The Storm Is Here

What if I told you QAnon was half right, but with a mind-blowing twist?

For years, we had to endure QAnon: a wild conspiracy, bought into by about a quarter of Americans, that insisted an elite group of pedophiles was operating at the highest levels of government. It promised that President Trump would arrive like a storm to expose and dismantle that evil ring of child sex traffickers.

Trump himself fed this conspiracy by sharing memes of himself portrayed as the coming storm.

But remember one of the key rules about Donald J. Trump: Every accusation is a confession.

You have to hand it to the 2025 writers for today’s plot twist. It turns out that, crazy as the QAnon conspiracy sounded, there really was an elite cabal of pedophiles at the highest levels of power, one that operated outside of the law and counted among its members tycoons, a prince, a prime minister and apparently a president.

But this wasn’t a bunch of Democrats operating inside a D.C. pizza parlor. QAnon and MAGA must come to terms with a mind-blowing twist. Rather than taking down the pedophile ring, Trump himself was part of it all along. The QAnon call came from inside a Florida mansion.

This is like the team of small town crime investigators learning in the middle of Season 2 that the mayor was behind it all. Damn it, it was the mayor all along.

Normal people, of course, have suspected this for some time, given how hard the White House sought to prevent release of the Epstein files. But now that a key tranche of it—some 20,000 documents from the Epstein estate itself—has been made public, the QAnon dam is breaking.

There’s a lot of information, much of it new, so it’s time to get out some corkboards, pictures and string so we can piece together what we know—and still don’t know—so far. Today’s discussion won’t cover everything (that would take a book or two), but it should help set the scene. Let’s begin by asking some basic questions and comparing them to what evidence we now have, as if we’re junior investigators on the case.

So did he do it?

This is the motherlode of all questions, of course: Did a sitting U.S. president himself participate in a pedophile ring run by Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell?

If he did, it would be the biggest political bombshell in U.S. history.

Already, the revelations were enough to take down a member of the British royal family. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor has been stripped of his title and his house as a result of his connection to Epstein and the sexual abuse allegations published posthumously by one of Epstein’s victims, Virginia Giuffre.

There are a lot of reasons to believe Trump is guilty of the same crimes and may have even conspired with Epstein and Maxwell to provide girls to the former prince. But there is no direct evidence of that—at least so far.

There is, however, one tantalizing email, released yesterday and highlighted by the House Oversight Democrats. And it gets us one step closer to proving that Trump was himself involved.

Back in 2011, when the FBI was beginning to suspect that the crimes Epstein committed in the early 2000s went well beyond Palm Beach, he and his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell exchanged emails about it.

Epstein wrote, “i want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump. [Virginia Giuffre] spent hours at my house with him,, he has never once been mentioned.”

As Heather Cox Richardson noted today in her column, the “dog that hasn’t barked”

referred to a story in which the fictional detective Sherlock Holmes solved a case by noting that a dog didn’t bark at a crime scene because it knew the perpetrator. The reference has come to mean an expected action or piece of evidence whose absence proves guilt.

In other words, Trump didn’t “bark,” presumably to the authorities, because Trump knew Epstein and was close to him. If he ever tried to speak up about Epstein, he would likely wind up implicating himself.

The email amounts to the two main co-defendants in the nation’s most notorious pedophile ring wondering between themselves why Trump hasn’t been pulled into the case yet.

Nothing to see here, right? Republicans were eager to note that Giuffre never accused Trump of any wrongdoing. So, in their minds, the email proves nothing.

They are wrong. While it may not directly prove that Trump participated in Epstein’s and Maxwell’s sex ring, in the email Epstein states that Trump spent time with a trafficking victim inside Epstein’s home. This was at a time when Trump was well aware of Maxwell’s attempts to recruit girls from Mar-a-Lago.

Sorry, but spending any amount of time, let alone hours, with an underage victim in the home of a known pedophile, who happens also to be your close friend, means you are already deep in the thick of it. Having the two later convicted criminals wonder why you’re not part of the investigation puts the lid on that pot of tea.

One more observation. The evidence for Trump’s direct participation may still exist among the Epstein files that haven’t been released yet. That may explain why the Justice Department reviewed them for any mention of Trump and has tried to stonewall their full release.

But short of that happening, we can still build the case by proving a few things that make crime suspects look very guilty.

Trump lied about what he actually knew

If a suspect lies about what he knows about his alleged criminal accomplices, that’s generally quite telling. Faced with such lies, investigators logically presume the suspect is hiding something and will pursue the trail even harder.

So let’s review what Trump has claimed about what he did know about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s sex trafficking. For this, I’ll first give a shout out to Judd Legum of Popular Info, who reminded us today of what Trump has claimed before:

On July 12, 2019, shortly after Epstein’s arrest on federal sex trafficking charges, Trump was asked by a reporter on the White House lawn if he suspected Epstein was sexually abusing underage girls:

REPORTER: With regard to Jeffrey Epstein, did you have any suspicions that he was molesting young women, underaged women?

