Candace Owens sets the record straight

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I ran across this amusing video from right-wing nutjob and conspiracy theorist Candace Owens:

You have to admire the confidence with which she says the most idiotic things.

Here’s a sample where she’s talking about the moon landings (at 21:50 in the video):

…Bill Maher made fun of me for this, like, a little tweet that I said that, I don’t know, the moon landing just seems weird and whenever the media like, tries to make you feel like you’re stupid, that’s usually for me like, the first breadcrumb that, like, you’re on to something, because they’re, that’s what they are trained to do. They’re trained to sit here and tell you “You’re ridiculous, you don’t believe this.”

But then I decided to read this document, it was 119 pages, and I know there’s a book, too, A Funny Thing Happened on the Way to the Moon, and he just broke down the science in a way that was very digestible so I didn’t have a non-expert problem. So there’s a basic thing that you guys can do if you’re, like, somebody who’s like, “It had to have happened, the moon landing,” um, what you can do is look up, uh — I’m calling this the firmament, but it’s the, um, uh, what is the, uh, belt the, uh, 200 miles out, you hit the Van Allen belt.

Okay, so there’s a Van Allen belt. So we have never gone beyond that belt, right? There’s been no human that’s gone beond belt since the moon landings, allegedly. And not even Elon Musk when they go out to space they have to stay like, there is a space station, but like once you get 200 miles out you hit the Van Allen belt which has an incredible amount of radiation. NASA has said, like, in order for us to get through it we’d have to have cement blocks around someone.

So I want you to just Google, if you’re watching this, the temperature of the Van Allen belt. Okay? Just Google that, and you’re going to get something like, at the lowest points in the Van Allen belt it’s, I think, 3,000 Kelvin and at the highest points it’s like 30,000 Kelvin and then I want you to Google what material the shuttle was made out of, and then I want you to Google at what temperature that would just burn and you’re just going to laugh out loud. This literally doesn’t make sense, that an aluminum alloy could have gone through the Van Allen belt for an hour and a half or 59 minutes. It just couldn’t have happened, literally can’t happen, there’s no explanation for it. They just don’t even talk about it, they don’t like talking about the Van Allen belt because that part makes entirely no sense…

Sorry, Candace, but you definitely have a “non-expert problem”.

143 thoughts on “Candace Owens sets the record straight”

  1. At 31:20 she explains why she doesn’t think dinosaurs are real and why the theory of evolution is “a faith, buddy”.

  2. Anti-space. Flat earth. Anti-vaccine. Pro-Hitler Nazi. Brigitte Macron is trans. Etc. She keeps landing on fascinating positions.

    She is also an Epstein apologist, thus a pro-sex-trafficking female political commentator. Everything is on the table.

  3. Here she explains that paleontologists are part of an anti-Christ, pro-Satan conspiracy fabricating dinosaur fossils:

    I’m like, it’s funny because people will literally say they don’t believe in God but then tell them, like, “dinosaurs aren’t real”, and they fall apart. I’m like “Okay, so they’re just roaming the planet” and I was like “That’s really interesting.”

    But then because I got into and very much subscribe and believe and know to be true that it is, there is a Christ conspiracy that’s happening right now, which is the intentional removal of Christ because they want people not to believe in God but instead to believe in humans. Well, that is what evolutionary theory was about, because rather than making human beings believe that they had a Creator — there was no concept of a dinosaur until 1850.

    That’s very recent, right? That’s the first time they were like “We actually think that there were these reptiles that are roaming the planet” and then within that same decade they were like “Dinosaur bones!” and they started finding them everywhere. I’m like, okay, so nobody found this, and then like suddenly there’s entire museums and in China they have actually been caught manufacturing dinosaur bones many times over.

    And it is the case that dinosaur bones for whatever reason are always just found by the paleontologists. Like, it’s not like you and me walking outside and like “Hey, a dinosaur bone!” and, um, or by somebody who’s related to a paleontologist. It’s, it’s very strange. Anyways, I don’t know for sure…

    Well, they want you to believe that God isn’t real, that, like, the theory of evolution, like you’re an ape, what happened was just over time, like you used to be a little chimpanzee, but then with time, this is why you learned about the theory of evolution: Homo sapiens, Australopithecus, but then we were Homo erectus and now you’re a human being…

    …that is what these people were pushing, and so once you start to realize that Satanism is real, that these people people who created everything that we view in Western society to be real, believed in Satan, right? They know God’s real, and yet they’re convincing everyone that God isn’t, and so when you speak to people that are super rational out of school, they’re like “Well, the evolutionary theory makes sense.” So it makes sense to you that you started as a chimpanzee? Like, “That’s a faith, buddy. It makes sense to you.”

