Enquiring minds want to know all about the Epstein Files, and Trump

 Today, House Judiciary Committee Democrats released a new report about the Epstein files, The Case Against Donald Trump Emerging in the Epstein Files and DOJ’s Desperate Efforts to Cover It Up (report summary at this link). One version of a summary is that there is more than enough evidence in the public record, including this new report, to reasonably believe that Trump is a serial rapist, a pedophile, a chronic liar, and a vicious criminal with sufficient power to subvert and neuter the DoJ, the FBI, and the rule of law as it applies to himself and people with dirt on him.

Sex predator: The released report says: A growing body of evidence demonstrates that Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women during the mid-to-late 1990s.

Of the 11 women who tie Donald Trump to Epstein’s sex trafficking operation, five of them—Beatrice Keul, Stacey Williams, Jill Harth, Katie Johnson, and a Jane Doe—have directly accused Trump of raping or sexually assaulting them in Epstein’s company or direct physical presence: ….. Beyond these direct allegations of physical assault, three survivors speak of encounters with Trump whose circumstances indicate that he was a participant in Epstein’s crimes, as shown by how Epstein and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, tried to make (or made) these women available for sex.

In total, more than 25 different women—some connected to Epstein and many not—have independently accused Donald Trump of rape, sexual assault, or other sexual misconduct. His ex-wife Ivana Trump stated in a sworn deposition during their divorce proceedings that Trump had physically and sexually assaulted her in 1989, pulling out clumps of her hair and raping her after an argument.

In the face of this wave of evidence, the only recourse for the President has been to spread lies and obfuscation. In July 2019, after Epstein was arrested on charges of conspiracy to traffic minors, Donald Trump claimed that he knew Epstein “just like everybody in Palm Beach knew him” and insisted that he “had no idea” about Epstein’s crimes. This evasion and this denial are contradicted by almost all of the available evidence, including Trump and Epstein’s own words and the documents contained in the Epstein files.

Subversion of the FBI and DOJ: The released report says: The Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) are doing everything they can to keep the American people in the dark about it. From the very first weeks of the Trump Administration, DOJ shut down ongoing criminal investigations into Epstein’s enablers and co-conspirators, lied about clear evidence of crimes in its possession, and sought to silence survivors. In July 2025, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and one of his senior deputies, Emil Bove—both former criminal defense lawyers for Donald Trump—released a memorandum stating that DOJ and FBI had determined that “no further disclosure” of the Epstein files would be “appropriate or warranted.”

Instead of pursuing justice for Epstein’s survivors, former Attorney General Pam Bondi and Attorney General Blanche have been running DOJ like a private legal defense firm for their former client. Determined to protect the President at any cost, DOJ itself now leads the cover-up of Epstein’s sex trafficking operation.

Chronic liar: Trump lied to the public about his sex with Stormy Daniels and the later payoff to buy her silence. Cohen Plea Deal Exposes Repeated False Claims, Silk pajamas, spanking and questions about STDs: Stormy Daniels details sexual encounter with Trump, Get Caught Up: Trump’s Alleged Affair With Adult Film Star Stormy Daniels, Stormy Daniels Said 2018 Letter Denying She Had Sex With Trump Is a ‘Lie’

Also, there’s a nice graphic showing that based on 1,000 fact checks, about 76% of Trump’s assertions are “mostly false”, “false”, or “pants on fire”.

What PolitiFact learned in 1,000 fact-checks of Donald Trump

There is far more evidence in the public record, but this is a short summary showing that Trump is a vicious lying liar.

Q: Is it reasonable and evidence-based to believe that Trump is a chronic liar and a sex predator with sufficient power to corrupt the DOJ and FBI, or is that just vicious fact checkers and Dems lying and smearing Trump’s good name?

Time is not on our side

 And maybe there’s not much time left for our what is left of our fading democracy, rule of law, and civil liberties. That will depend on how the midterm elections come out. If the MAGA party retains a significant degree of control of the House or the Senate, it’s probably (more likely than not) game over for us by the Nov. 2028 elections.

By significant I mean (1) enough MAGA votes in the Senate to filibuster everything the Dems want to do, and to be unable to override Trump’s promised tidal wave of vetoes, and (2) enough MAGA votes in the House to constantly sabotage Dem bills. In the House, a slim majority won’t cut it. As we all know, the Dems will almost certainly be fatally fragmented and unable to get their shit together. All the MAGA politicians have to do is stick together, something they are very good at doing.

