As mentioned in an earlier post, Americans have seen numerous attacks on institutional knowledge during the past three years. There are some who claim that academia, especially science, has a liberal bias. Those same people also echo the phrase “fake news” in order to bury their heads in the sand and deny the obvious. Prison Planet, Breitbart, the /pol/ board of 4chan, and other extreme right-wing sites have simultaneously disseminated countless stories that have no basis in fact. These tales consistently accused members of the US Democratic Party of conspiring in varied criminal activities ranging from corruption to sex trafficking.
Those initially composing these stories would almost certainly have known that the sources they based these accusations upon contained no evidence, only loose connections and googobs of innuendo. And in other cases, they had to have known that they were simply creating tall tales out of their fecund imaginations.*
We now know that a downpour of conspiracy accusations, ratcheting up in intensity as the clock counted down to the federal election of November 2016, received financial and logistic support from the Russian government, itself a plutocracy created by the theft of government coffers courtesy of a new oligopolistic class headed by President Vladmir Putin.** Most of this occurred in social media forums, and was aided by the Russian dissemination of DNC materials stolen by Wikileaks agents. For the most part, they really didn’t contain much damning information, just potentially embarrassing revelations.*** But the spin on these items led to a hardcore belief among Hillary Clinton's oppositional base that she had engaged in illegal activities, sometimes with the help of Democratic operatives.
While mudslinging has always been part and parcel of American politics, this represented, in horse-racing lingo, a step up in class in terms of sophistication, media and strategy. And it had tangible results, most notably the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency. There were also consequences to this shotgun approach to political targeting. These were (and continue to be) so numerous and mind-numbingly common that many have ceased to pay attention, or worse yet distrust all outside information unless it affirms deeply held beliefs. To show something interesting about the “deep state,” I want to spend a little time talking about arguably the most famous example.
Before I do that, here’s some background, starting with a premise that you know all too well: oftentimes, the best defense is a great offense.
In 2008, when it seemed certain that US Senator John McCain would sew up the Republican nomination, those supporting the conservative cause online knew that they had a potential issue coming up, namely the fact that he was born in Panama, on an American naval installation. Of course, that shouldn’t have been a big deal. The Canal Zone was US territory, and many have regarded offshore US installations as American soil. But it was about the time Illinois Senator Barack Obama became a shoe-in for the nomination when Jim Geraghty penned a 9 June 2008 post for the National ReviewOnline, in which he challenged Obama to prove his US citizenship. The story spread like wildfire for a brief time in mainstream conservative media, and continued for years online. This movement finally goaded Obama into releasing his actual birth certificate, issued and confirmed by officials from the state of Hawaii. Despite the release and authentication, “birthers” dismissed hardcore documentary evidence, and continued to make the charge, attempting to prove it true by ginning up phony birth certificates indicating a Kenyan place of birth.
One could speculate that many if not most birthers knew that the charge was false. The accusation nevertheless provided other benefits. For eight years, a base that would become the bedrock for the eventual Republican nominee heaped doubt as to the constitutional legitimacy of the President, and by association the person he endorsed as his successor. Most of those who circulated this story doubled-down on the allegation even after challenged/debunked by reputable persons using reputable methodology.
And all of this found impetus in a minor molehill perceived as Everest. But as a candidate, Donald Trump didn’t have minor molehills to overcome. He had the Rockies.
To start, Trump suffered a chain of known business blunders which included bad casino deals, restructuring of debt, insolvency, and an investigation into his allegedly fraudulent for-profit university. Many conservative Christian voters who comprised the core of the Republican base didn’t seem to have with a huge problem with the money issues. Who doesn’t have money problems from time-to-time, right?
