OPINION:
The campaign to force the release of records related to Jeffrey Epstein’s serial sex trafficking has put Washington officialdom in an uproar, and rightly so. A similar clamor was glaringly absent, however, during the four long years that President Biden held open the doors to the nation’s borders, allowing the unprecedented trafficking of human beings, including children, and lethal drugs into the United States.
Although the victims of the Epstein abuse are reported to number at least 1,000, the human exploitation that debased Biden-era immigration policy has harmed the well-being of Americans by the millions.
Capitol Hill Democrats, hoping the secret Epstein files might reveal accounts of President Trump joining the billionaire pedophile in his playboy-style misbehavior, have orchestrated a full-court press to release all pertinent material collected before Epstein’s 2019 death in prison while awaiting trial for sex-trafficking underage girls.
“Republicans have spent months trying to protect Donald Trump and hide what’s in the files. Americans are tired of waiting and are demanding to see the truth,” Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer protested in November.
Mr. Trump’s subsequent, sudden signing of the congressionally approved Epstein Files Transparency Act caught his detractors by surprise, and a 30-day countdown has begun for U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi to “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format all unclassified records, documents, communications, and investigative materials in the possession of the Department of Justice,” according to the law.
Too late, Mr. Schumer et al. must contemplate the wisdom of an oft-repeated warning: “Beware of what you wish for.” They now squirm as the bits of electronic communications point the spotlight on some of their own.
For one, Lawrence H. Summers, a Clinton administration Treasury secretary and longtime Democratic solon, quickly faced disgrace when embarrassing emails surfaced containing love-interest advice he sought from Epstein. He has since withdrawn from his public activities.
Additionally, Democratic powerhouses Bill and Hillary Clinton face House Oversight and Government Reform Committee subpoenas seeking a full accounting of their involvement with Epstein. Reportedly, Bill enjoyed numerous trips aboard Epstein’s “Lolita Express” jet, and Hillary took Epstein money for her Senate campaign.
Meanwhile, files related to Mr. Trump’s lengthy acquaintance with Epstein have thus far revealed no unseemly misbehavior. This assessment was acknowledged by none other than Epstein madam Ghislaine Maxwell, now serving time for her own sex-trafficking transgressions. Democrats hoping the Epstein files would wound the president in the manner the Hunter Biden laptop crippled Mr. Biden’s 2020 reelection bid have traded their grins for grimaces.
If only the party of the left had demonstrated such righteous opposition to human trafficking when Mr. Biden opened the nation’s borders to tens of millions of Illegal immigrants. Their tears for forlorn children are apparently reserved for the ones who served the wolfish billionaire and his assortment of high-flying friends at his far-flung estates.
Since Mr. Trump’s return to the White House, the Department of Homeland Security has found that, from 2019 to 2023, 448,000 unaccompanied children were trafficked into the U.S. and transferred to the Department of Health and Human Services. Disturbingly, 300,000 failed to appear for their immigration court proceedings.
Tens of thousands of lost children subjected to inhumane sexual and forced labor exploitation — not to mention the hundreds of thousands of young American lives snuffed out by deadly imported fentanyl — would seem humanitarian causes worthy of an angry, liberal outcry. Drawing attention to the scope of the Biden-era immigration disaster, however, would detract from the campaign to thwart the Trump mandate to “Make America Great Again.”
As harmful as the Epstein debauchery surely was to its young victims, the damage done by the Biden-Democratic faction’s flood of lawless immigration and lethal drugs into communities across the nation has given Republicans a 13-point advantage for trust in handling immigration, according to a September Washington Post/Ipsos poll.
There are transgressions more heartbreaking than human trafficking, but not many. Treating fellow human beings as a commodity to be marketed for sex or forced labor represents a throwback mindset mired in benighted antiquity. When Democrats’ current outcry over the Epstein abuses is compared with their curious quietude toward the recent cataclysm of unbridled immigration, common sense can easily recognize the phenomenon for what it is: hypocrisy.
Americans should trust leaders on the left again only when they demonstrate that their concern for the trafficking of children includes illegality at the nation’s borders and not simply supposed predatory behavior with which they hope to defame Mr. Trump.
• Frank Perley is a former senior editor and editorial writer for Opinion at The Washington Times.
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