MEGA, NSA, and the Ugly Truth About the Epstein Sexpionage Network

Over four years after Jeffrey Epstein’s mysterious death, the details of his sordid spy operation remain remarkably opaque – does anybody really want to know the unpleasant truth?

Democracy supposedly dies in darkness, our elite media tells itself, but the reality is markedly different. Some stories are simply too big for the media to cover. Scandals, particularly involving sex, always make good copy. Politicians caught with their pants down, doing something embarrassing and perhaps illegal, that’s a clicks bonanza. However, the media loses interest fast if the scandal appears to be more than merely salacious, when the story may expose deeply troubling goings on among VIPs.

Hence the uproar in 2007 when police at Minneapolis airport arrested Sen. Larry Craig, yet another GOP closet case, for soliciting sex from an undercover police officer in a men’s bathroom. The Republican Craig had represented Idaho in Congress since 1981, including nearly two decades in the Senate, but the scandal crashed his political career immediately. Craig claimed it was all a misunderstanding, denying he was gay, but he announced he would not run for reelection the next year. The media covered the Craig scandal in considerable detail, with accompanying comedian guffaws, since secretly gay Republicans are a standard liberal trope, not without cause.

Considerably more muted were the media responses to the spectacular downfall of another closeted Republican, Dennis Hastert, who in 2015 was discovered by the FBI, in the course of an investigation into his financial misdeeds, to have molested at least four teenage boys in the 1970s when Hastert was a high school teacher and wrestling coach. Hastert was sentenced to 15 months in prison and required to register as a sex offender, with the judge naming him a “serial child molester.”

Hastert was no ordinary pol. He represented Illinois in the U.S. House for two decades and was the top Republican and Speaker from 1999 to 2007. In other words, the guy who was next in line after the Vice President for eight years was a serial child molester. Might there be more to this? Hastert’s former Congressional colleagues professed utter shock when his crimes were unmasked. Illinois Sen. Dick Durbin, a Democrat, stated, “It seems so out of character for Denny. I just never could imagine that he'd be involved in anything like this.” Some other Hill colleagues conceded that they had heard rumors about Hastert’s illegal sexual shenanigans, but they dismissed them as mere innuendo.

But is that the real story? The media certainly covered the basics of Hastert’s embarrassing post-Congressional downfall, but they were remarkably incurious about digging into what Denny had been up to on the Hill behind closed doors. Since pedophiles seldom just stop, it’s reasonable to assume that Hastert was diddling minors while being the top Republican in Congress, but the Washington press corps didn’t overexert itself trying to find out. Hastert’s role in the case of Rep. Mark Foley (R-FL), whose political career imploded in 2006 amid multiple allegations of what we shall euphemistically term “boy problems,” raised obvious questions. It turned out that Speaker Hastert was aware of Foley’s penchant for getting overly friendly with underage Congressional pageboys yet did nothing about it.

You don’t have to a be conspiracy theorist to wonder if there’s a secret cabal of Congressional pedophiles, up to the highest levels of our national legislature, that protects its members from exposure. Indeed, that seems to be the logical inference from the Hastert-Foley story, which we only know in outline. Neither does this ugly hidden side of Washington follow partisan lines. Partisanship is for mere rubes. Real power on the Potomac is about money and sex and our elites protect each other. Although Hastert’s post-prison life has been plagued by civil lawsuits over his serial sexual abuse, he stayed in the good graces of some of the top VIPs in Washington, including the Podesta brothers, John and Tony, the Democratic power players. Hastert and the Podestas have been pals since college days in the 1960s, partisan differences being irrelevant. Two years before Hastert’s arrest, Tony Podesta referred to his old friend thus: “His personality has not changed at all from 1965 to 2013. He’s a decent, wonderful guy.” The Podestas’ powerful DC firm employed Hastert’s son Josh, passing the baton to the next lobbying generation. These are the same Podestas who played a prominently strange role in the so-called Pizzagate scandal, with their emails that conspiracists believed referred to child sex trafficking and abuse.

The idea that our political elite includes a fair share of sexual deviants and criminals is something which the elite media won’t touch yet can hardly be dismissed as a mere “conspiracy theory” given what we know, which is surely a mere sliver of unpleasant reality. From there, it’s a short jump to wondering what others may know about such secret shenanigans among the mighty. “Others” here include foreign intelligence services. Washington is one of the world’s top venues for espionage, and plenty of spy agencies are on the nonstop prowl for secrets that might be able to compromise a Congressmember on the rise.