Sexual impropriety, on the other hand, is a lot harder to dismiss from a puritanical perspective. During the campaign we were inundated with redundant reports of Trump’s sexual misdeeds. Many of them had become public years ago, for example his affair with a mistress who would later become his second wife, Marla Maples. In a 1989 deposition, Trump’s first wife, Ivana, swore that he had raped her.**** During the campaign we saw old clips from the Howard Stern Show, in which Trump bragged that his ownership of the Miss USA and Miss Teen pageants entitled him to go to the contestants' dressing rooms at any time to see the young women in varying stages of nudity. And if that weren’t enough, in 2005 he boasted to Access Hollywood reporter Billy Bush that his wealth allowed him to do anything he wanted to any woman. He could kiss whomever he pleased without permission or grab her by the feline.
Still, the President-to-be had an even more damning skeleton in his closet. If you only watched broadcast or cable news, or read the dailies, you probably missed it. But the anti-Trump crowd generated heavy buzz on YouTube and social media, often on the same battleground as those waging war on behalf of Donald’s candidacy.
The story is big enough to have its own X-Spot series, but to sum it up the best I can, the scandal originated in Trump’s relationship with a man name Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was ostensibly a financial analyst for the super-wealthy, although some within that industry question his actually level of expertise. His success allowed him to purchase the largest single-family dwelling unit in Manhattan, a mansion converted from an old nine-story elementary school. He also owned an apartment in Paris, a 10,000 acre ranch in Stanley, NM, a villa in Palm Beach, FL, and an entire Carrabean island, on which he built mansions and guesthouses. Epstein traveled to and from these properties on his private jet.
In 2005, a woman filed a complaint with Palm Beach police saying that Epstein had sexually abused her fourteen-year-old stepdaughter. Dozens of subsequent charges flooded the department soon afterward. Local police received help from the FBI, whose investigation led to a fifty-three page indictment on myriad charges.
Court documents referred to the complainants, all minors at the time of the alleged abuse, as Jane Does. But one of them, Virginia Giuffre (nee Roberts), gave a more extensive overview into Epstein’s activities. According to her, he had been using the underage girls to curry favor with wealthy, powerful men. Much of this occurred on Epstein’s island. Giuffre, said that Jeff flew the girls to wealthy clients on his personal jet, which eventually acquired a nickname: the Lolita Express. . As quoted by Kate Briquelet in a 3 June 2019 Daily Breast article, Giuffre stated, “Epstein and his friends sexually and physically abused many other girls. They did this in many places around the world.”
As for Epstein, his attorney, Alan Dershowitz managed a plea deal with federal prosecutor R. Alex Accosta.***** Dershowitz managed to whittled down the charges to a single misdemeanor count of solicitation of a minor, for which he received a sentence of thirteen months in the local jail. But because of his business activities, the court granted him a work furlough during weekdays, during which time he flew on The Lolita Express to wherever he had to go.
As for the powerful men Epstein seduced with the nymphets, one of them was allegedly Donald Trump. Trump did, in fact, know Epstein. As Trump said of him in a 2003 speech, “I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy, he's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Epstein actually met Virginia Giuffre at Mar -A-Lago where the then-fifteen-year-old worked for Mr. Trump. According to The Young Turks and many other sources, the flight manifest for The Lolita Express lists his name as flying to this private, presumably for sexual favors.
During the middle of the election year of 2016, yet another Jane Doe filed suit against Trump claiming that he had raped her during one of Epstein’s soirees. Although thirteen at the time, she made clear that this was a not just statutory rape. She said the session started with him striking her hard in the face. On 4 November 2016, just days before the national election, Doe dropped her lawsuit. Her attorney, Lisa Bloom explained that she received threats demanding she drop the suit or die.
Hmm. Why does that sound so familiar? It’s not like Trump would just have his way with women, dump them, and then send over goons who threaten to kill them if they don’t shut up, is it?
Figure 1. Morning Joe Segment on Stormy Daniel’s 60 Minutes interview.
The story had been brewing for some time during the summer of 2016 in cyberspace, the same territory where Steve Bannon and his social media warriors waged their smear campaigns against Clinton in the national election. They countered the above story throughout this time by noting that someone else’s name appeared on the Lolita Express’ flight manifest: specifically Bill Clinton.
