| --- |
| title: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12) (HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019957)" |
| source: "House Oversight: Estate Documents (Nov 12)" |
| sourceUrl: "https://www.justice.gov/epstein" |
| date: "2026-01-01" |
| category: "House Oversight" |
| eftaNumber: "HOUSE_OVERSIGHT_019957" |
| ocrPages: 1 |
| ocrChars: 2794 |
| ocrElapsed: 0.0 |
| parseTier: "external-legacy" |
| engine: "engine undisclosed (ep-nov-12.greg.technology mirror)" |
| externalSource: "greg-ep-nov-12" |
| externalLicense: "not granted" |
| externalCredit: "ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| externalUrl: "https://ep-nov-12.greg.technology" |
| --- |
| |
| office, firmly crossing his arms. "There's no reason to even talk about it," he said again, |
| stubbornly. |
| For his part, the president did not use, though he might have, the word "Kafkaesque." |
| He regarded the Russia story as senseless and inexplicable and having no basis in reality. |
| They were just being sucked in. |
| They had survived scandal during the campaign-the Billy Bush weekend-which |
| virtually no one in Trump's inner circle had thought they could survive, only to be hit by |
| the Russia scandal. Compared to Pussy-gate, Russia seemed like the only-desperate-thing- |
| left-gate. What seemed unfair now was that the issue still wasn't going away, and that, |
| incomprehensibly, people took it seriously. When at best it was ... nothing. |
| It was the media. |
| The White House had quickly become accustomed to media-led scandals, but they |
| were also used to their passing. But now this one was, frustratingly, holding on. |
| If there was any single piece of proof not just of media bias but of the intention of the |
| media to do anything it could to undermine this president, it was— in the view of the |
| Trump circle this, the Russia story, what the Washington Post termed "Russia's attack on |
| our political system." ("So terribly, terribly unfair, with no proof of one vote changed," |
| according to Conway.) It was insidious. It was, to them, although they didn't put it this |
| way, similar to the kind of dark Clinton-like conspiracies that Republicans were more |
| wont to accuse liberals of -Whitewater, Benghazi, Email-gate. That is, an obsessive |
| narrative that leads to investigations, which lead to other investigations, and to more |
| obsessive no-escape media coverage. This was modern politics: blood-sport conspiracies |
| that were about trying to destroy people and careers. |
| When the comparison to Whitewater was made to Conway, she, rather proving the |
| point about obsessions, immediately began to argue the particulars involving Webster |
| Hubbell, a mostly forgotten figure in the Whitewater affair, and the culpability of the Rose |
| Law Firm in Arkansas, where Hillary Clinton was a partner. Everybody believed their |
| side's conspiracies, while utterly, and righteously, rejecting the conspiracies leveled at |
| them. To call something a conspiracy was to dismiss it. |
| As for Bannon, who had himself promoted many conspiracies, he dismissed the Russia |
| story in textbook fashion: "It's just a conspiracy theory." And, he added, the Trump team |
| wasn't capable of conspiring about anything. |
| * * * |
| The Russia story was— just two weeks into the new presidency— a dividing line with each |
| side viewing the other as pushing fake news. |
| The greater White House wholly believed that the story was an invented construct of |
| weak if not preposterous narrative threads, with a mind-boggling thesis: We fixed the |
| HOUSE. |
| _OVERSIGHT_019957 |
|
|