    And if you say to them “Of course you went to the moon”, then you start talking about basic science but they don’t actually know — they can’t talk to you about the Van Allen belt. They don’t know anything. it’s a faith…

  4. She thinks the Van Allen belt is the biblical ‘firmament’:

    And if you say to them “Of course you went to the moon”, then you start talking about basic science but they don’t actually know — they can’t talk to you about the Van Allen belt. They don’t know anything. It’s a faith. Like, they have asserted and what’s interesting, even that — going to the moon — the Bible talks about a firmament, and if the firmament in the Bible — if, if you look at that you would go “Okay well it says that as below, so above” and this is how God created. So if that — if the Bible is real, which I know in my heart to be true — there’s no way we got past this firmament…

    Well, the Bible says that there are waters both below and above the firmament:

    And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. [Genesis 1:7]

    So I guess if the astronauts survived the scorching temperatures of the Van Allen belt they would drown in “the waters above”.

  5. She thinks the Van Allen belt is the biblical ‘firmament’:

    And if you say to them “Of course you went to the moon”, then you start talking about basic science but they don’t actually know — they can’t talk to you about the Van Allen belt. They don’t know anything. It’s a faith. Like, they have asserted and what’s interesting, even that — going to the moon — the Bible talks about a firmament, and if the firmament in the Bible — if, if you look at that you would go “Okay well it says that as below, so above” and this is how God created. So if that — if the Bible is real, which I know in my heart to be true — there’s no way we got past this firmament…

    Well, the Bible says that there are waters both below and above the firmament:

    And God made the firmament, and divided the waters which were under the firmament from the waters which were above the firmament: and it was so. [Genesis 1:7]

    So I guess if the astronauts survived the scorching temperatures of the Van Allen belt they would drown in “the waters above”. I’m becoming more and more convinced that the moon landings were fake.

  6. Politics produces strange bedfellows. Politics regarding Israel the strangest.

  7. Around 46:30, Jack Neel asks Candace how she thinks she can maximize her impact on the culture, and she replies:

    I’m doing it right now. I think we are doing it right now. All it’s going to take are people that are watching this — and you’re going to get a percentage of them that think it’s all crazy, you’re going to get some journalists that go “Oh my gosh!”, freaking out because they’re on the payroll of the CIA and they’ve got to write articles about this discussion. The overwhelming majority are going to be interested and they’re going to just Google “Van Allen belt”. It only takes one thing to go “Okay, she’s right about that” and then it will grow by itself. I’m all about just, like, spreading the seeds, and I think that’s how we impact culture. By having the courage to have the discussions. Having the courage to walk away from those big sponsorships, and those red carpets that would come, and those magazine covers that would come if I had only just said Black lives matter and pedaled all the leftist talking points and said “The government can save us from Covid!” and “Stay at home, save lives”. I’m good. I want people to wake up to the, the tyranny that’s happening right now because I think we have a very small window of opportunity to reverse it.

    OK, everyone. Google ‘Van Allen belt’, put on your tinfoil hats, ignore the CIA-employed journalists and join Candace in… whatever reality she’s inhabiting.

  9. Epstein brings out the theologian in all of us.

    What we have for certain is a few photographs of famous people hobnobbing with Epstein and his cohorts, and some documents purporting to be flight logs. I believe he pled guilty to something in 2004, and somehow still attracted the attention of celebrities. We are told there are affidavits from victims, but we haven’t seen them.

    All very odd.

    From these scraps we have created universes. Creation myths.

  10. Candace Owens on X today:

    Barack Obama wrote the Epstein files?
    LOL

    This is outright embarassing.

    When even Candace “the moon landings were a hoax” Owens is laughing at your conspiracy claims, you know that you’ve lost all credibility.

  11. petrushka: All very odd.