As a philanthropist, Epstein had socialized with both the Clintons and Trumps in New York at charity events and so forth. So it didn’t seem in those days, before the criminal case, all that untoward for Clinton to borrow Epstein’s plane to make two trips to charity events in Africa. On one he flew with comedian Chris Tucker. On the other he flew with actor Kevin Spacey.******
The linking of Bill Clinton to the Lolita Express, and the subsequent linking of the ex-President and his wife, eventually drew airplay on Fox News during October 2016. But these were nebulous associations linking Hillary to Epstein that carefully avoided Trump's ties to the same man.
The development of a concrete narrative came a little over a week before the election when on 30 October 2016 a Twitter user going by the handle David Goldberg posted a fake claim that disgraced ex-Congressman Antony Weiner’s emails linked Hillary Clinton to a pedophile ring. By this time, a number of intercepted emails given to Wikileaks by Russian intel had noted a restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, that had become really popular among Democrats. Even better, their advertising featured a symbol perilously close to one the FBI had identified as a pedophile code only a few months earlier.
Figure 2. Comet Ad.
![]()
Figure 3. FBI’s pedophile code.
![]()
The story grew until those living in that echo chamber convinced each other that an active sex trafficking ring was operating at that very pizzeria under the command of the Democratic nominee. The legend grew even more in the days before the election with some accusing former White House Chief of Staff of personally kidnapping Madeleine McCann, a four-year-old at the heart of an infamous missing person case.
For over a month, Comet Ping-Pong and its personnel suffered both online and offline harassment. On 4 December 2016, Pizzagate proponent Edgar Welch fired a volley of three bullets from an AR-15 rifle into the restaurant, and then took it over in search of the missing and exploited children. After finding none there, he peacefully surrendered to authorities while still insisting that the story was true.
In this case, the damage was minimal. No one was injured in the attack. And the shooter, who seemed to have decent intentions (his lack of cognition notwithstanding), was spared a murder charge that could have ruined his entire life. Yet, anyone with a couple of neurons to rub together can see how this could have gone horribly wrong, possibly devolving into the type of mass shooting that occurs every other day, it seems.
A number of institutional actors have called “conspiracy theories” to task, and understandably so given the reckless accusations made by those identifying with extremist elements. Moreover, other gullible adherents to false claims have drawn real blood, as in the murder of Charlottesville counter-protestor Heather Heyer on 12 August 2017.
To a large extent, these sorts of false accusations cite the principle of Imperium in Imperio as an excuse/rationale for their actions. In their eyes, they believe that they’re rescuing democracy from a secret, shadow government hell bent on destroying it.
Of course, were they looking at this from just about any other perspective they might be shocked to find that whatever shadow government exists benefits greatly from their unyielding, unwitting, and unquestioned support.
Or in other words, they’d be horrified to find out the side they’re really on, and probably guilt-ridden when confronted by the atrocities they executed for its glory.
______________
*For example, the story that Democratic nominee Hillary was gravely ill and not expected to live out the year made their initial appearances in right-wing message boards during the summer of 2016, with no background information or corroborating evidence preceding it. This expanded to such openly right-wing tabloids as The National Enquirer after Clinton took ill during a 911 memorial. While this affirmed (and for some still affirms) that Hillary was deathly ill, the fact that she is quite alive and well at the time of this posting should be sufficient to prove the accusation objectively false.
**For more information on this, see Dr. Karen Dawisha’s (Political Science, Miami University) 2015 book Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? Among other things, Dawisha recounts how elements within the dying KGB siphoned off monies belonging to the even more moribund Communist party during the last days of the Soviet Union. The party, it would seem, relied upon the KGB to safeguard the money by keeping it in offshore accounts. Putin and his fellow KGB officers had different plans for that cash.
