Seriosly, why?

  • danc4498@lemmy.worldEnglish
    0·
    17 days ago

    It’s possible they were protecting their own. You don’t release only the parts that implicate your opponents and leave out the parts that implicate your friends.

    I think it’s also possible there wasn’t any smoking gun that directly implicated anybody. Only loose associations to Epstein that we already were aware of.

    So if they did release it, Republicans wouldn’t believe anything in it that made them look bad, and Democrats wouldn’t care as they want a real smoking gun before they react. So it wouldn’t help in the election, and the release would have zero impact.

    Instead, let the next administration deal with it. With Trump now in charge, it really is a rock and a hard place. If there are “loose associations” that make him or his people look bad, and they are the ones to release it, Republicans would not be able to question its authenticity.

    Notice how Trump is now claiming Obama and Biden were manipulating the documents, which is why he won’t release it. This is giving his people a reason to be skeptical even if he does release something that looks bad.

    TLDR, either Democrats are implicated and Biden was protecting, or Biden felt it was better to let the next administration deal with it, especially if the next administration was Trump.

  • I Cast Fist@programming.dev
    0·
    17 days ago

    I think the real question is: why isn’t anyone on the FBI or whatever agency is responsible for that, willing to just throw that shit onto the internet?

  • selokichtli@lemmy.ml
    0·
    17 days ago

    Sorry to answer with other questions, but as a foreigner I have to. Do investigations like this can just be published by the POTUS? I’m my country, it works be the sole decision of the AG, and they would probably won’t publish anything because it could end up damaging the investigation. Or so they’d say.

    It’s really baffling the power of the current POTUS, having all the power of the state in his hands. To me, him just telling Pamela Bondi what to do in such a delicate matter feels just wrong, as in lacking the due seriousness on the matter, utterly sloppy and populist in a bad manner.

    • wjrii@lemmy.worldEnglish
      0·
      17 days ago

      One of the recurring themes I keep coming back to in all this is that the US has a uniquely bad situation with regard to its Constitution. We worship it as an infallible and complete guide to running a democratic republic, but really it’s extremely old, extremely vague, and depends on goodwill and sensible interpretation to function. We have neither the explicit understanding that everything is old AF and cobbled together and dependent upon custom and moderating tyrannical sensibilities like the British, nor the unwieldy but straightforward comprehensiveness of EU treaties and certain other lengthy modern written constitutions.

      To me, him just telling Pamela Bondi what to do in such a delicate matter feels just wrong, as in lacking the due seriousness on the matter, utterly sloppy and populist in a bad manner.

      This feeling you have is exactly how presidents of either party would have felt for the last 80-100 years. The idea of a largely independent Department of Justice was considered eminently sensible and moral and even to the realpolitik set it provided outer bounds of what was politically possible and so they would nudge and tug at the edges, but never blow right past it, lest they suffer Nixon’s fate. I think we make a mistake to say that Trump is stupid in a binary yes/no sense, but he is deeply uncurious about things that don’t interest him, like democratic norms, so when people tell him “The Constitution doesn’t actually say that,” his eyes gleam and he just does whatever he might get away with. And because we have a Supreme Court dominated by the idea that the US Constitution is more akin to a piece of computer code than a framework for sensible governance, they simply throw up their hands and say, “whelp, it didn’t SAY that the administration of justice should be handled with integrity, so guess we makin’ a fascism now.” Better vote them out, except oh wait the Constitution also doesn’t say you can’t fuck with the elections either.

      One of my anxious worries lately is that at the end of this term, Trump will look at our term limits amendment and parse the verbiage with a simple literalism and Clarence Thomas et al will back him up. It says you can’t be elected president more than twice, so why not simply run for VP and then have your patsy resign five minutes after swearing in? After all, we’re mindless textualists now. We didn’t want an FDR type getting overly entrenched in the machinery of power, but we clearly meant to allow loopholes that are significantly less democratic!

    • TheFogan@programming.devEnglish
      0·
      17 days ago

      I’m my country, it works be the sole decision of the AG

      It works like that… but the problem is effectively we give the president the power to fire and replace the AG. So… in short, the AG is hand picked by the president and then approved by congress.

      With a crazy president like this that effectively has 100% of his party members in congress intimidated to back every one of his picks, the AG is basically his hand picked employee.

    • dave881@lemmy.world
      0·
      17 days ago

      Yes and no.

      In the US the Judicial branch is responsible for the the courts and interpretation of the law / constitution, but the Executive branch is responsible for the execution / enforcement of the law. I think that in other parts of the world it is common for the AG to be part of the Judicial branch, but here they are part of the Executive branch.

      As I understand it, there are parts of these investigations/prosecutions that the AG can release under their own authority (or by direction of the President) but other parts that are under seal and require authorization from the courts.

  • Alsjemenou@lemy.nlNederlands
    0·
    16 days ago

    Okay. Let me give a sane outsider take.

    First thing you have to understand is that there is a big disconnect between the conviction of Epstein and the influential connections he had. All the conspiracy talk about the island being a childporn hub for elites is nothing more than that: conspiracy fantasy. His suicide fueled many more ideas about the elite killing him, but again no evidence at all.

    However, there is a strong public pressure to research the connections between Epstein and the elites he knew. This has most likely been done in the background, since Epstein did shady finances. But Trump has campaigned heavily on the popular sentiment. And it lives in the minds of people a solution to lock up all the elites/draining the swamp.