    It’s all very odd for you because you don’t follow facts and sources of information. You follow Trump and his conspiratorial pundits who lie. Their idea is to confuse you so you don’t know what to believe. It hasn’t taken much because you are a willing accomplice and you were already pre-confused.

  12. Erik writes, “you were already pre-confused.”

    That’s a good phrase! I’ll remember that.

  13. aleta:
    Erik writes, “you were already pre-confused.”

    That’s a good phrase! I’ll remember that.

    Bless your heart.

  14. Owens, today:

    The Wall Street Journal piece seems so beyond fake that it makes you wonder why on earth they would move to publish it.

    They don’t normally engage in sleazy hit pieces so what was the purpose of this?

    Interesting how many MAGA and MAGA-adjacent people are claiming that the letter is fake. Do they really think the WSJ fabricated this or didn’t vet the source?

  15. keiths:

    Interesting how many MAGA and MAGA-adjacent people are claiming that the letter is fake. Do they really think the WSJ fabricated this or didn’t vet the source?

    Yes, of course. They think they are journalists, and by projection what journalists must do is Make Stuff Up. This so-called letter must be fake because it doesn’t fit the MAGA narrative. The WSJ has become part of the Deep State, which has happened because Murdoch now hates Trump.

    And yeah, Trump has sued them for defamation or something like that. If he wins, that’s proof it’s fake. If he loses, that’s proof the left wing judges are corrupt.

  16. Flint:

    And yeah, Trump has sued them for defamation or something like that.

    I wonder if he’ll chicken out and withdraw the suit. Discovery would be brutal for him. He’s a disaster in depositions, judging by the E Jean Carroll case.

  17. Trump sues WSJ and owner Rupert Murdoch over Epstein story

    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.

    Trump filed the lawsuit in Miami federal court on July 18 and named as the plaintiffs Dow Jones & Company, News Corporation, owner Rupert Murdoch and reporters…

    Oh dear, so he is really suing. And for $10 billion because he always gets numbers wrong.

    Trump is not really one of Epstein’s clients. Trump was in the same business as Esptein. Epstein’s business was high-profile pimping. Trump ran beauty pageants – same business. And that’s when the two were friends, sharing the girls, e.g. Epstein/Maxwell picked up Giuffre (the most publicised victim) from Mar-a-Lago. And the business was larger. In earlier Epstein-related lawsuits at least Jean-Luc Brunel has come up, an international high-profile sex trafficker in his own right, who ended up with the same fate as Epstein. And I’m saying that Trump was also a sex trafficker during his beauty pageant days, functioning also as a predator of his little beauties, something that he has openly bragged about – it’s the kind of reputation that Trump himself pushed for.

    There is no lie, fake news, libel, slander or defamation against Trump here. It is all open facts. So what the hell is Trump suing for? He wrote a birthday letter to Epstein. (As did Alan Dershowitz.) He drew the doodle (which WSJ did not publish, btw, but Trump used to be a known doodler, even framing them for his friends or for selling) Trump is a pimp alongside with Epstein. In a lawsuit this is all going to be litigated and even those who never wanted to know will know about it. What is Trump doing? If he wanted these matters to go away, he’d have to shut up about it and create more distractions, e.g. attack Iran again, sign a deal with Putin giving Ukraine away, etc. Distractions always worked before.

    It seems that Trump finally lost his mind for good. The mental acuity of our dear stable genius is no longer there. He has lost his creative capacity for distractions and instead he is suing facts, causing more Epstein-related facts about him be documented in courts and reported by newspapers. Even Charlie “I’m done with the Epstein topic because of my friends in the administration” Kirk cannot avoid going on about Epstein again when Trump files lawsuits like this.

  18. Funny when people use the term du jour “lawfare” to describe suits against Trump, when he himself is a prolific wielder of the legal hammer – particularly against media companies, it seems. But the Streisand Effect is certainly coming into play.

  19. Allan:

    Funny when people use the term du jour “lawfare” to describe suits against Trump, when he himself is a prolific wielder of the legal hammer…

    He’s filed some 1,600 lawsuits and been a defendant in 4,000 more. You have to wonder if that’s some kind of record.

  20. keiths: You have to wonder if that’s some kind of record.

    Googling it brought up a Slate article that says they tried to Google it too, and the best they got is that Guinness Book of World Records awarded the title to “Jonathan Lee Riches, who has filed over 4,000 lawsuits, according to ABC News. When the Guinness Book of World Records awarded him the world record for most lawsuits filed, he—guess what?—sued them.”

