Epstein, Epstein, Epstein

 Josh Marshall has read some reports and come up with an interesting theory. We had Mike Johnson's bizarre statement that Trump was actually the informant that worked with the FBI to take Epstein down.

What?

Marshall looked at Michael Wolff's previous interviews about what he claims to know about Epstein. I'll just let him cook:

Wolff said that Epstein suspected that Trump was the guy who ratted him out to the authorities. So maybe some version of Johnson’s claim isn’t that far-fetched. But of course this isn’t actually exonerating at all. In fact, it implicates Trump about as badly as anything we’ve heard to date. You can’t tell what you don’t know. Trump was in a position to rat out Epstein because he knew all about his operation and had for years.

So, why did Trump rat out Epstein? Especially if it implicated him?

The timeline looked like this:

Epstein was trying to buy a South Florida estate. He brought Trump along to see it one time. A short time later Epstein found out that Trump had gone behind his back and placed a higher and ultimately successful bid on the property. He’d snatched it out from under him with a much higher bid. The problem was that Trump’s entire empire in 2004 was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. It made no sense that Trump was coming up with $41 million to buy this property. Epstein suspected that Trump was acting as a front for a Russian oligarch as a money-laundering scheme. And in fact Trump did purchase and flip the estate two years later to a Russian oligarch named Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million, or a profit of over $50 million dollars.

Epstein was pissed for his own reasons (he wanted the estate). But he also suspected the money laundering scheme. So he threatened Trump that he would bring the whole thing out into the open through a series of lawsuits. Right about this same time authorities got a tip about Epstein’s activities which started the investigation that led to his eventual 2008 plea deal.

Now, if this is true, then we have a number of stories converging:

- Trump knew about Epstein's crimes, because he was at least somewhat a participant. At the very least, he knew about them for years and only came forward when he was trying to kneecap Epstein.

- We are pretty sure that he was laundering money for the Russians. This could be damning in its own way. You're basically tying together the "Epstein hoax" and the "Russia hoax" in one big ugly ball. 

Whatever is in those files has certainly got Donnie spooked.