A few times on the blog we’ve referred to the classic noir film, The Big Clock, in which the hero is caught in a compromising position, witnesses a murder, and then is tasked by his boss with tracking down the only witness to the crime–so he’s in the difficult position of hunting himself. This was remade in the 80s with Kevin Costner as No Way Out, and that was good too.
When this came up before, Jessica proposed a setting for a hypothetical re-remake:
Lost in Preregistration: Bill Murray plays a fading figure in the open science movement, who, in the midst of a midlife crisis, must go to Tokyo to track down his lost preregistration. He finds it, but it turns out it’s written in Egyptian cuneiform. He befriends a recently graduated psychology B.A., played by a young Francesca Gino, who helps him reconstruct a version of the preplanned analysis.
Expand it a bit and it could be on a double-bill with Don’t Call Me Shirley, Mr. Feynman!
“An uplifting double-feature matinee celebrating women’s contributions to science.”
Anyway, I was thinking about The Big Clock plot in the context of Jeffrey Epstein, that notorious financier, sex criminal, and patron of junk science. As is well known, Epstein was a good friend of Donald Trump in years past, they shared an interest in young female companionship, and then after Epstein was finally held to account for his crimes, he mysteriously died in a Federal prison cell–during Trump’s earlier term as president.
That’s not the real mystery, though.
The real mystery is why, given all this, Trump and his political allies kept banging on the Epstein story for years, pushing Epstein conspiracy theories, etc. Given Trump’s closeness to the man, along with one of Trump’s appointees having let Epstein off easy in his first prosecution, and other Trump appointees being on the watch when Epstein was allowed to kill himself, you’d think that the Epstein case would be the last thing that Trump supporters would want to talk about. Sure, Epstein also had connections to Democrats such as Bill Clinton and Alan Dershowitz, but Trump was by far the biggest currently active political figure with a close Epstein connection.
And this brings me to the plot of The Big Clock. Given Trump’s closeness to Epstein, and given all the controversies revolving around Epstein’s ability to remain at large as a flamboyant sex trafficker and patron of science for all those years, maybe the reasoning was: somebody’s gonna be sniffing after the Epstein story, so it might as well be us.
I’m not suggesting that there was some sort of master plan here, just that, in a situation where you’re the one being investigated, there’s a logic to wanting to be in charge of the investigation. Related is this article, Why didn’t Biden release the Epstein Files?, which argues that under the usual legal rules, “Such testimony is typically only released under exceptional circumstances . . . it’s highly unusual for the FBI to release information unrelated to charging individuals with a crime. . . . even if Democrats wanted to release the Epstein Files in their entirety during Biden’s presidency, it’s not clear that a court would have granted their request.” One difference since then is now a single party is in control of all three branches of government.
Again, though, to me the interesting question is not whether particular files will be redacted, released, or destroyed, but rather the motivation for Trump and his supporters to have kept talking loudly about the Epstein issue for several years, given the connection of Trump of Epstein and the connections of his appointees to Epstein’s controversial death, and before that his avoidance of serious prison time. This is where The Big Clock comes in. The idea would be, not that Trump and the far right kept the Epstein story afloat for years, but rather that the story wasn’t going away, and by talking about it so incessantly, they were able to frame it in their terms. How this will look going forward, I can’t say.
P.S. Speaking of Epstein, this story is kinda funny. A few years ago I almost signed a contract with Jeffrey Epstein’s notorious literary agent . . . if that had happened maybe some vender of Jamaican beef patties would’ve refused to serve me. I’d like to think that, unlike Alan Dershowitz or Steven Pinker, I wouldn’t have given Epstein legal advice, but who knows? I’ve given statistical advice to all sorts of people. On the plus side, if Alan D. gets refused pierogi service another 3514 times, he can save up his money and buy a ticket to this wonderful conference where he can schmooze with Grover Norquist’s rabbi.
In any case, for an ascetic scholar like Dershowitz, the intellectual compensations of hanging out with the talented Mr. Epstein surely outweigh the mere sensual pleasures of a pierogi. After a few minutes the food will be forgotten, but memories of cosmic conversations on the private jet will last forever.
Its like a highschool with various overlapping social circles and blackmail rings. All these people know each other and go to the same parties. When it comes to friday night they tribalize to support their school’s football team vs each other.
Also, seems pretty obvious the FBI/DOJ is not going to do any real investigation. So whatever “Epstein files” exist are going to be the equivalent of p-hacked BS.
