38 Comments
User's avatar
Gavin Pugh's avatar

"Oh, Mr. Trump, you've got the longest road!"

"Oh, Mr. Trump, I desperately need some sheep. Isn't there *anything* I can do to convince you to trade?"

"Oh, Mr. Trump, I'm playing my monopoly card so I can get my hands on your wood."

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Jeff Maurer's avatar

Quality "yes, and"-ing!

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Kyle M's avatar

Desperate for *sheep*? Something is fishy about this story.

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Will I Am's avatar

(Trump voice) Settlers of Cataan, great game, one of the best. I played it once with this teenage girl on Jeffrey's Island after we fucked...

Trump's Handlers: (facepalm)

Trump voters: Meh, he could molest my daughter and still get my vote!

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MarkS's avatar

Droit du seigneur. Well established legal principle. People are saying.

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Will I Am's avatar

(Trump voice) They're saying this Jeffrey Epstein guy is a really bad hombre. I wouldn't know, I've never had the pleasure of visiting Jeffrey's beautiful island or flying on his wonderful airplane - I'm told they call it the Lolita Express! Crazy times, but Jeffrey and I, we had a falling out because he poached a teenage massuse from my Mar-A-Lago club, and that my friends, is something I cannot forgive.

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Mike Kidwell's avatar

Who would have guessed that "shooting a man in Times Square" would be LESS horrifying than what Trump actually did?

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Ellinor DiLorenzo's avatar

Haha for a second there I thought the headline was making a play at the 4D chess meme. "Trump's playing Catan PLUS EXPANSIONS while you're all playing jenga"

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P. Eldred's avatar

As jenga is a game of constant dread and anxiety this is at least partially accurate.

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Matt Benson's avatar

This doesn't directly involve Trump, but I'd be curious to know what Jeff thinks about Michael Tracey's reporting on Substack which severely casts doubt on the reliability of the late Virginia Giuffre as a witness (i.e. giving ultra detailed accounts of sex with Alan Dershowitz and then later dropping all accusations against him and saying she was "mistaken", writing a previous iteration of her memoir with accusations against many persons and then later also dropping it with her lawyers claiming the memoir was "fictionalized", bizarrely making up being in a severe car crash in Australia which was actually a fender bender and there's no evidence she was actually present). I'm not saying nothing happened to her, I have no idea, but there appears to be more to the story and no one except unpopular Michael Tracey is willing to question it.

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Jeff Maurer's avatar

Fully assessing a witness' credibility is a big thing, and I wouldn't want to do it lightly -- that's why when we need to do it, we sequester people and make them listen to all the available evidence. It is objectively true that Giuffre later recanted some things that she had previously claimed.

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Frantic Pedantic's avatar

I’m inclined to believe Occam’s Razor, which is that a young victim of sex trafficking had her brain scrambled by virtue of being sex trafficked. “Witness reliability” for abuse victims is notoriously challenging; it may mean that some things are indeed not remembered correctly, which is a huge obstacle when there’s still overwhelming evidence that the abuse happened.

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Matt Benson's avatar

Sure but that means her accusations cannot be taken at face value and must be corroborated with other evidence. Which is the exact opposite of the approach in the court of public opinion. BELIEVE ALL VICTIMS!

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soulstatic's avatar

The whole thing seems like a money grab from a lot these ladies. Who were of consenting age when they said the abuse happened.

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Sean's avatar

I’m not Jeff, but I followed Tracey’s reporting. Giuffre seemed like a very troubled woman and was a victim of a predatory man as a teen. I don’t think we can take much of what she said at face value. Of course, dropping allegations could have been a response to litigation, but she kept doing it. As Tracey pointed out, only 2 people have made allegations of being pimped out, and both are of questionable reliability. Most of his more credible victims have not made such outlandish claims.