    It’s worth reading because it gives a good overview of Trump’s most important cases https://slate.com/news-and-politics/2023/05/has-anyone-been-sued-more-than-trump.html

  22. petrushka:
    Should be easy to produce the original document.

    It is as easy as Obama’s birth certificate – you won’t believe your lying eyes when Trump says it’s a hoax.

    Edit: Trump says, “I could stand in the middle of Fifth Avenue and shoot somebody, and I wouldn’t lose any voters,” and his cultish followers follow, always and forever.

  23. Besides Trump’s “I never wrote a picture in my life” claim, which fell apart, some MAGA people are claiming the Epstein letter can’t be real because Trump’s vocabulary is too limited for him to have used the word ‘enigma’, lol. They have a point about Trump’s limited vocabulary — this is a guy who only recently discovered the word ‘groceries’ and thinks he invented the word ‘equalize’, after all — but it turns out that ‘enigma’ actually is part of his vocabulary.

    I wonder how cult member colewd is dealing with all of this Epstein stuff. We haven’t heard from him for a while.

  25. petrushka:

    I wonder if WSJ has considered the possibility that Trump has the book.

    Here’s what the WSJ has said:

    Pages from the leather-bound album—assembled before Epstein was first arrested in 2006—are among the documents examined by Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein and Maxwell years ago, according to people who have reviewed the pages. It’s unclear if any of the pages are part of the Trump administration’s recent review.

  26. Some astonishing numbers from a July 11-14 Economist/YouGov poll: 67% of respondents think that the government is covering up evidence related to the Epstein case, including 59% of Trump voters. Only 8% say no (12% of Trump voters). Wow.

    View post on imgur.com

  27. Flint, in the tariff thread:

    Reports now tell us that hundreds of DOJ employees have spent thousands of hours combing through this treasure trove – AND that they have been instructed to “flag” any references to Trump, whatever that means.

    From Dick Durbin’s letter to Pam Bondi:

    According to information my office received, you then pressured the FBI to put approximately 1,000 personnel in its Information Management Division (IMD), including the Record/Information Dissemination Section (RIDS), which handles all requests submitted by the public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Privacy Act, on 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in order to produce more documents that could then be released on an arbitrarily short deadline. This effort, which reportedly took place from March 14 through the end of March, was haphazardly supplemented by hundreds of FBI New York Field Office personnel, many of whom lacked the expertise to identify statutorily protected information regarding child victims and child witnesses or properly handle FOIA requests. My office was told that these personnel were instructed to “flag” any records in which President Trump was mentioned.

    A thousand people in 24-hour shifts, instructed to flag anything in which Trump appeared.

  28. And all this potential trump/Epstein evidence was ignored while Comey was in charge of the FBI? A thousand FBI agents looking for dirt, many of whom hate Trump?

    Recall that when the head of the New York office was forced out, his staff gave him a standing ovation.

    Epstein was protected for decades, but not by Trump.

  29. Recall that Trump is so paranoid that he doesn’t use email. If he says a card from him doesn’t exist, it probably doesn’t.

    If it ever existed, it won’t have his fingerprints on it.

  30. petrushka,

    Recall that you are always wrong about everything and never right about anything.

    Trump and Murdoch had a personal fight just before the publishing of this WSJ story. Trump threatened he would sue. Then Murdoch, knowing this, went on and published it.

    The story is not just about Trump’s birthday letter to Epstein. There were more letters by others, e.g. Alan Dershowitz (again). Those other birthday-party people are not denying anything and are not suing. It does not make sense to sue easy physical facts.

    Trump is suing because he lost his mind. If he comes back to his senses, he will withdraw his lawsuit. If he does not come back to his senses, he will lose. Murdoch will easily outlawyer him. Trump is, at this stage, without lawyers worth the name. All Trump’s lawyers of the interim years had just one tactic – delay. They lost him everything legally, and the best that the current ones (Pam Bondi) have done for him is coverups, which is what is going on now.

    The only rational explanation for why Trump is suing is that he expects Murdoch to cave the way ABC and CBS caved despite facts. Given the facts, ABC and CBS would have easily won in court. Also, given the facts, WSJ and Murdoch will win, easily, and Trump will lose totally. In my assessment the circumstances that caused ABC and CBS to cave despite facts are not there for Murdoch.

