The Wall Street Journal reported Thursday that a note from former president Bill Clinton was included in a leather-bound album compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell for the 50th birthday of her sex trafficking partner Jeffrey Epstein in 2003. Written in Clinton’s handwriting, the note said:
It’s reassuring isn’t it, to have lasted as long, across all the years of learning and knowing, adventures and [illegible word], and also to have your childlike curiosity, the drive to make a difference and the solace of friends.
Clinton is known to have associated with Epstein, a multi-millionaire financier and trafficker of hundreds of underage girls for sexual exploitation by his ruling class friends among the political and corporate elite. President Donald Trump is among the 60 or so people who contributed a letter to the birthday album, sending a note with a hand-drawn outline of a naked woman, according to the Journal. The newspaper published an explosive article on Trump’s letter last week, after which Trump sued the Journal and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, for $10 billion, alleging defamation and claiming the story was a hoax.
Epstein was arrested in Florida in 2006 for the procurement of a minor for prostitution and solicitation of a prostitute. He was indicted and released on bond. Two years later, he pleaded guilty to solicitation of prostitution and procurement of a minor for prostitution as part of a plea bargain, serving 13 months in the Palm Beach County jail with an extremely liberal work release.
He was jailed on federal sex charges in 2019 and found dead in his Manhattan cell while awaiting trial, in what was officially ruled a suicide.
The Trump administration and the entire political system have been thrown into crisis by the return of the Epstein affair after Trump and his allies promised the MAGA base for years that they would release the FBI files on Epstein. Then, earlier this month, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that there was no client list, that Epstein’s death was, in fact, a suicide and the files would not be released.
It has since been reported that after the FBI conducted a frantic search of the files, Bondi informed Trump in May that his name appeared multiple times. The flip-flop on releasing the files has enraged many Trump voters and thrown his administration into disarray, and the crisis is only deepening.
It is a crisis not only of the Trump administration, but of the entire political system. Prominent Democrats as well as Republicans associated with the sexual predator, and the pervasive depravity of the ruling elite reflected in the Epstein case has been covered up for years. Not a single one of the hundreds of Epstein’s clients involved in abusing teenage girls has been named, let alone prosecuted and jailed.
Now, under conditions of mounting social opposition to Trump’s erection of a presidential dictatorship, his pogrom against immigrants and his frontal assault on social programs to pay for war, genocide and tax handouts to the super-rich, the Epstein case has become the focal point for a crisis with potentially revolutionary implications.
Others whose notes appear in Epstein’s birthday album include, according to the Journal, the billionaire co-founder of Apollo Global Management, Leon Black, media owner Mort Zuckerman, fashion designer Vera Wang, former chief of Victoria’s Secret Leslie Wexner, attorney Alan Dershowitz, and the current British ambassador to the United States, Peter Mandelson.
Trump’s desperate attempts to change the subject and distract attention from the Epstein affair are intensifying the political crisis. On Tuesday, Trump cited recent statements by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard to accuse former president Barack Obama of treason. Speaking of the outgoing Obama administration’s 2017 intelligence assessment that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to undermine the campaign of Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton and boost that of Trump, Trump said, “It would be President Obama. He started it… This was treason… They tried to steal the election.” Trump also cited as co-conspirators former president Joe Biden, former FBI Director James Comey, former CIA Director John Brennan, and former Director of National Intelligence James Clapper.
On Wednesday, Gabbard addressed the press from the White House briefing room. She announced the declassification and release of a 2017 report by Republicans on the Republican-led House Intelligence Committee that debunked the Obama-era intelligence report on alleged Russian interference in the 2016 election. Gabbard said the Republican report proved that Obama and company were guilty of a “treasonous conspiracy” and a “years-long coup” against the first Trump administration.
She said she was submitting the documents to the Department of Justice for criminal investigation, stating that “every person involved in this conspiracy must be investigated and prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.” On Thursday, Attorney General Bondi announced that a Justice Department “strike force” would investigate the allegations against Obama and the others, and two Republican senators, Lindsey Graham and John Cornyn, called for the appointment of a special counsel to lead the inquiry.
In a column in the New York Times headlined “The Line Trump Crossed by Accusing Obama of Treason,” legal commentator Jeffrey Toobin wrote that the official criminal investigation of a former president for treason “suggests that the nation has moved to a never-before-seen era of malevolence and reprisal.”
It is highly significant that the legal offensive against Obama and the Democrats focuses on the question of Russia and US foreign policy. It is on these issues that serious divisions between the Democrats and Trump exist, not on Trump’s attacks on the social conditions of the working class or his assault on immigrants and democratic rights.
The Epstein crisis has now brought to the fore the divisions in the ruling class over the proxy war against Russia in Ukraine, which the Democrats have consistently insisted must be escalated until Russia is defeated and reduced to a semi-colonial state, before moving on to war against China. Trump, on the other hand, has resisted such a policy, emphasizing instead more immediate preparations for war against China. Despite Trump’s recent shift vis-à-vis Russia, with his resumption of military aid to Ukraine, these tensions and conflicts continue to simmer, with concerns over whether Trump will follow through on his threats against Russia, as well as his refusal, thus far, to approve long-range offensive weapons for Ukraine.