A bronze-painted statue titled “Best Friends Forever, ”depicting Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein holding hands on October 2, 2025, in Washington, DC.(Andrew Harnik / Getty Images)
The scandal around Jeffrey Epstein, who trafficked and abused children and died in a prison cell in 2019, has never gone away. It continues to explode now that House Democrats have released thousands of e-mails from Epstein and his cronies. But while the political class and mainstream media are understandably focused on the sex scandal, another dimension of the scandal goes uncovered except by independent media outlets such as Drop Site: Epstein’s deep ties to the national security state. I talked to international relations scholar Van Jackson about this crucial part of the story.
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Over at Talking Points Memo, Josh Kovensky has written an essay on the Trump
administration’s use of anti-terrorism law to target political groups it doesn’t like.
In that piece, Kovensky notes,
"Across the country, federal prosecutors are upgrading what would have been routine
prosecutions into terrorism cases when they involve people President Trump has cast as his
political enemies.
It represents a dramatic departure from how the Justice Department has historically used the
federal material support for terrorism statute. For decades, counterterrorism prosecutors have
largely reserved the statute — 2339A — for the kinds of audacious plots that wreak real, lasting
damage or whose ambition forms the stuff of movie screenplays."
I spoke to Kovensky about his essay and the history and politics of this dangerous legal
innovation.
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