  31. petrushka,

    If he says a card from him doesn’t exist, it probably doesn’t.

    If he says Santa Claus doesn’t exist, he probably does.

  32. It’s actually a weird thing to fabricate. If I were going for a Trump-a-like tone, I wouldn’t go for that weird dialogue. I asked Grok to have a go.

    Jeffrey, Happy Birthday, folks! Tremendous day for a tremendous guy, nobody does birthdays better, believe me. You’re a fantastic friend, always the best parties, the best people, everyone says so. Keep winning, keep being great, nobody does it like you, Jeffrey! Big celebration, the best, enjoy your day, it’ll be YUGE!

  33. Erik: The story is not just about Trump’s birthday letter to Epstein. There were more letters by others, e.g. Alan Dershowitz (again). Those other birthday-party people are not denying anything and are not suing. It does not make sense to sue easy physical facts.

    I doubt if there are any physical facts available. And I doubt if the newspaper can produce any witnesses.

    So it boils down to the wording of the story and whether it meets the criteria for libel.

    But this illustrates the quandary regarding producing the List.

    There are people who associated with Epstein, and people who committed crimes. I doubt if the sets are identical. The interesting question is why the victims haven’t pressed charges.

    I can guess, because I’ve seen a dozen victims not press charges.

  34. petrushka,

    Of course. Trump could shoot someone on the Fifth Avenue and you would not budge. Also, Trump could nuke WSJ headquarters and you would not budge. You are always with the Fuhrer, nevermind the facts.

    Edit:

    petrushka: The interesting question is why the victims haven’t pressed charges.

    Why do you hate facts? Or is it rather that you enjoy being a factless brainwashed loon?

    The victims *have* pressed charges. They got Epstein convicted or locked up at least twice. And they got Ghislaine Maxwell locked up too.

    However, a certain federal attorney got Epstein a non-prosecution agreement the first time round, so that to the victims it looked like Epstein was behind bars, while in reality he walked free every day. This federal attorney was promoted to Trump’s first administration. Later a certain Florida AG avoided prosecuting Epstein, and this person is now in second Trump’s administration. This is the game the victims are up against.

    You are always wrong about everything. You consistently brush facts, knowledge, reason, and morality aside.

  35. c69% of rapes go unreported, and about 1% of those that are reported result in conviction. That’s in general, without even factoring in the wealth and publicity angle, and the likelihood of intimate probing of one’s sexual past for the amusement of the world. The deck is very heavily stacked against women, and the.willingness of some to give billionaires a pass plays even further into that. Thank God the Christian Right have objective morality to guide them, or who knows what monster they might inflict upon us.

    I have a hunch that, had Trump not wrapped himself in the Republican flag, none of his current vigorous defenders would be pretzel-ing themselves to get him off the hook. Let the playboy get his desserts, they would say.

  36. Allan Miller,

    Additionally, in USA it seems to be required that jury members be conspiratorial fact-denying loons with broken moral compass. Such as petrushka, who has proudly presented here his history of jury duties and said the following,

    petrushka: I have personal knowledge that child sex abuse is almost unprosecutable.

    Naturally, child sex abuse is a very tough case for a jury member who thinks “The interesting question is why the victims haven’t pressed charges,” even though the case is right in front of him in the courtroom, i.e. the victims *are* pressing charges. This is how our petrushka functions.

  37. In 2008, representatives for two of Epstein’s victims filed a lawsuit in federal court aiming to vacate the federal non-prosecution agreement on the grounds that it violated the CVRA.[30] For more than a decade, the U.S. Attorney’s office denied that it acted in violation of victims’ rights laws and argued that the CVRA did not apply in the Epstein case.[32] The government’s contention that the CVRA did not apply was based on questions of timing (whether or not CVRA applied prior to filing of federal charges), relevance (whether the CVRA applied to non-prosecution agreements), and jurisdiction (whether the case should be considered a federal case or a state case under the CVRA). The court rejected those arguments in the February 21, 2019 ruling, finding that the CVRA did in fact apply and that victims should have been notified of the Epstein non-prosecution agreement in advance of its signing, to afford them the opportunity to influence its terms.