***For example, one of the leaks quoted Clinton as saying:
I think the statement depicts a regrettable truth regarding the nature of American politics. And Clinton suffered a number of political attacks due to the expression of her private positions in public forums: e.g., her point-blank assertion that the AMA and large pharmaceutical companies were roadblocks to universal health care; her stated belief that her husband had subject to a vast right-wing conspiracy (later proven true when the Richard Scaife’s Arkansas Project came to public light, and affirmed by former self-proclaimed ‘right-wing conspirator’ in his 2003 memoir Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative . Thus, one can understand her saying this as a hard-learned self-lesson. One can also note that contrary to context, the statement can easily seem hypocritical.
****by 2015, Ivana backtracked on this claim, saying that she didn’t mean the term rape literally, but rather figuratively.
*****Many have noted the oddity of this, seeing that Dershowitz’s fame came as an appellate specialist, not as a plea-bargainer. Likewise, a number of pundits took note of this arrangement and plea deal when Trump nominated and a Republican-majority house and Senate confirmed Accosta as Secretary of Labor.
******During the election, Spacey’s name had yet to surface in any scandal. One could imagine how alt-right pundits would have reacted were the actor’s proclivities known in 2016.
Those initially composing these stories would almost certainly have known that the sources they based these accusations upon contained no evidence, only loose connections and googobs of innuendo. And in other cases, they had to have known that they were simply creating tall tales out of their fecund imaginations.*
We now know that a downpour of conspiracy accusations, ratcheting up in intensity as the clock counted down to the federal election of November 2016, received financial and logistic support from the Russian government, itself a plutocracy created by the theft of government coffers courtesy of a new oligopolistic class headed by President Vladmir Putin.** Most of this occurred in social media forums, and was aided by the Russian dissemination of DNC materials stolen by Wikileaks agents. For the most part, they really didn’t contain much damning information, just potentially embarrassing revelations.*** But the spin on these items led to a hardcore belief among Hillary Clinton's oppositional base that she had engaged in illegal activities, sometimes with the help of Democratic operatives.
While mudslinging has always been part and parcel of American politics, this represented, in horse-racing lingo, a step up in class in terms of sophistication, media and strategy. And it had tangible results, most notably the election of Donald Trump to the US Presidency. There were also consequences to this shotgun approach to political targeting. These were (and continue to be) so numerous and mind-numbingly common that many have ceased to pay attention, or worse yet distrust all outside information unless it affirms deeply held beliefs. To show something interesting about the “deep state,” I want to spend a little time talking about arguably the most famous example.
Before I do that, here’s some background, starting with a premise that you know all too well: oftentimes, the best defense is a great offense.
In 2008, when it seemed certain that US Senator John McCain would sew up the Republican nomination, those supporting the conservative cause online knew that they had a potential issue coming up, namely the fact that he was born in Panama, on an American naval installation. Of course, that shouldn’t have been a big deal. The Canal Zone was US territory, and many have regarded offshore US installations as American soil. But it was about the time Illinois Senator Barack Obama became a shoe-in for the nomination when Jim Geraghty penned a 9 June 2008 post for the National ReviewOnline, in which he challenged Obama to prove his US citizenship. The story spread like wildfire for a brief time in mainstream conservative media, and continued for years online. This movement finally goaded Obama into releasing his actual birth certificate, issued and confirmed by officials from the state of Hawaii. Despite the release and authentication, “birthers” dismissed hardcore documentary evidence, and continued to make the charge, attempting to prove it true by ginning up phony birth certificates indicating a Kenyan place of birth.
One could speculate that many if not most birthers knew that the charge was false. The accusation nevertheless provided other benefits. For eight years, a base that would become the bedrock for the eventual Republican nominee heaped doubt as to the constitutional legitimacy of the President, and by association the person he endorsed as his successor. Most of those who circulated this story doubled-down on the allegation even after challenged/debunked by reputable persons using reputable methodology.
And all of this found impetus in a minor molehill perceived as Everest. But as a candidate, Donald Trump didn’t have minor molehills to overcome. He had the Rockies.
To start, Trump suffered a chain of known business blunders which included bad casino deals, restructuring of debt, insolvency, and an investigation into his allegedly fraudulent for-profit university. Many conservative Christian voters who comprised the core of the Republican base didn’t seem to have with a huge problem with the money issues. Who doesn’t have money problems from time-to-time, right?