The Epstein “files” are probably going to show something pretty banal - still terrible. He was rich and had a private island. Prior to his conviction, people probably thought he was weird but let it go. After…he was still rich and had a private island. Plus he was a big donor to universities and whatnot. People were still willing to let it go when the weird rich guy is offering money to your university or charity, or invites you to his private island. It’s still terrible, but rather banal. The conspiracy also assumed that prominent, wealthy people would 1) want to have sex with underage girls 2) if they didn’t, they still kept their mouth shut and had no conscience 3) all those involved would keep their mouth shut. Even assuming 1, a scheme like that would require more than just 2 people to pull off - pilots, drivers, any number of household staff, neighbors seeing girls coming in and out. And to be honest, he didn’t hide it well.

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l'artiste manqué's avatar

At the very least, say there was a conspiracy: to paraphrase Bill Maher, “why the fuck would he keep a list?”

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Sean's avatar

“Are you taking notes on a criminal fucking conspiracy?”

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Tallredrider's avatar

Was Epstein that illiterate? The grammatical errors are insufferable. It reads like a 9 year old's text message.

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Kamut Maksen's avatar

...or, in my experience, a senior officer of the US Navy

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l'artiste manqué's avatar

And this was back when email was a medium. He presumably had upward of 10 minutes to formulate his response.

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Lucidamente's avatar

I think Trump was regaling her with stories about all the music he downloaded ten years earlier with Napster; Epstein was simply surprised that this confession of massive copyright infringement elicited no interest from the authorities.

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MajorSensible's avatar

Let me be clear: I did not play Monopoly with that woman, Miss Lewinsky.

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I_was_saying_boo_urns's avatar

But isn’t the other email more or less exculpatory? JE says to Wolff that he knows Trump “knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop” not “as he couldn’t get enough of them.” Maybe Trump just saw enough to know that he thought Epstein was a creep, always felt like he didn’t want to draw attention to their prior friendship and so he just wanted to move on.

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Toiler On the Sea's avatar

Yeah I think Resistance libs are setting themselves up for a big fall just like with the Mueller stuff during the 1st term. He's a POS but so far the evidence is mad weak.

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MarkS's avatar

Trump just needs to go with the Randle McMurphy defense:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BvjTeWn0Uac

Start at 2:30.

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NY Expat's avatar

“Look, I was offering wood for sheep, and I told her, ‘you really should take this wood if you know what’s good for you.’”

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William Adderholdt's avatar

They could have been playing cribbage or gin rummy. Those are well-known two-player games, unlike Settlers of Catan. And I imagine Epstein kept lots of decks of cards around for strip poker games, which again, doesn't really work for only two people.

Unless there is some variant of strip cribbage that I'm unaware of. 🤔

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l'artiste manqué's avatar

What if he had some of those decks of cards with bawdy imagery?

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Andrew Wurzer's avatar

Do we know the provenance of this? I have no problem believing Trump did bad things with Epstein, and in fact think it's more likely true than not, but did Epstein normally refer to the women he victimized as "victims"? That just kind of makes me wonder about if it's really legit.

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Chris O'Connell's avatar

He didn't use the word victim. He named the person in the email and it was redacted with the word VICTIM put in it's place to protect their privacy.

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Andrew Wurzer's avatar

Thank you!

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Frank Lee's avatar

I asked ChatGPT to create a believable email from Jerry Epstein to Ghislaine Maxwell explaining that Jeff Maurer had spent many hours at Epstein's house with THE VICTIM.

It came out quite believable. I cannot post an image in the comment section otherwise I would.

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Jonathan Davis's avatar

I haven’t even read the article yet, but this headline made me cackle out loud in public. Well done.

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Rick's avatar

On the flip side, the chances that Trump engaged in sexual intercourse for a few hours is equally as implausible. In fact, the only thing that Trump does enthusiastically over time is talk and receive praise. Heck, you could shove a ChatGPT inside a dakimakura and Trump could be entertained all day. So I vote for a few hours of incessant self-promotion intermixed with fawning schoolgirl praise. Naked, of course.

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