    …

    On July 6, 2019, Epstein was arrested by the FBI-NYPD Crimes Against Children Task Force on sex trafficking charges stemming from activities alleged to have occurred in 2002–2005.[40]
    Amid criticism of his mishandling of the Epstein case, Acosta resigned his role as Secretary of Labor effective July 19, 2019, after a public outcry.[41] When he was vetted for his cabinet post in the Trump administration, Acosta stated “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone.”

    -Wikipedia

    No one gets off free on this one. Note that 2008-2016 was Obama’s presidency. It’s almost as if no one in power wants this to see the light of day. That’s why I said Mutually Assured Destruction.

    My personal conspiracy theory is that Epstein was created by the intelligence communities of two countries. Speculation, but not idle. Dershowitz has not specifically said that Epstein worked for Mossad, but he has said that Mossad has blackmail info on hundreds of politicians.

  38. Erik: In my assessment the circumstances that caused ABC and CBS to cave despite facts are not there for Murdoch.

    I agree. There are several circumstances in play here. One is access to the White House press pool – no pay, no access. Another big one is the CBS-Skydance proposed merger, worth an estimated $8 billion – to be approved or denied by Trump. Compared with that kind of money, losing Colbert is peanuts. Then there are surely lots of things that give Trump leverage, both positive (like exclusive access to juicy stories) and negative (like yanking their license). We should always bear in mind that Trump’s chosen punishment of the fake news media need not be legal – SCOTUS says illegal is just fine if Trump does it.

    I have no idea how much leverage Trump has over the Murdoch empire.

  39. Allan Miller:
    c69% of rapes go unreported, and about 1% of those that are reported result in conviction. That’s in general, without even factoring in the wealth and publicity angle, and the likelihood of intimate probing of one’s sexual past for the amusement of the world. The deck is very heavily stacked against women, and the.willingness of some to give billionaires a pass plays even further into that. Thank God the Christian Right have objective morality to guide them, or who knows what monster they might inflict upon us.

    I have a hunch that, had Trump not wrapped himself in the Republican flag, none of his current vigorous defenders would be pretzel-ing themselves to get him off the hook. Let the playboy get his desserts, they would say.

    Oh please. Mueller spent three years with unlimited funds and unlimited power of subpoena. If you think this particular kind of corruption belongs to just one party, you are seriously lacking in discernment. There is something about Epstein that scares everyone.

    One inconvenient fact: people on suicide watch are not given the means to hang themselves. Unless someone wants them to. I challenge you to find anything about this case that looks legit.

  40. petrushka: I doubt if there are any physical facts available. And I doubt if the newspaper can produce any witnesses.

    The report is that when Epstein’s apartment was raided, the FBI collected plenty of relevant information. Enough for a thousand FBI people to be spending 24 hours a day combing through it. It has come out that Epstein had a whole collection of video discs of clients doing sex with underage girls – all labeled with the date, the client, and the girl. This is the small mountain of documents they’re looking at for references to Trump to redact. If Trump is in there, how many genuine clients might also be identified? Hey, Epstein spent years trafficking young girls to wealthy old men. Do you suppose in all those document, somehow there’s no mention (or video) of ANY of them?

    You don’t need to be a genius to realize that the FBI is sitting on a keg of dynamite. It’s not hard to see through all the denials.

  41. petrushka: Oh please. Mueller spent three years with unlimited funds and unlimited power of subpoena. If you think this particular kind of corruption belongs to just one party,

    Took me a while to parse this. Yes, there was plenty of corruption, and yes the Mueller report produced plenty of proof. There was absolutely nothing corrupt about Mueller’s investigation, or his findings. Of course, Bill Barr withheld that report as long as he could, lied brazenly about the contents, then produced a heavily redacted version (and he never did release the underlying documents). Corrupt? Of course – Barr was Trump’s toady.

    Now, recall that there were two parts of Mueller’s report, concerning whether there was collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia, and whether Trump broke the law trying to cover it up (obstruction of justice). For the first part, the issue was that “collusion” was legally undefined (like, does a key member of Trump’s campaign giving internal polling data to Russian intelligence count?) Mueller concluded there wasn’t enough concrete evidence to guarantee a conviction under any specific law in court. For the second part, Mueller produced 10 instances of obstruction, 5 of which were solidly documented and covered every aspect legally required for conviction. Mueller himself testified that the only reason he did NOT recommend an indictment was because it is DOJ policy not to indict a sitting President, who (according to Muller) clearly broke the law multiple times. Mueller even wrote to Barr saying Barr’s misrepresentation conveyed exactly the oppose of what the report (that Barr wouldn’t release to anyone) actually said.

