and one moving side to side,” Buntin said in an email. “If they were really excited they would step a few feet backwards and repeat the motion, which usually erases the back half of each earlier set of scrapes. When this happened three or more times, a few of these show a counter-clockwise turn, kind of like the moonwalk with a little spin.”

This may be the best dino news we’ve ever had, and certainly the definitive proof that they lived then to make us happy now. Moonwalking theropods! Get down with your bad selves!

I’ll be back on Monday for whatever fresh hell awaits. Be well and play nice, ya bastids. Stay above the snake-line and wear the damn masks, and take the damn shots, especially the boosters and the New One. In your spare time, spare a thought for everyone touched by the flooding in Texas, and in North Carolina. and by earthquakes in Myanmar and Thailand, and by the tornadoes throughout the Southeast, and for everyone touched by floods in Kentucky and in West Virginia, and Nigeria, and by the crash in Washington, and by the measles outbreak in the Southwest, and in the wildfire zone around Dallas, and in the fire zones in Los Angeles and in Canada, and for all the folks in Ukraine, who stubbornly fight on, and all the folks in Gaza, and all the people in New Orleans, Las Vegas, Nashville, and Queens, who were visited by the Crazy before the year had hardly begun, and the folks in Dallas and Tallahassee, who were visited by the Crazy this week. And the people in drought-stricken north Alabama. And the folks caught in floods and tornadoes in Nebraska, and in Missouri. And the folks caught in "historic floods" in Kentucky. And in Oklahoma. And the folks in L.A., now fighting floods and mudslides exacerbated by the recent wildfires. And the folks in the wildfire zones in Pennsylvania, and in Minnesota. And the folks in Lahaina, who are still rebuilding. And the victims of the nightclub collapse in the Dominican Republic. And all the folks we regularly cited here in the year gone by, and especially for our fellow citizens in the LGBTQ+ community, who deserve so much better from their country than they’ve been getting. And for all of us, who will be getting exactly what we deserve.