Trump's Kryptonite just got even more dangerous to handle

This is what we in the business of journalism call a news story.

Last week, the Justice Department released a document showing that Mark Epstein submitted a 2023 tip to the FBI stating that he believed President Donald Trump authorized his brother Jeffrey’s murder. The government had classified Epstein’s 2019 death in prison as a suicide.

Here’s what Mark Epstein wrote to the FBI on February 22, 2023.

“Jeffrey Epstein was murdered in his jail cell. I have reason to believe he was killed because he was about to name names. I believe Presient [sic] Trump authorized is [sic] murder.”

Journalists cannot treat Mark Epstein’s allegation as established fact. There is no public evidence supporting it, and the official ruling remains suicide. But it is not our role to declare his claim false either. Our role is to report that he made it — and that it was submitted to the FBI.

All we know for sure is that the American people have a right to know. And that so much information and context has not been widely reported — through convention or cowardice — by the news media they trust.

Mark Epstein is not claiming America faked the moon landing. He is not alone in doubting the federal government’s assertion that his brother — while in federal custody, facing charges that could send him to prison for life — managed to commit suicide.

According to the Bureau of Prisons, Epstein was found hanging in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center on Aug. 10, 2019. He had been taken off suicide watch despite having been found semiconscious with marks on his neck three weeks earlier. On the night he died, both guards assigned to check on him were asleep. Security cameras malfunctioned. His cellmate had been transferred out, leaving him alone.

In the 40 years preceding Epstein’s death, the Metropolitan Correctional Center — a fortress that has held everyone from John Gotti to El Chapo — had recorded only one successful suicide. The system had worked for four decades. But presumably not in this case.

Dr. Michael Baden, a former New York City Chief Medical Examiner hired by Mark Epstein to observe the autopsy, concluded that injuries to Jeffrey Epstein’s neck — including fractures to the hyoid bone — were “extremely unusual in suicidal hangings” and more consistent with “homicidal strangulation.” The New York City Medical Examiner nevertheless ruled the death a suicide.

Still, the media had no appetite for the story at the time. Today it’s treated as some frivolous footnote to the Epstein story.

Consider what Trump has said publicly. Throughout his political career, Trump has brazenly embraced retribution as principle. He has mused about handling whistleblowers “like we used to in the old days.” He labeled his former attorney Michael Cohen a “rat” for cooperating with authorities. When Trump uses the word “retribution,” he is signaling that the cost of betrayal is total.

The Trump administration arrested Epstein in July 2019. The Trump Justice Department oversaw the facility where he died six weeks later. Epstein was facing life in prison. His only bargaining chip was information.

Trump and Epstein were photographed together multiple times in the 1990s. In a 2002 interview with New York Magazine, Trump said he had known Epstein for 15 years and described him as someone who liked “beautiful women … many of them on the younger side.”

Epstein's testimony would have carried obvious political risk for anyone he might have implicated — including Trump — regardless of whether any allegations were true.

Still, taking all that into account, it's an enormous leap to ponder whether an American president might even consider involvement such as that alleged by Mark Epstein. But one needn't take that leap to examine the documented historical record.

Unlike any other president in American history, Trump entered office with a business record marked by decades of litigation and documented dealings with contractors and associates later convicted in organized crime cases. Long before Trump entered politics, elements of his real estate and casino operations were examined in court records, regulatory findings and investigative reporting.

In the 1980s, Trump’s construction projects used S&A Concrete, a company federal prosecutors later described in racketeering indictments as being controlled by Anthony “Fat Tony” Salerno and Paul Castellano, who were convicted in organized crime cases.

In 1982, Trump purchased Atlantic City property from Salvatore Testa, later identified by law enforcement as a member of the Philadelphia crime family. The transaction was reflected in public property records and later detailed in investigative reporting.

In 1991, the New Jersey Casino Control Commission fined Trump Plaza $200,000 for regulatory violations involving high-rolling gambler Robert LiButti, who in secretly recorded FBI conversations referred to Gambino boss John Gotti as “my boss.” That same year, the commission imposed additional fines related to luxury vehicle transactions tied to LiButti.

In separate litigation, Judge Charles E. Stewart Jr. ruled that Trump had engaged in a conspiracy to violate fiduciary duties in connection with undocumented Polish workers employed during the demolition of the Bonwit Teller building. The demolition contractor, William Kaszycki, was later linked in court records to organized crime figures.

Trump was never charged with organized crime offenses in these matters. None of this history establishes any connection to Jeffrey Epstein’s death. It does, however, form part of the documented public record of Trump’s pre-presidential business career.

Courts operate under strict evidentiary rules designed to limit what juries hear. Journalism operates differently. Our role is not to adjudicate guilt, but to report what has been alleged and what is known.

The media is not a court of law; it’s a court of public opinion. It’s governed by rules of fairness, honesty and thoroughness.

But now, after all the clamoring for the release of the Epstein files, a veritable news blackout has greeted the bombshell allegation that Jeffrey Epstein’s brother told the FBI he believed his brother did not commit suicide and that the president of the United States authorized his murder.

For those of us who believe the public has a right to know what their government does in their name, that silence is the story.

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