TRUMP: No, I had no idea. I had no idea. I haven’t spoken to him in many, many years. But I had — I didn’t have no idea [sic].

That’s a flat denial. So if the evidence shows that Trump actually had direct knowledge that Epstein was molesting young girls, then this statement was a lie, and liars tend to hide the truth to protect either themselves or others.

But maybe Trump misspoke or misunderstood? No way. He got asked a related question as recently as this summer:

On July 31, 2025, Trump was asked if he knew why Epstein had been “taking“ young women who were employed at Trump’s spa at Mar-a-Lago. Two days earlier, Trump claimed that Epstein had “stolen“ Virginia Giuffre and other underage victims from the spa. Trump again denied knowledge of Epstein’s activities. “No, I didn’t know,” Trump said.

But look at this next email from Epstein to author Michael Wolff. It directly undermines this denial, suggesting that Trump lied twice to the American public.

There are some critical things still redacted here. But “mara lago” is mentioned first, right after a victim’s name. Epstein notes that Trump asked him to resign, but Epstein claims he was never a member.

Then the bombshell: “of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop.”

Ghislaine Maxwell was recruiting victims, including Giuffre, from Mar-a-Lago. Trump even admitted earlier this summer that he knew the recruiting was going on inside his club and was angry that girls were “stolen” from him. An interesting choice of word.

But the Epstein email directly contradicts Trump’s already implausible claim that he didn’t know what the girls were being used for. In fact, per the email, Trump “knew about the girls” because he “asked Ghislaine to stop.”

If Trump didn’t know what was going on, that request would make zero sense. Stop what exactly? It’s not like Maxwell was running her own health spa with a locker room where a “stolen” Giuffre could work as an attendant. Trump was friends with Maxwell and knew what she was doing.

When Trump told the country, twice, that he wasn’t aware of what was going on with Epstein, Maxwell and the girls, it was a lie. Even if Trump wasn’t directly participating (a dubious assumption), he did nothing to stop or bring attention to what he saw going on in his own locker room.

How on brand for the GOP.

The cover up

In addition to building the case that Trump actually knew about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s criminal sex trafficking and lied about that knowledge, there’s another way to nail the coffin shut here: the cover-up.

Guilty people, particularly those in power who have some say over investigations, often try to impede and obstruct justice. Such efforts demonstrate consciousness of guilt even when the underlying crime is harder to prove.

Here, we know that the Justice Department—specifically Pam Bondi, Kash Patel and Todd Blanche—has insisted there isn’t anything incriminating about anyone else in the Epstein files. That rather incredible statement was laid out in a memo that attempted to shut down the investigation for good this summer, claiming there was no “client list” and therefore there would be no further individuals named. (They meant Trump.)

They didn’t count on the possibility that evidence of Trump’s involvement could come from someplace other than their own highly protected files. In this case, the 20,000 documents released by the House Oversight Democrats came not from the Justice Department but through a subpoena to the Epstein estate.

Blanche visited Ghislaine Maxwell to interview her, itself a flashing warning sign. During that interview, Maxwell claimed that Epstein and Trump were not close friends and that she didn’t think she had ever seen Trump in Epstein’s house.

But in the “dog that hasn’t barked” email, Maxwell replied to Epstein saying that she had been thinking about the fact that Trump had been in Epstein’s home with Giuffre, which was probably why he hadn’t “barked” to investigators:

Blanche undoubtedly had the above email at the time he was interviewing Maxwell. It would have been part of the Justice Department files and almost certainly one of the documents flagged in the Department’s rush to review and tag the files for any mention of Trump.

Typically, a prosecutor or investigator bent on uncovering the truth would ask a basic follow up question, something along the lines of, “You say you ‘don’t think they were close friends’ and you ‘don’t recall ever seeing him in his house.’ And yet in this email reply to Epstein, you say you’ve been thinking about the fact that Trump was in Epstein’s house with Giuffre. Can you explain the discrepancy?”

The reality is, Blanche was there not to get to the truth but to help Ghislaine obstruct it. In exchange for her cooperation, she was moved to a minimum security prison, was given a puppy to play with, and is now preparing to seek commutation of her sentence.

It bears repeating that the one living witness who can peg Trump to all of this is being offered sweetheart deals to play along.

Bondi grew combative during her appearance before Congress, refusing to answer basic questions about what she had seen in the files. As I wrote back in October,

[W]hen Bondi was asked by Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) whether the FBI found the referenced photographs of Trump with half-naked young women in their search of the Epstein safe or property, or whether she’s seen any such thing, Bondi really went off the rails.

She accused Sen. Whitehouse of making “salacious remarks trying to slander President Trump” and then tried to change the subject to something completely unrelated.

Sen. Whitehouse ignored the dodge and asked again, and this time Bondi stared at Sen. Whitehouse slack-jawed, simply not answering the question.

Kash Patel also failed to answer basic questions about who else was involved in Epstein’s trafficking ring. As I reported back in September, he told Senator Kennedy this:

Kennedy: Who if anyone did Epstein traffic these young women to, besides himself?