    So now there is a big problem for the maga populists, there is a ‘list’ of connections to epstein. But there is no further evidence (yet) that those people did anything illegal, or is entirely complicated financial crime. The list probably includes just about the entire political spectrum includes donors and includes Trump. So everybody wants to handle this the correct way, including those donors. Nobody wants their name public because they spoke to a shady financial advisor. And any case against a super wealthy person needs to be watertight, they can afford a legal team.

    Is it possible that there was deeper predatory connections? sure. Epstein had easy access and no question that he was willing to share. Is that going to be written down in a list? absolutely not. Epstein did finances the shady way and that’s more likely the reason so many rich people were interested in his business.

    So this isnt a political issue. Of course, now it is. But that’s because Trump made it one.

  • specialseaweed@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    16 days ago

    I think it’s important to remember that Biden was, perhaps more than any president in my lifetime (and I’m an old man), an institutionalist. He was a senator for just about forever, then the VP for 8 years. He was 78 years old when he became president. He is an old school liberal Catholic, a very nearly extinct person in the Catholic and Christian spheres.

    I think he saw his presidency as a repudiation of right wing reactionary politics. His election, in his mind, was in large part a call to what he saw as the original intent and purpose of the executive branch. To put it plainly, he saw himself as elected because America rejected the politicization of government under Trump. Included under that umbrella of beliefs about the purpose of the executive was the unalienable requirement that the executive not direct the FBI to investigate the opposing political party. Remember, Joe Biden was a senator when Nixon resigned. He was there when Nixon was using the executive branch to attack Democrats.

    Biden appointed Garland to the DOJ. Garland’s record was perfectly fine and appeared well suited to the role, but his biggest strengths (in Biden’s mind) was his nonpartisanship and his conservative view of government. By conservative I mean staying within the lines of what the DOJ should be doing, a cautious view of the use of DOJ power. Again, this was done in reaction to Trump and his… let’s call it “expansive” view of government power. In Biden’s mind, he was righting the ship.

    And Garland was exactly as advertised, to a maddening degree. He was cautious to the point of being timid. He refused to throw the weight of the DOJ into investigations with political implications without reaching an imaginary bar of fairness that just isn’t realistic. You saw it in the Jan 6th investigations. You saw it in the Kushner deals (and all of the Trump family deals which are obviously dirty). You saw it in Garland’s unwillingness to take on wildly politicized federal prosecutor offices because doing so would be political interference (in his mind). You saw it when Robert Hur took unprofessionalism and partisanship to the absolute extreme when attacking Biden under the guise of a special counsel appointment and Garland did nothing because instiutionalism in his mind meant not interfering with the process.

    And you saw it in the Epstein case.

    Garland did everything by the book to an absurd degree that ended up paralyzing justice. Biden didn’t touch Garland or any of it because he believes doing so was itself an injustice, even if Garland was wrong to handle it the way he did. In Biden’s mind, the president should not have the power to demand the DOJ take action in a specific case like the Epstein case, especially if there’s political implications.

  • BarneyPiccolo@lemmy.today
    0·
    16 days ago

    Because spineless Establishment Dems have some obsession with “playing nice,” even with vicious MAGA Nazi enemies. I have a million questions, starting with:

    Why didn’t Biden have HitlerPig and his henchmen arrested within the first 60 seconds after his Inauguration?

    • TankovayaDiviziya@lemmy.world
      0·
      16 days ago

      Because spineless Establishment Dems have some obsession with "playing nice insider trading

      Ftfy.

      The Dem party is known as the party of insider trading after all!

    • Binturong@lemmy.caEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      This is the actual answer, cutting right through the smoke and mirrors and bullshit. Anyone who had the displeasure of reading through the flight logs that were available in their entirety online almost a year ago and probably still are: saw just what names pop up, often multiple times. This is the most bipartisan issue there ever was, so NOBODY in power wants to touch it.

    • ReiRose@lemmy.world
      0·
      15 days ago

      Because they’re assholes.

      Oh, you mean dems are assholes too…?

      Are you one of those ‘both parties are the same’ folks?

      • Swordgeek@lemmy.ca
        0·
        15 days ago

        I think you missed the point.

        Trump won’t release them because his name (and others in the GOP) is all over it and he could be facing actual prison time.

        The Democrats didn’t because…well, we know that Clinton at least was involved with Epstein. I’m sure many others were as well.

        Besides which, other powerful people outside of politics are likely to have put strong pressure on the US to keep them locked up (e.g. Prince Andrew).

        The problem isn’t one party or the other, and it’s not that “all parties are the same,” but in this particular case it IS almost guaranteed that too many people are named and shamed for any group in power to release them.

    • subversive_dev@lemmy.mlEnglish
      0·
      16 days ago

      No you see Joe Biden just loves institutions so much! Almost as much as he loves weirdly sniffing women’s heads

      • iridebikes@lemmy.world
        0·
        16 days ago

        Obsessed with the hair sniffing bullshit but is fine with Trump being the wingman of one of the planets most prolific pedophiles.

        • subversive_dev@lemmy.mlEnglish
          0·
          15 days ago

          Certainly, there is more evidence in the public record of trump being the worst sort of sex pest, and with Epstein specifically.

          Nevertheless “both sides” across at least three administrations chose to protect the elite pedophiles at the expense of the truth and the victims.

  • Quacksalber@sh.itjust.works
    0·
    17 days ago

    The give reason must be procedual, but the real reason is that the Epstein files undoubtedly also contain the names of democrats or democratic backers. They were more than happy doing nothing with those files.