The Grammar of a Scandal
Monday, July 21st, 2025
Bill Bonner, from Poitou, France
‘How to make an airplane totally invisible’...began a post from Elon Musk.
There followed a picture of a fighter jet with Jeffrey Epstein’s client list stuck to it.
L’Affaire Epstein refuses to die.
Over the weekend came this news. USA Today:
Donald Trump is seeking $10 billion in damages in a lawsuit against the Wall Street Journal, its parent company, owner and two reporters claiming libel and slander for publishing an article saying the future president wrote a lewd letter to Jeffrey Epstein for his 50th birthday.
The Journal’s story appeared last week:
Jeffrey Epstein’s Friends Sent Him Bawdy Letters for a 50th Birthday Album. One Was From Donald Trump.
According to the WSJ, Trump’s birthday wish included a drawing of a naked woman with ‘Donald’ etched in the pubic hair.
Not true, said the Donald. “I never wrote a picture in my life.”
Within hours, his denial turned out to be not true. The Independent:
The president declared, “I don’t draw pictures.”
Analysts were quick to pounce on Trump’s denial, including Media Matters chief Angelo Carusone, who told MSNBC, “I can think of three [Trump sketches] off the top of my head that were auctioned.”
At least five sketches from the late 1990s and early 2000s have been sold at auction.
Is this worth thinking about? Like the Dreyfus affair in France, or the Aaron Burr case in the US...Watergate Break-in?
Dreyfus was a military officer accused of betraying France. He was eventually found innocent. But the accusation revealed a deep vein of antisemitism, particularly in the army, and divided public opinion.
Aaron Burr was accused of launching an insurrection against the USA. The charges were many...and varied. He too was found innocent. But patriotic mobs threatened to hang him. Later, he shot Alexander Hamilton in a duel and was forever disgraced.
The Watergate saga is well known to us all. A group of inept CIA/Republican spooks broke into the Democratic party headquarters hoping to score some useful intel. They were arrested.
It would have been a minor B&E crime story, except that the press began asking questions: How far up did the planning go? What did Nixon know?
“I am not a crook,” Nixon insisted, but the tide of sentiment turned against him and he resigned.
That was 1973...more than half a century ago. Since then, the nation’s ideas and attitudes have evolved. Voters and news-spinners have different hot-buttons and different no-nos. They have no nose for corruption or sex peccadillos, but they gag on even a whiff of ‘antisemitism.’
While all the public figures deny any wrongdoing, Jeffrey Epstein was up to something. Jean-Luc Brunel, one of ‘regulars’ on his ‘Lolita Express,’ committed suicide. Ghislaine Maxwell is serving a 20-year jail sentence. And Epstein was [probably] strangled. (A former occupant of the cell where Epstein died said hanging himself would have been physically ‘impossible.’) Either something pretty bad was going on...or someone owes these people a big apology.
The government says it was a sex-trafficking story. But it is like an incomplete sentence. We have the subject — the traffickers. We have the verb — the trafficking. What we lack is the predicate...notably, the indirect object; to whom were these girls trafficked? Not a single person (of the hundreds?) to whom the girls were trafficked has been charged.
And Epstein had a vast fortune, with a townhouse in Manhattan, a ranch in New Mexico, and an entire island (with a staff of 70) in the Virgin Islands. But where did the money come from? And what was the point of photographing rich and powerful men with under-aged girls?
Most likely, Tucker Carlson is right. Epstein got his money from the Israeli intelligence community. And most likely, it was an old-fashioned honey pot trap. But accusing Israel of anything is a no-fly zone for the press and the politicians. So, this will remain a sex story...and it will probably fade away…like Jennifer Flowers and Stormy Daniels.
In the interest of full disclosure, our name is not on ‘the list.’ We never got an invitation!
Regards,
Bill Bonner
Research Note, by Dan Denning
On a recent chart, $39 for an ounce of silver seems like a big number. The big number everyone remembers is around $50/ounce in early 1980. THAT number was hit after the Hunt brother infamously tried to corner the silver market. And now?
We published our latest Research Report on Friday. It was about silver, by way of looking at one important idea: major monetary resets in American history happy on a regular, cyclical basis. We are due for one now, if our research is correct.
Also, based on the inflation-adjusted chart above, $39/oz is not that big a number at all. The inflation-adjusted 1980 high for silver is closer to $194/oz, or just over 390% higher than Friday’s closing price.
There’s no guarantee the price will come anything close to that high in this cycle. But if it does, and speculators can leverage the gain in the metal with mining stock…look out above.
Paying subscribers to our research can read The Silver Report here.
You know, I sit here wondering what could possibly have have happened to the Wall Street Journal... How a once respected, thoroughly reliable, "just the facts, ma'am" type of outfit, generally mired in over-analysis of the financial life of the nation, went "bad".
Perhaps it's as Bill says: when the money goes, everything goes. When Wall Street ceased to be a true generator of capital of the engine of the nation and became just a pump-and-dump playpen of special interests and the 1%, the Wall Street Journal lost its way, too, and all a result of the literal ocean-turned-tsunami of printed "money".
Still, one thing struck me today, when Bill mentioned President Trump's lawsuit against the WSJ and "it's parent company" et al. The WSJ was always Dow-Jones captive, but most, if not all, "papers" were independent and privately owned, just like businesses, banks, and other facets and pieces of America, which reflected the nature of the country herself. Now? It's just rampant corporatism and mega-government, Constitution be damned.
We are in a pickle. Maybe failure and restart is the better outcome. Best always. PM
Bill mentions the press digging in to the Watergate scandal. But has anyone seen any "free press" investigation into the means by which Epstein acquired his wealth and why he was maintaining incriminating evidence against the visitors to his resort?