The main point this OP is arguing is pretty simple. By not winning overwhelming majorities in the House and Senate, the Dems will be stymied. There will be another 2 years of congressional failure, gridlock, and believe it or not, further drift into tyranny and kleptocracy. When government is corrupted and broken, as it now is, time weighs heavily against democracy, the rule of law and our precious civil liberties. When government is broken and corrupted, the more time that passes, the weaker our defenses become. It’s siege warfare. We are stranded and our defenses are constantly weakening.

A person paying attention to MAGA politics, tactics and policy related to democracy, the rule of law, and civil liberties since Jan. 2017 when Trump was sworn into office the first time can easily see how close we are to degenerating into a true, cruel, bigoted kleptocratic tyranny. We’re close to that end.

An example of the slow but constant advance of MAGA’s siege against our defenses

An article The Nation published, The Fall of Scientific American, is a great example of how MAGA wears down and neuters our democracy and its defending institutions. Recently the owner of SciAm, Springer Nature, decided to sell SciAm to LabX. Springer is a publisher of serious, high quality science journals including the top science publication in the world, Nature. LabX publishes sensational stuff for clickbait purposes. Springer said to sold SciAm so it could concentrate on academic research and scientific publishing. The thing is though, SciAm is focused on academic research and scientific publishing.

So why sell a high quality science publication like SciAm to a crappy publisher? Money. With MAGA and corrupt capitalism, it always involves money and the power to move it where the elites in power want it to move.

What triggered the SciAm sale to a crappy business was a May 2025 editorial, Science Tells Us the U.S. Is Heading toward a Dictatorship. It’s no surprise that Trump and MAGA elites were super pissed off with that. Tyrants and kleptocrats vehemently hate criticism accompanied by inconvenient facts, truths, and reasoning. Reality make them look bad because they are bad.

MAGA’s political pressure threatened the parent company’s business. Springer Nature faced the potential loss of as much as $25 million in federal contracts after Trump canceled subscriptions to its scientific publications. Internal recordings show executives feared that SciAm’s criticism of Trump endangered their much larger academic-publishing business.

Corporate intervention changed editorial decisions. The Nation’s article documents management’s insistence on softening an opinion piece about government intimidation of scientific journals. After the May 2025 column, management suspended the opinion department’s publishing. Its editors were reassigned. Editor in chief David Ewalt acknowledged temporarily discouraging “Trump” in headlines because the word attracted corporate scrutiny. Ewalt wanted less “editorializing” and more factual reporting, arguing that rigorous news coverage could challenge the administration without jeopardizing the magazine.

Well, as we all know by now, rigorous MSM news coverage catastrophically failed to challenge Trump and rising MAGA tyranny and corruption. Ever since 2017 when it became clear who and what Trump and MAGA were, a few of us have been incessantly warning elites in the MSM (and the Dem Party) of the threat. Not surprisingly, those fine (arrogant, clueless and/or complicit) elites have been equally constantly ignoring the warnings. They acted and still act as if everything was/is more or less normal. Maybe a bit nastier than usual, but still mostly normal.

Anyway, SciAm staff who had not been fired or coerced into retirement wanted to form a labor union to protect SciAm’s editorial independence. What did Springer do? Springer announced the SciAm sale to LabX on June 23, 2026. That was three days before union votes were scheduled to be counted. The union alleged that the restructuring and sale were intended to defeat organizing; the article reports that the related NLRB (National Labor Relations Board) case remained open. But as we all know by now, Trump and MAGA elites have neutered the NLRB (another link), so those employees can go pound sand. Federal law is absolutely not going to protect them — MAGA policy has made damned sure of that worker complaints will be ignored or outright rejected by deeply corrupt MAGAfied government.

Power and wealth flows from protected workers (and consumers) to elite owners. That is MAGA’s core economic agenda and it always has been.

Q1: If the Dems do not win overwhelming control of the House and Senate, which they probably won’t, will we probably will lose having a meaningful democracy, rule of law and civil liberties by Nov. 2028, because as long as Trump and MAGA elites have sufficient power they will continue to wear down our defenses?

Q2: Is science inseparable from politics and social conditions, and thus SciAm commenting on the connections between science, and politics and society important for the public to be aware of?

PTSD treatment update

A 2023 post here mentioned an opinion piece from July 2023, The Best PTSD Treatment You've Never Heard Of.  At the time, the new protocol called RTM (Reconsolidation of Traumatic Memories) sounded to be almost too good to be true. The US military was hostile to it because an effective, low-cost PTSD treatment threatened some military budgets and careers. An article in Science Daily about a different treatment protocol, Breakthrough PTSD treatment achieves 68% remission rate in clinical trial, raised the question, whatever happened to that old RTM protocol? Was it killed off and buried by hostility to effective, low cost treatments, or did it survive despite hostility?