    Meanwhile, Fox News and the whole right wing media empire were braying that the Mueller report “totally exonerated” Trump. Now, uh, who were you saying was corrupt? You didn’t fall for those lies, now did you?

  42. If we assume, arguendo, that Trump visited Epstein Island, imagine what bipartisan horrors prevent anyone from saying so.

    The whole point of Epstein appears to have been gaining the means to control politicians.

  43. Flint:

    Meanwhile, Fox News and the whole right wing media empire were braying that the Mueller report “totally exonerated” Trump. Now, uh, who were you saying was corrupt? You didn’t fall for those lies, now did you?

    It’s amazing how many people fell for that and still believe it. Trump runs around talking about the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” and his base actually buys it. Ditto for his lies about the 2020 election (as of July 2023, an astonishing 69% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents still thought that Biden’s win was illegitimate). I thought their gullibility was unlimited, but the Epstein coverup has managed to get through to at least some of them. Sad that it had to be Epsteingate, of all things, that finally woke them up.

  44. Flint:

    The report is that when Epstein’s apartment was raided, the FBI collected plenty of relevant information. Enough for a thousand FBI people to be spending 24 hours a day combing through it. It has come out that Epstein had a whole collection of video discs of clients doing sex with underage girls – all labeled with the date, the client, and the girl.

    Author Michael Wolff, in an interview:

    At one point after Trump had been elected, I was sitting talking to Epstein and he said, “Wait a minute. I got to show you something.” He went into his safe and he came out with photographs. They were polaroids, I think. And he kind of, they were, he kind of spread them out like playing cards. And it was Trump. I mean, I think there were a dozen of them. And it was Trump with girls of an uncertain age at Epstein’s Palm Beach House.

    And I remember very vividly three of them. There are two in which Trump is, the girls, topless girls are sitting on Trump’s lap and then a third in which he has a stain on the front of his pants and the girls are kind of kind of pointing at it, sort of bent over laughing, you know, um covering their mouths and pointing. Three or four girls, and those are the ones I specifically remember and my assumption is that they, I mean, they were in the safe and I have seen him on other occasions take them out of the safe and I think it’s it’s certainly not unlikely that they were in the safe when the FBI came in after his arrest and took everything from the house including everything that was in the safe.

    If the FBI has those, it’s no wonder Trump is desperate not to release the files.

  45. petrushka:

    I doubt if there are any physical facts available. And I doubt if the newspaper can produce any witnesses.

    So it boils down to the wording of the story and whether it meets the criteria for libel.

    There’s no question that the wording of the story would meet the criteria for libel, if it were false, but it doesn’t constitute libel unless Trump can show that it’s false and that the WSJ either knew it was false or was recklessly negligent in their reporting. From the relevant 1964 Supreme Court ruling:

    The constitutional guarantees require, we think, a Federal rule that prohibits a public official from recovering damages for a defamatory falsehood relating to his official conduct unless he proves that the statement was made with ‘actual malice’—that is, with knowledge that it was false or with reckless disregard of whether it was false or not.

    The folks at the WSJ aren’t stupid, and it isn’t just their money that is on the line. It’s also their journalistic reputation. I can’t imagine they would risk all of that if they couldn’t back up their story. On the other hand, it’s totally believable that Trump would file a libel suit as a strategic move despite knowing that the story was actually true. For someone as litigious as Trump not to file suit would look like a confession in the eyes of the public, and Trump can’t afford that. Better to file suit and hope that the WSJ chickens out. If they don’t (and it doesn’t look like they will), Trump has to decide which is worse: subjecting himself to discovery or withdrawing the suit and thereby seeming to admit that the story is true.

  46. keiths:
    Flint:

    It’s amazing how many people fell for that and still believe it. Trump runs around talking about the “Russia, Russia, Russia hoax” and his base actually buys it. Ditto for his lies about the 2020 election (as of July 2023, an astonishing 69% of Republicans and Republican-leaning independents still thought that Biden’s win was illegitimate). I thought their gullibility was unlimited, but the Epstein coverup has managed to get through to at least some of them.Sad that it had to be Epsteingate, of all things, that finally woke them up.

