The MAGA movement, which has spent years lobbing accusations at public figures over their purported appearances on late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s flight logs, is now being told by a senior Department of Justice official that there’s no reason to question people who partied with Epstein.
Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general and Donald Trump’s former defense attorney, sounded more like a personal attorney than a prosecutor Monday night on Fox News, when he responded to a question about filing charges against attendees of Epstein’s events by saying, “It is not a crime to party with Jeffrey Epstein.”
Context matters. Saying it’s “not a crime to party with Jeffrey Epstein” is like saying it wasn’t a crime to dine with Jeffrey Dahmer or to fly with Mohammed Atta. The statement is facially true, but obviously lacks context that, depending on who was there and what happened, could have made partying with Epstein quite criminal. So while it was not a crime to have partied with Epstein if all you were doing was, say, playing Jenga or singing karaoke, we know victims have alleged that Epstein offered them up as sex objects to his associates.
Rather than merely dismissing “partying” with Epstein wholesale, Blanche and the DOJ should be working to identify who was partying with Epstein and to determine the exact nature of that “partying,” and specifically whether any of it was criminal. The DOJ should be looking again at victim statements and working with Epstein’s survivors.
The cautiousness of Blanche’s remark is certainly curious, if only because his former client, the president, appears in the files more than 5,000 times, by one estimate, and is on video partying with Epstein. And Democratic Congressman Ted Lieu rebuked Blanche on Tuesday while calling on him to resign.
But the backlash hasn’t been confined to Democrats. Many MAGA world influencers cringed at Blanche’s comments as well. This post from right-wing influencer Shawn Ryan basically sums up the collective groan that came out of the pro-Trump camp after Blanche’s remarks. Why this poses a problem for staunch MAGA loyalists isn’t difficult to figure out. It’s hard to push “guilt by association” rhetoric about Epstein when the president you’ve backed was once close friends with the guy. And it’s even harder when one of the deputies steering the release of the Epstein files is defending the idea of partying with one of the widely reviled sex offenders in modern history.
Ja’han Jones is an MS NOW opinion blogger. He previously wrote The ReidOut Blog. 