Anon:
Yeah, it does seem that celebrities are a kind of club. I’ve noticed this with science celebrities, that with rare exceptions they tend to defend each other, so that you get things like Steven Pinker, who is skeptical about so many things, coming to the defense of ridiculous power pose research.
I’ve always attributed this to a feeling of affinity: once you become a celebrity, you feel empathy to other celebrities.
But now I’m thinking that a lot of this is selection: one way to become a celebrity is to play the celebrity endorsement game. It bothered me that economist Steven Levitt and physicist Sean Carroll were promoting ridiculous mind-body healing research. But if they weren’t professionally credulous–if they didn’t make credulity a key part of their professional identity–then maybe they wouldn’t have reached their current levels of prominence. The sorts of people who’d view a wild research claim with skepticism will not end up hosting popular podcasts. After all, who wants to turn on a podcast and listen to a Debbie Downer.
Similarly with Epstein: I’m sure there were lots of businessmen who had the opportunity to hang with Jeff but didn’t want to, lots of Harvard-affiliated people who avoided the guy, etc.–but they’re not the ones in the files.
“… under the usual legal rules, “Such testimony is typically only released under exceptional circumstances . . . it’s highly unusual for the FBI to release information unrelated to charging individuals with a crime. . . . even if Democrats wanted to release the Epstein Files in their entirety during Biden’s presidency, it’s not clear that a court would have granted their request.”” So, maybe candidate Trump figured he was safe carrying on about the Epstein files?
In fairness to Dershowitz, he’s noted that his profession is criminal defense lawyer (“criminal” meaning client, not him). That involves dealing with, mostly, people who are probably criminals or at least likely to be widely thought of as criminals. He used to talk about, heavily paraphrased, how taking on the cases of rich sleazebags provided him the money and status to do pro-bono civil-liberties work. I found his early writings (decades ago) to be good reading on those topics.
I’ve wondered myself at the thought processes of Trump supporters at the Epstein case. In fact, not that I believe this happened, but if there was anyone who would seem to have a strong motive to arrange Epstein be killed, it would be Trump. But the political strategy Trump uses seems both clear and simple: Muddy the waters. BOTH SIDES! And it’s the Democrats who are the real villains.
Remember, these people live by the maxim: Never defend, always attack. If you can put your accuser on the defensive, they’re the ones tied up in answering questions, and they’ll seem desperate pointing out what you in fact are guilty of (hoax, fake news, take away the licenses of the liberal media …).
It’s a very simple playbook, and it’s actually worked spectacularly well.
Ummm, Alan Dershowitz was not a criminal defense lawyer. (I believe his brother, Nathan, may have been.) He was a legal academic who had a sideline of brief-writing: the only thing that legal academics are good for. As far as I know, he never appeared in front of a jury. A brief-writer does not need to get up-close-and-personal with their client. His other sideline was self-promotion.
https://www.jpost.com/american-politics/dershowitz-why-i-will-continue-to-defend-clients-like-jeffrey-epstein-597335
“Most criminal defense lawyers defend mostly guilty defendants, because we live in a country where most people accused of a crime are in fact guilty. In order to keep it that way, we must vigorously defend every person accused of a crime.
In other words, I defend the guilty in order to protect not only them, but in order to assure that innocent people are not brought to trial and put through the personal agony that such a legal process entails. If criminal defense lawyers were to refuse to zealously defend the guilty, then more and more innocent people would be brought to trial.
Being a criminal defense lawyer, particularly a successful one, is not the way to popularity. But it is the way to a just system of law.”
Seth:
I get the “zealously defend the guilty” thing, not so much the “hang out on private island with the guilty” bit!
I don’t believe that we “zealously defend the guilty” to protect the innocent from being charged. I think we zealously defend people who are charged with a crime in order to sustain the integrity of our system of justice, regardless of whether Alan Dershowitz thinks they are guilty. We don’t charge innocent people because we are trying to sustain the rule of law, even if we sometimes make mistakes or encounter acts of corruption.
