Court records show hundreds of millions of dollars being paid to Epstein by Wall Street big shots and billionaire tycoons like Leslie Wexner and Leon Black for tax advice he wasn’t even professionally qualified to render. Photograph by Leiada Krözjhen.

Not long after Donald Trump had the Department of Justice unceremoniously torpedo its own investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the President’s longtime friend and fellow member of the predator elite, Bill O’Reilly, announced something that I found to be disturbingly telling. During an interview with Chris Cuomo on NewsNation, Bill revealed that he had discussed the Epstein files with the President at the White House months before it reentered the headlines. “I talked to President Trump, man-to-man, eye-to-eye, on St. Patrick’s Day about this… And he said- and I agree- ‘There are a lot of names associated with Epstein that had nothing to do with Epstein’s conduct… They maybe had lunch with them or maybe had some correspondence for one thing or another… If that name gets out, those people are destroyed, because there’s not going to be any context.”

It was one of those moments that felt too absurd to exist anywhere but cable news. Here were two career newsmongers, jettisoned to the ghetto of the legacy media for their own predatory sexual appetites, chatting with great concern about how deeply disturbed the accused rapist in the White House is over the reputations of fellow oligarchs who chose to associate with a convicted sexual predator. But beyond the bizarro world vibe of this sharply dressed slice of locker room logic, I felt that O’Reilly’s revelation actually cut to the very core of the Epstein scandal on many levels.

It reveals the bloated sense of self-importance carried by the elites in this country, it reveals the fluid bipartisan nature of their lives behind the scenes, but perhaps more than anything, it reveals the fear they have of their own supporters. The general gist of Bill O’Reilly’s defense of Donald Trump’s decision to betray his own voters was that your average yokel couldn’t possibly understand the need for powerful men in both parties to socialize with a sex fiend confirmed by their own government to have ran a vast criminal empire trafficking in teenage girls without first being provided with the proper context by the very news media that Trump was elected twice to rail against.

Even more telling was Bill’s dire warning that such unfettered access to the truth would destroy what’s left of the reputation the powerful hold in........

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