Kash Patel : There is no credible information—none, if there were, I would bring the case yesterday—that he trafficked to other individuals.

And as I asked at the time,

But if that were true, why is Ghislaine Maxwell in prison for sex trafficking? What about all the statements by the victims detailing how they were trafficked and the list of people they have compiled who were involved?

Everything from Bondi, Patel and Blanche to date has been specifically designed to slow down inquiries, deflect the truth, and ultimately, obscure it. Even up until yesterday, the White House was actively attempting to prevent a floor vote on the Epstein files Transparency Act by unsuccessfully pressuring GOP signers, including Reps. Nancy Mace (R-SC) and Lauren Boebert (R-CO), to take their names off the discharge petition. (That effort failed, and the signatories’ names, per Rep. Thomas Massie (R-KY), who reportedly spoke to the Parliamentarian to confirm, cannot be changed at this point.)

I would be remiss not to mention the ultimate cover-up possibility, which makes many feel itchy because it’s so wild: that Jeffrey Epstein’s death while under Attorney General Bill Barr’s watch was not actually a suicide. Here, there’s a lot of smoke: an edited surveillance video, missing footage, guards who weren’t present and were charged with falsifying wellness check records, and even evidence that unreported third parties may have gone up and down the stairwell to Epstein’s cell.

I won’t dive down that rabbit hole again today. But I will point out that the new documents add something quite interesting: a possible strong motive for wanting Epstein dead.

The blackmail email and Epstein’s Russia overtures

A third email released by the Oversight Dems is a whopper, but it takes some explaining.

It’s an email exchange between Epstein and author Michael Wolff dated December 2015. Trump is about to go on the debate stage during the GOP primaries. Wolff tells Epstein he has heard that CNN might ask Trump about his relationship with Epstein, either on air or afterwards.

Epstein responds wondering what the response would be if Wolff could craft it for him.

The answer is quite interesting and amounts to a threat to blackmail Trump. Wolff says he thinks Epstein should not say anything and “let him hang himself.” That is to say, if Trump denies that he has ever been on the plane or to the house, that gives Epstein something valuable PR-wise: “political currency.” That could be used either to hurt Trump (by, for example, contradicting his statement to the press that he’s never been on the plane or to the house) or to help Trump (thereby “generating a debt” because Epstein helped him win).

Either way, the blackmail only works if the underlying fact is true: that Trump actually was on the plane or at the house. Both Wolff and Epstein were acting as though they had the goods on Trump and could use it to advantage. And the only “goods” here would be Trump’s involvement in the Epstein pedophile ring.

It gets stranger. After Trump won the election, Epstein tried to use what he had on Trump as a bargaining chip with the Russians. (Yes, we have come to that point in the story.) Per reporting by Politico, Epstein sent the following email:

“I think you might suggest to putin that lavrov can get insight on talking to me,” Epstein wrote in a June 24, 2018, email to Thorbjorn Jagland, a former prime minister of Norway who was leading the Council of Europe at the time of the exchange. Lavrov was an apparent reference to Sergei Lavrov, Russia’s longtime foreign minister.

This wasn’t some isolated attempt by Epstein to leverage what he knew about Trump. Again, per Politico:

Epstein indicated he had previously talked about Trump with Vitaly Churkin, Russia’s forceful ambassador to the United Nations, before Churkin died in 2017.

“Churkin was great,” Epstein, the late convicted sex offender, wrote. “He understood trump after our conversations. it is not complex. he must be seen to get something its that simple.”

Notably, the attempt to get a message to Lavrov about Trump occurred just one month before the fateful meeting between Trump and Putin in Helsinki in July of 2018.

And now we have to wonder: Did Putin receive kompromat about Trump’s involvement with Epstein in advance of that meeting? The leaders spoke in Helsinki for two hours in a private closed-door session, after which Trump took Russia’s side against U.S. intelligence which claimed Russia had interfered in the U.S. election.

The Russia connection shows that just when you think this story can’t get any crazier, it does. If Epstein was out there actually offering dirt on Trump to Russian agents, as the emails state, then he became a far higher risk than ever before, not just to Trump but to the whole country. Such loose lips are not generally welcome and seldom stay blabbing for long.

I’ll say one last thing in what admittedly is already a long discussion. What we saw yesterday is still likely just a taste of what other evidence exists. The Justice Department is still sitting on troves of evidence, and it’s now clear that Pam Bondi, Kash Patel and Todd Blanche, no doubt at the direction of Trump, whether implicitly or expressly, have all actively sought to prevent the truth from coming out.

The discharge petition, set to bring the bill to the House floor, will trigger another crisis within the GOP. It is bound to pass the House, and then the Senate GOP will have to decide whether to filibuster it and be labeled the party of pedophile protectors, just at the moment fresh evidence of Trump’s deep involvement has emerged.

QAnon itself could hardly have concocted a more bizarre, twisted and shocking story. But at least one thing now is certain: It is not going away any time soon.