|
 |
Good afternoon, Press Pass readers. Feeling burnt out by the news cycle? Solidarity! Many of us are. That’s one of the benefits of joining Bulwark+. We’re fortunate to have one of the best pro-democracy communities you can find online—and being a part of it is just one of the benefits of membership: With Bulwark+, you’ll also get access to all of our newsletters, videos, and other content keyed to what matters the most to you and can best help you stay sane. Use the link below to give it a try. If you do, leave a comment on today’s newsletter so I can reply to welcome you.
Today’s edition takes you into the halls of the Capitol, where GOP lawmakers ducked, divagated, and acted otherwise dumb about the lewd birthday card President Trump sent to child trafficker and rapist Jeffrey Epstein many years ago. To prevent them from having an easy out—“I haven’t seen it yet”—I printed the drawing and showed it to them, and their responses were interesting. I also have a bit of reporting on some strange vendor disclosures coming out of Congress. (Anybody know why an embattled Florida congressman would be contracting with the NRA’s former top lobbyist?) And lastly, the AI bubble might be starting to pop. All that and more, below.
GOP Senators Run From the Sight of Trump’s Epstein Card
“No it does not!” Moreno interjected. “Stop it.”
|
| |||||||||||||||
 |
Scrib-ghazi
Minutes after the Wall Street Journal published a letter signed by Donald Trump and addressed to Jeffrey Epstein for his fiftieth birthday, I ran into Sen. Bernie Moreno (R-Ohio) in the basement of the U.S. Senate.¹
Moreno is a freshman member. But that doesn’t mean he’s not savvy in the ways of evasion. And when I asked him about Trump’s Epstein card—in which the president’s signature is scribbled in the pubic region of a silhouette of a youngish-looking girl, which encloses a cryptic but very dirty-sounding imagined dialogue between the two men—the senator deflected using the same wording Trump did when trying to shut down a reporter’s question about Epstein a couple months ago: “Are you guys still talking about that stuff? I haven’t seen it, no.”
I handed him a printout of the letter so he could take a look.
“Oh, that’s not his signature,” Moreno said immediately.
I was surprised by how rapidly Moreno switched from professing ignorance of the card to claiming it was a forgery. But I saw it as an indication of how quickly talking points for defending the president were circulated on the Hill. Of course, those talking points don’t make any sense: As JVL noted in his newsletter today, believing the card is a forgery requires believing someone manufactured it and placed it in Epstein’s estate more than two decades ago when the birthday book was compiled, which was more than two years before he was first investigated. Also, claiming the signature doesn’t match goes against the vast evidence of comparable notes and writings from Trump back then that show a nearly identical autograph.
But Republicans I spoke with nevertheless seemed set on insisting that this was all just one more hoax meant to damage the president—Scrib-ghazi or QAhancock, if you will.
“Have you ever seen Donald Trump’s signature?” Moreno asked me, almost laughing. He pointed right at Trump’s name. “Does that look like his signature?”
Yes, I affirmed, it did.
“No it does not!” Moreno blithely interjected, sounding almost playful. “Stop it.”
I asked if he thought the signature had been forged. “Looks like it,” he said. “Also, could you imagine President Trump drawing a drawing like that? That’s not his style.” Moreno then popped into the elevator. I didn’t get to ask whether he thinks the president might have rendered a woman’s figure differently.
Moreno’s response to the latest Epstein revelation was not exactly a surprise. Congressional Republicans have perfected the art of denying reality or disclaiming knowledge of it to better protect Donald Trump. They have become so resolutely evasive that Capitol Hill reporters have for years been printing out physical copies of Donald Trump’s tweets to prevent them from getting out of addressing a particularly gross insult or unexpected policy announcement by claiming they haven’t seen it.
The practice declined a bit when Trump started making his insults and announcements primarily through official press releases and on-camera comments. But when the House Oversight Committee released the documents it obtained from Jeffrey Epstein’s estate yesterday afternoon, Capitol Hill reporters knew that some members would try to avoid offering any comment about the drawing of a naked woman and cryptic poem that Trump sent to the now-deceased child trafficker and rapist. So it felt like a good moment to bring back the printout practice.
But the Trump operation moves quickly. And by the time I had grabbed my warm copy off the printer tray and began holding it out to lawmakers in the halls of Congress, the Republican strategy had already started to take shape. Trump and his allies went all in on claiming the Wall Street Journal’s story was a hoax. Trump doesn’t draw pictures, they said. (Except when he does, of course—but, you know: not those kinds of pictures.) The signature didn’t look like his. Trump doesn’t even know how to read. How could he have written the card?²
But most of the lawmakers I approached with the card printout didn’t go so far as to deny everything outright. Instead, they begged off when I asked if they wanted to see it.
“I’m not gonna get sucked into that vortex,” said Sen. John Cornyn (R-Texas). Asked if he had seen it or wanted to, Cornyn added, “No. I don’t care.”