3 hours ago

The Republicans’ latest Clinton stunt will not work | Arwa Mahdawi

The Clinton-Epstein connection

I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that, somewhere in a makeshift situation room in Mar-a-Lago, there’s a whiteboard with “very high IQ strategies to distract everyone from Jeffrey Epstein” written on the top.

“Kidnap a foreign head of state” will have already been crossed off this hypothetical whiteboard. The capture of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, dominated headlines for a while but it hasn’t stopped the ghost of Epstein from haunting Donald Trump.

All the chest-beating around annexing Greenland doesn’t seem to be doing much to memory-hole the Epstein files either. During a visit to a Ford plant in Michigan this week, Trump was heckled by an autoworker who reportedly called the president a “pedophile protector”. And Shawn Ryan, an influential podcaster, who supported Trump’s 2024 run, also publicly accused the president of “protecting pedophiles” by not fully releasing the Epstein files. “I voted to get these damn files released, and it’s like a total 180 just happened,” Ryan complained on a podcast released Thursday. Your first problem, sir, was ever believing a word the convicted felon said.

The newest plan to take the heat off Trump’s Epstein connection? Judging by recent events, it seems to be to try and make us all focus on the Clintons’ Epstein links instead.

While things escalated this week, the Trump administration has been slinging mud at Bill Clinton for a while. Which, to be fair, isn’t difficult to do, considering the Democratic former president’s personal history, and his well-documented ties with Epstein. The disgraced financier visited the White House at least 17 times during the early years of Clinton’s presidency. The pair also travelled together. However, Clinton maintains that (unlike several other powerful people) he cut ties with Epstein in 2005, before the sex offender pleaded guilty to solicitation of a minor in Florida. Clinton has never been formally accused of any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein.

The Trump administration, however, has done a lot of informal accusing. Last year the Department of Justice released a number of photos of Clinton alongside Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, posted one photo on X in December with the caption “Oh my!”

And, last August, the House oversight committee issued subpoenas to Bill and Hillary Clinton, along with various others, demanding “testimony related to horrific crimes perpetrated by Jeffrey Epstein”.

“Given your past relationships with Mr. Epstein and Ms. Maxwell, the Committee believes that you have information regarding their activities that is relevant to the Committee’s investigation,” the committee’s Republican chair, James Comer, wrote in a letter to Bill Clinton. A much vaguer version of this letter was issued to Hillary Clinton.

This week the Clintons made it clear they have no plans to cooperate with the committee’s investigation, announcing they would not comply with the subpoena demanding testimony. Comer said in response the committee would seek to hold both Clintons in criminal contempt of Congress.

In a letter addressed to Comer, and posted on social media on Tuesday morning, the Clintons issued a scathing statement about the Trump administration and the contempt proceedings.

“Every person has to decide when they have seen or had enough and are ready to fight for this country, its principles and its people, no matter the consequences,” the Clintons wrote. “For us, now is that time.”

Oh, give me a break. I don’t doubt that the Trump Administration is going after the Clintons to create a sideshow, but is this really the moment when the power couple have decided that they’ve had enough? Spare me the sanctimony from two people who worked overtime to justify (and deny) Israel’s genocide in Gaza. For many people in the US, seeing children in Gaza burned alive with their taxpayer dollars was when they stood up to fight for their principles, no matter the consequences. For the Clintons, however, the moral red line seems to be harm to their personal brand. They are not fighting for the country here, they are fighting for themselves.

This isn’t to say the Clintons should just quietly go along with this sham of an “investigation”. As the comedian Jon Stewart said this week, the Clintons should comply with the subpoenas, but only as part of a process where everyone is fully complying. “Why should [Clintons] comply if the Department of Justice is not complying with releasing the files?” Stewart said. “[But] do I personally think [the Clintons] should comply? Abso-fucking-lutely, absolutely. And if they’ve got something to hide nefarious, yes, we should know about all this. This is bonkers how long this is going on.” Quite.

Anyway, here’s a little memo to Maga: focusing on the Clintons is not going to work for you. I’m sure the Clintons have some superfans but they don’t preside over a cult the way Trump does. If they have done anything immoral concerning Epstein, I think you’d be hard-pressed to find anyone who thinks they should be shielded from consequences because they’re Democrats. The little stunt of holding the Clintons in contempt while the Trump administration drags its feet on releasing all the Epstein files just demonstrates the government’s contempt for the American public.

Louisiana officials have been trying to extradite a doctor in California who they claim sent abortion pills to the southern state. Medication abortion, to be clear, has been available in the US since 2000 and decades of studies have shown it is safe and effective. However, Louisiana has banned almost all abortions and the state’s Republican attorney general has described sending abortion pills to the state as “illegal drug trafficking”. California has said there is no way an extradition is happening.

Renaming the Department of Defense the ‘Department of War’ could cost up to $125m

There always seems to be money for nonsense like this and never any money for universal healthcare. Someone should create a “department of government efficiency” to look into this …

Texas A&M University is banning Plato because of “gender ideology”

The public research university has a new policy of restricting discussions of race and gender, which means around 200 courses have had to be revised. It turns out Plato’s Symposium is problematic because of the “Myth of Androgyne,” in which Aristophanes describes three genders.

Alabama library denied state funding because of inappropriate books

The Fairhope public library will take a funding hit because it kept The Handmaid’s Tale and certain other books in its teen section, rather than moving them to the adult section.

How gender bias impacts math education

A new Rutgers University–New Brunswick study has found that children are more inclined to believe incorrect math information from men than accurate information from women. This plays into the well-documented “brilliance bias”: studies show girls as young as six think boys are more likely to be “really, really smart”.

Mike Pompeo wants “to make sure history books don’t write about the victims of Gaza”

The former US Secretary of State received rapturous applause at a pro-Israel conference on Tuesday after saying that “we need to make sure that the story [of October 7] is told properly so that when the history books write this, they don’t write about the victims of Gaza, right?” The good news for Pompeo is that journalism is supposed to be the first draft of history, and there is precious little journalism coming out of Gaza – by design. The international press still isn’t freely allowed to report from Gaza, where babies are continuing to freeze to death.

The week in pawtriarchy

Some emu-sing news out of Florida, where police have been on the lookout for a runaway bird. The escaped emu was finally captured by a deputy who secured it with a makeshift lasso, resulting in some wild bodycam footage. The emu was returned home unharmed. Someone send that deputy to St Louis, now, where multiple monkeys are on the loose. The world really is going bananas.