Apparently, RTM is still being tested. Results of another study comparing RTM treatment of PTSD patients (n=48) with the existing longer-term standard of care (n=46) was published last April. in that study, RTM matched the standard of care control group, with meaningful positive responses happening faster in the RTM group. So, RTM is still alive.

The RTM study published April 2026

 An RTM study in Ukrainian children with PTSD appears to be underway. That study, NCT07185126, calls for ~40–48 children aged 6–14 to receive a modified-protocol RTM therapy. The record names the Charitable Foundation Voices of Children and Quresta, Inc. as collaborators. It does not clearly identify a funding amount or financial contributions. That study is detailed on the US government's clinical trials website. So far, no results have been posted for that trial.

And there's some sort of an RTM-clinician focused site that indicates future clinical trials are planned.

It's hard to compare RTM results with the brain stimulation protocol the Science Daily paper talks about. Existing results put RTM in the same broad range of observed improvement as MeRT (targeted transcranial magnetic brain stimulation), but results do not establish that either treatment is better. RTM’s strongest recent trial found substantial improvement comparable to standard prolonged treatment, with more early responders. MeRT’s larger trial found a statistically significant benefit over sham stimulation. Its 68% remission rate cannot validly be compared to RTM’s 58% loss-of-diagnosis rate (PTSD no longer diagnosable). The protocols and follow-ups are too different for direct comparison.

Global warming update: The Exxon-Suncor lawsuit

By now, many states are starting to feel significant economic damage from global warming. In Colorado, Boulder City and County filed a lawsuit against Suncor Energy and Exxon-Mobil to recover some of the damages. Boulder sued the energy companies in 2018. They argued that Suncor and Exxon deceived the public about the dangers of climate change and should be forced to pay damages for climate-induced heat waves, wildfires, droughts, and floods.

A 2026 fiscal analysis projected that from 2025 to 2050 Colorado would face about $36 billion in costs directly attributable to climate change, plus defined climate resilience spending. That's about $1.4 billion/year. 

An article discussing the lawsuit, Burned Cattle, Drought, Smoke-Choked Pastures—and the SCOTUS Case to Make Exxon and Suncor Pay, points out damage from the new climate situation and the potentially fatal flaw in Boulder's lawsuit against the polluters. An expert,  Alejandro Camacho (UCLA law professor) comments: “Suncor is not about whether climate change is real, and it’s not about who sets national emissions policy. It’s about whether a state court may hear an ordinary damages claim. ..... And that’s why I think it’s more useful for people to see it for what it is: a tort case.” The professor points out that Boulder linked its legal argument to climate change, not tort damages. He asserts that could hurt Boulder’s chances in front of a pro-pollution MAGA USSC. In corporate liability situations, tort law allows a plaintiff who’s been harmed, e.g., from pesticides or medications to the recent lawsuit against Meta for damages from social media addiction. That is how people can sue a company for compensation. 

Not surprisingly Suncor and Exxon are going for a total knock-out blow against all such lawsuits. Their argument is simple. Pollution is a matter of interstate commerce and only the federal government can regulate that. Suncor-Exxon argue that those damages claims are an unconstitutional attempt by states and others to regulate interstate and international emissions using state or local laws. They argue that federal law and constitutional limits on state authority foreclose the lawsuit. Also not surprisingly, the pro-pollution, pay-to-play Trump administration supports the polluters and the distribution and socialization of damages, while trickling profits up to the owners and executives.

  

A major ruling for the companies would probably gut dozens of similar lawsuits in other jurisdictions. A sufficiently expansive constitutional rationale would also threaten other state-law claims involving nationwide or international corporate conduct. How bad this will be for society that is eating the costs right now depends on how the MAGA judges word their opinion.

In oral arguments on Oct. 5, the MAGA judges signaled their worries about the well-being of the polluters. Apparently, damages the states are are incurring is of little to no concern. For example, Chief Justice Roberts asked what would happen if a municipality in every state copied Boulder’s lawsuit. He's worried about protecting the polluters. Similarly, Justice Beer Boofer Kavanaugh raised the possibility that such litigation could bankrupt energy companies. And of course, there's Trump pounding his shoe on the podium asking for more power, arguing that dealing with interstate air pollution belongs to the federal government. 

Plus, there are other legal arguments being asserted in this case. Also relevant is the reality that a Boulder victory only allows this litigation to continue. It would not establish deception, causation, liability, or damages. There's possibly a long way to go on this. But even at this early stage, one gets the feeling that MAGA's staunch protection of polluters and it's hostility to the concepts of service to the public interest and global warming is going to mostly dictate how this will eventually play out.

The polluters will probably get most of what they want, maybe all of it. Regardless, big polluter contributions called free speech will continue to roll in for Trump and MAGA politicians.