OPINION:
The 2016 anti-Trump dossier and its lies didn’t stop the Democrats’ hoax train. The Jeffrey Epstein files have proved that. All aboard.
The 35 pages of the Russian dossier gossip proved to be like a Democratic political seminar on how to sabotage opponents. Allegations don’t have to be true; the lies just need to be packaged in a way that infiltrates grateful news media and social media influencers who will run with anything.
The damage done, retreat to the next gambit. Brush off conservative fact-checkers with appearances on CNN and MS NOW.
The Epstein document dump started in November via the Justice Department and the dead man’s estate. It took only days for Democrats to smear President Trump.
First, the history: To prove that Mr. Trump had colluded with the Kremlin during the 2016 election season, Democrats colluded with the Kremlin.
The Hillary Clinton campaign and the Democratic National Committee paid for a dossier compiled by former British intelligence guy Christopher Steele. His collector, Igor Danchenko, was suspected by the FBI from 2009 to 2011 (the John Durham report) of being a Russian intelligence operative. His dossier sources were Russians in Moscow. The Kremlin itself penetrated Mr. Steele’s source network to plant bogus stuff that hurt, not helped, Mr. Trump, according to declassified documents.
So Democrats did a double hoax. The dossier itself was thoroughly discredited. It was the Democrats, not Mr. Trump, who were colluding with the Kremlin to influence the 2016 election.
Democratic operatives spread the dossier all over town. An eager FBI Director James B. Comey took it to judges for wiretaps and briefed President Obama’s Oval Office and his intelligence czars. They folded the dossier into an intelligence assessment they rushed to release before Mr. Trump took office. It was another lie.
The Democratic hoaxing didn’t begin or end with the dossier:
Mr. Biden’s personal biography features false stories: He wasn’t nominated to the U.S. Naval Academy, and he didn’t quit his high school varsity football team to marry his first wife.
The 2018 hearings for Justice Brett M. Kavanaugh: The Democrats outdid themselves with unfounded stories about rape lines, sex at sea and a raunchy high school party.
Back to real time. When the Trump Justice Department released the first huge tranche of Epstein emails, Democrats couldn’t help themselves. They released a statement saying an email showed that Mr. Trump had Thanksgiving dinner with Epstein.
The email said no such thing.
Their other email hoax was more sinister. The Justice Department’s master list contained an email from Epstein that mentioned Mr. Trump and Virginia Louise Giuffre, who worked at Mr. Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago club. That didn’t work, so they redacted her name, inserted “victim” and then gave it to willing reporters.
See the hoax? Make the public think there was an underage girl who was associated with Mr. Trump and must be protected by Democrats. In fact, there was no need to delete the name because Giuffre was one of Mr. Epstein’s most publicized victims. She wrote a book and always said Mr. Trump treated her well.
Rep. Jasmine Crockett, a Texas Democrat running for the U.S. Senate, decided to go all out with a full stage show. She said on the House floor that Federal Election Commission records show somebody named Jeffrey Epstein donated to Rep. Lee Zeldin, the current boss at the Environmental Protection Agency.
That’s a hoax, and it’s sleazy to boot.
During the week of Dec. 14, some of the Epstein photos subpoenaed by House Oversight and Government Reform Committee Chairman James Comer were released to the public. The Epstein estate’s 95,000 pictures were not released by Mr. Comer. His staff is still assessing them. Still, he gave them to committee Democrats, who, of course, quickly abused them.
In one photo, Mr. Trump, at Mar-a-Lago in 1998 for a Hawaiian-themed party, poses with six beauty queen contestants. The women are all adults. Republicans sent the photo unredacted. Yet Democrats quickly placed censor bars across the women’s faces to create the impression that Mr. Trump was hanging out with underage girls. CNN ran the photo that way. Democratic Rep. Yassamin Ansari posted the photo and said, “Vile, disturbing new photos of Donald Trump that raise even more question about knowledge of abuses at Epstein’s estate.” Oversight and Government Reform Committee Democrats reposted the smear.
Later, Democrats released a photo of Mr. Trump with a woman whose face is censored. Again, the photo was sent unredacted by Republican staff because the woman is an adult.
Here is another from the hoax bonanza: In the released Epstein files is a letter supposedly sent by Epstein, locked up at the Manhattan federal jail, to sex offender Larry Nassar, locked up across the country. The letter makes mention of Mr. Trump and young women.
The problem for Democrats? The FBI quickly determined that the letter was a fake, sent by a Democratic hoaxer.
That didn’t stop Senate Minority Leader Charles E. Schumer from writing on X, “Disgusting and abhorrent — and just the tip of the iceberg,” along with a reposting of the letter.
The problem for Mr. Schumer is that the “iceberg” is the loyal cast of Democrats, including Bill Clinton, who floated around Epstein and his money for years.
• Rowan Scarborough is a columnist with The Washington Times.
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