Andrew: I was thinking of what you said about: “I’d like to think that, unlike Alan Dershowitz or Steven Pinker, I wouldn’t have given Epstein legal advice, but who knows?”. But it’s literally the duty of a criminal defense lawyer to defend criminals – sometimes not even alleged criminals, but convicted criminals (appeals, sentencing). Yes, the lawyer doesn’t have to be too friendly with the client, but that’s an occupational hazard. And in this situation, Epstein had cultivated Dershowitz as a friend long before he had any legal trouble. There’s plenty of things to criticize Dershowitz about, but this particular aspect strikes me as too close to the idea that it’s immoral for lawyers (or linguists) to provide a defense to people accused of horrendous crimes.
Matt Skaggs: It’s important to read what Dershowitz is saying in context, of constantly getting the question “How can you defend those people?”, and that he’s a bad person for doing so.
Seth:
I was contacted the other day by some lawyers who were interested in hiring me for a consulting job. I’ve done such things before for money, and I would not say I’ve always been on the side of the angels. In this case, however, I did not want to help them out. I told them truthfully that it sounded like they had a good case and that they should find someone other than me to be their expert. The lawyers seemed personally like nice people (during the 15 minutes I was speaking with them) but I did not want to be involved in their case.
I’d like to think that had Epstein or Pinker contacted me and said they had this good friend who was a sex trafficker and child molester but, hey, in our system everybody deserves legal representation, I would’ve told them that this may be true but that their friend would need to get his expert help from some other source.
To put it another way, in our country everyone is supposed to get legal representation (ok, almost everybody; I guess this isn’t happening nowadays with the people being kidnapped by masked ICE agents) and maybe everyone deserves some linguistic representation too–but that doesn’t mean that they all get world-famous lawyers and linguists from Harvard. For that you need some combination of money, fame, and connections.
Andrew: Of course no person is morally obligated in specific to be involved in any particular case. I think the crucial problem is different – if someone is involved in the legal defense of a person accused of a horrible crime, does that constitute a moral stain on them? Does it matter how much it appears the defendant is guilty or not? (note Dershowitz claims that his clients have never told him that they’re guilty, though I suppose he couldn’t say otherwise). Also, generally, nobody has to be a Public Defender either – and that can involve defending murderers, rapists, and sex traffickers who are just selling to a much lower class than Epstein was. While it would rather amusing to have a system where the rich are only allowed the legal representation available to the poorest of the poor, that’s different from the issue sometimes called “How Can You Defend Those People?”.
I made the same point about Dershowitz before. He’s in a different category from people whose interactions with Epstein were more social. Pinker is somewhat different in that he claims he gave an opinion on linguistics to Dershowitz while Dershowitz was representing Epstein (I don’t think Pinker got paid for that, he portrayed it as a normal thing he would do for a colleague), and also that he disliked Epstein in his interactions as a science funder.
Coincidentally, my family had delicious pierogi last night, hand made by a local Philadelphia shop (Mom-mom’s). I am really struggling to think of a conversationalist whose virtues would outweigh that experience.
Honestly, I suspect Dershowitz might’ve screwed up. He should’ve asked himself, “are my choices today going to interfere with my pierogi tomorrow?” I guess the idea of heaven is supposed to function in that sort of way — maybe it’s a quantifier over future pleasurable experiences?
I was going to say that maybe it was the guiding hand of the future sensual pleasures of the pierogi that made Trump push the story.
As I mentioned here before, we are seeing a replay of something like The Business Plot. (When it was confirmed that a cabal of oligarchs had tried to overthow FDR, we not only got a shrug from Congress, we got a bipartisan shrug.)
It turns out Epstein’s chumminess with politicians did not earn him much space, but the opposite is true with the oligarchs. The bottom line is that neither party will do anything to jeopardize the flow of money from the oligarchs, and throwing even one of them under the proverbial bus is likely to have long-term negative ramifications. Look what happened when Musk criticized Trump: nothing, because Musk is richer than Trump, and you NEVER punch up if you want to stay in the game (you might even get murdered in prison). Meanwhile, the Epstein files are chock full of interactions with these oligarchs, so much so that even redacting their names probably wouldn’t protect them from at least some scrutiny.
Why do you think it is that FDR, with a majority in Congress, didn’t do more in response to the Business Plot?
Small correction/ update:
According to Wikipedia, Alan Dershowitz is not a Democrat anymore: he left over anti-Israel sentiment by members of the party.
*I could add ‘alleged’ and ‘perceived’ to that last sentence, but I am not a lawyer 😉
I know several people who met Jeffrey Epstein, but all before he was arrested the first time.
He seemed to have interesting taste in people but not in ideas.