Republican scheme to embarrass Dems backfires: analysis

Former President Bill Clinton and former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton walked into a House hearing and exposed the real cover-up involving the investigation files for trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.

Columnist Paul Waldman penned a piece Saturday shaming Republicans in the House Oversight and Reform Committee for spending more time on "Pizzagate" conspiracy theories than on helping survivors of Epstein's decades of abuse.

While Republicans hoped to "embarrass Democrats," Waldman said, they "ended up embarrassing themselves."

While speaking to the committee, Secretary Clinton flipped the script on Republicans as they hoped to humiliate her. Instead, she highlighted just how unserious the GOP has been when it comes to handling the Epstein case.

"This is the nature of the Republican response to the unending Epstein scandal: from Congress, the kind of buffoonery represented by the Clinton deposition; and from the administration, an insistence that Trump is unconnected to or 'exonerated' from a scandal whose central figure long counted the president as a friend," wrote Waldman.

He went on to mock claims from President Donald Trump's Justice Department that it would investigate itself to better understand what went wrong in the Epstein investigation.

It noted that there isn't merely one set of missing documents, "But among the millions of pages of Epstein files that have been released were massive amounts of heavily redacted documents with names and other information blacked out. In some cases, that was done to protect the identity of victims, but not all."

He recalled reports from last July in which Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) wrote a letter to the DOJ saying he was made aware of as many as 1,000 FBI personnel sifting through the files to "'flag' any records in which President Trump was mentioned."

Bloomberg News later reported that Trump’s name was removed from all of the files for "privacy" reasons.

Thankfully, the DOJ isn't made up of "the skilled operators" necessary of carrying out an expert conspiracy. Instead, Waldman said the "bumbling partisan hacks. ... They’d have a tough time mounting a comprehensive cover-up of Trump’s ties to Epstein, simply because those ties are so public and extensive."

While Republicans might be trying desperately to tie Epstein to the Democrats, and make it go away, Waldman explained that the scandal is bigger than a typical political scandal. What happened to the girls and women is horrific, but the anger goes beyond getting them justice and dips into the anger Americans have over elite, powerful men getting away with such crimes. Both sides of the political aisle are angry, "no matter how many times Trump says he was 'totally exonerated.'"

There is no greater example of the powerful elite that gets away with whatever they want, Waldman said, recalling his father bailing Trump out of financial blundersand funding his projects. He even admitted in the "Access Hollywood" video that he can assault women and get away with it because he's "a celebrity."

“When you’re a star, they let you do it. You can do anything," Trump said in the video.

"That’s the rot in the American elite that this scandal has revealed," Waldman closed. He argued that whatever distractions Republicans try to throw up, it won't help the scandal disappear.