    Uh, I don’t think so. Trump’s hold on the ignorati mostly owes to his ability to shamelessly repeat the same lies ad nauseum while the far right media stays in lockstep with whatever lies he tells. And his cult followers aren’t so much gullible as they are in need of the appropriate Dear Leader, and found comfortable community there.

    What has happened isn’t that his marks are suddenly waking up. What has happened is that they are as gullible as ever, but that they are being fed conflicting lies that (a) are very important to their conspiracy convictions; and (b) are opposites that can’t be reconciled. There is simply no way that Bondi can have Epstein’s client list on her desk, and have it not exist! So the cult members have to swallow one or the other – these client lists either exist or they don’t (Trump’s cult isn’t big on nuance or detail).

    I imagine the same problem would happen if Trump were to admit that Russia helped get him elected, or that the 2020 election was fair, or that immigrants tend to be law-abiding productive members of society. What’s happening with Epstein is that Trump is revealed as a false prophet, and the devoted faithful are deeply disturbed.

  47. keiths:
    Ift he FBI has those, it’s no wonder Trump is desperate not to release the files.

    I doubt he’s so much desperate not to release the files, as he is desperate to control the release, so that what gets released is harmless. In his dreams, there will be a release that does some harm to some reputations so as to appease the base, but no harm to himself. If Wolff is to be believed, any release is a potential minefield, which explains the army of censors looking for anything related to Trump. He’s slowly realizing that a dishonest release is better than no release. I think something like that is being fabricated today.

  48. petrushka,

    Oh please. Mueller spent three years with unlimited funds and unlimited power of subpoena. If you think this particular kind of corruption belongs to just one party, you are seriously lacking in discernment. .

    Did I say this? I don’t believe I did. I said that you would not be pretzel-ing yourselves in his defence were he not dressed in Republican garb. ie if he’d just stayed a tabloid staple, a reality TV star. Your defence of him is entirely rooted in your reflexive need to circle the wagons when a Republican is attacked. That you perceived me as saying “if he was a Democrat…” demonstrates this admirably. Everything is seen through the 2-party polarising lens. If one attacks a Republican, one is seen as by implication defending Democrats. Both can be in the wrong. Crazy, I know.

  49. There still are plenty of cultists who manage to reconcile the conflicting signals from their cult leaders. For example, Pam Bondi has the client list on her desk and she is reviewing it, the list does not exist, crooked Hillary (and Obama and Biden) wrote it, and Trump administration is fully transparent.

    One tactic is to pick one signal and ignore the rest. Trump supporters are very well trained in this by now, selectively assigning two thirds or more of what Trump says as acceptable “joke” or “hyperbole”, and they do not require that those jokes harmonise with what else Trump says. The other day I heard that Bill O’Reilly has picked for his truth that Democrats fabricated the Epstein files, that Obama protected Epstein and Biden killed him. This seems to line up with what petrushka is pushing, even though on this forum he tries to play both-sideism. Both-sideism in Q/MAGA world means that if there is at least one corrupt Democrat, then Republicans are fully justified to go totalitarian.

    By the way, Michael Cohen – Trump’s closest personal attorney from 2006 to 2018, who implemented Trump’s porn star payoff scheme, sat in jail for it and resents Trump ever since – does not believe at all that Trump could have written that letter. He has a very low opinion of Trump’s abilities to compose and draw or even doodle anything. On the other hand, he is sure that the letter exists and originated from Trump’s office, because Epstein and Trump were close enough so that a birthday gift was necessary.

    For the completeness of the timeline: Epstein turned 50 (the birthday we are talking about) in 2003 and Epstein and Trump had a fallout over this real estate affair in 2004. This considerably distances Michael Cohen from the entire relationship that Trump had with Epstein.

  50. Erik:
    There still are plenty of cultists who manage to reconcile the conflicting signals from their cult leaders. For example, Pam Bondi has the client list on her desk and she is reviewing it, the list does not exist, crooked Hillary (and Obama and Biden) wrote it, and Trump administration is fully transparent.

    Well, you gotta admit the lying is pretty transparent.

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