Sexual impropriety, on the other hand, is a lot harder to dismiss from a puritanical perspective. During the campaign we were inundated with redundant reports of Trump’s sexual misdeeds. Many of them had become public years ago, for example his affair with a mistress who would later become his second wife, Marla Maples. In a 1989 deposition, Trump’s first wife, Ivana, swore that he had raped her.**** During the campaign we saw old clips from the Howard Stern Show, in which Trump bragged that his ownership of the Miss USA and Miss Teen pageants entitled him to go to the contestants' dressing rooms at any time to see the young women in varying stages of nudity. And if that weren’t enough, in 2005 he boasted to Access Hollywood reporter Billy Bush that his wealth allowed him to do anything he wanted to any woman. He could kiss whomever he pleased without permission or grab her by the feline.
Still, the President-to-be had an even more damning skeleton in his closet. If you only watched broadcast or cable news, or read the dailies, you probably missed it. But the anti-Trump crowd generated heavy buzz on YouTube and social media, often on the same battleground as those waging war on behalf of Donald’s candidacy.
The story is big enough to have its own X-Spot series, but to sum it up the best I can, the scandal originated in Trump’s relationship with a man name Jeffrey Epstein. Epstein was ostensibly a financial analyst for the super-wealthy, although some within that industry question his actually level of expertise. His success allowed him to purchase the largest single-family dwelling unit in Manhattan, a mansion converted from an old nine-story elementary school. He also owned an apartment in Paris, a 10,000 acre ranch in Stanley, NM, a villa in Palm Beach, FL, and an entire Carrabean island, on which he built mansions and guesthouses. Epstein traveled to and from these properties on his private jet.
In 2005, a woman filed a complaint with Palm Beach police saying that Epstein had sexually abused her fourteen-year-old stepdaughter. Dozens of subsequent charges flooded the department soon afterward. Local police received help from the FBI, whose investigation led to a fifty-three page indictment on myriad charges.
Court documents referred to the complainants, all minors at the time of the alleged abuse, as Jane Does. But one of them, Virginia Giuffre (nee Roberts), gave a more extensive overview into Epstein’s activities. According to her, he had been using the underage girls to curry favor with wealthy, powerful men. Much of this occurred on Epstein’s island. Giuffre, said that Jeff flew the girls to wealthy clients on his personal jet, which eventually acquired a nickname: the Lolita Express. . As quoted by Kate Briquelet in a 3 June 2019 Daily Breast article, Giuffre stated, “Epstein and his friends sexually and physically abused many other girls. They did this in many places around the world.”
As for Epstein, his attorney, Alan Dershowitz managed a plea deal with federal prosecutor R. Alex Accosta.***** Dershowitz managed to whittled down the charges to a single misdemeanor count of solicitation of a minor, for which he received a sentence of thirteen months in the local jail. But because of his business activities, the court granted him a work furlough during weekdays, during which time he flew on The Lolita Express to wherever he had to go.
As for the powerful men Epstein seduced with the nymphets, one of them was allegedly Donald Trump. Trump did, in fact, know Epstein. As Trump said of him in a 2003 speech, “I've known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy, he's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” Epstein actually met Virginia Giuffre at Mar -A-Lago where the then-fifteen-year-old worked for Mr. Trump. According to The Young Turks and many other sources, the flight manifest for The Lolita Express lists his name as flying to this private, presumably for sexual favors.
During the middle of the election year of 2016, yet another Jane Doe filed suit against Trump claiming that he had raped her during one of Epstein’s soirees. Although thirteen at the time, she made clear that this was a not just statutory rape. She said the session started with him striking her hard in the face. On 4 November 2016, just days before the national election, Doe dropped her lawsuit. Her attorney, Lisa Bloom explained that she received threats demanding she drop the suit or die.
Hmm. Why does that sound so familiar? It’s not like Trump would just have his way with women, dump them, and then send over goons who threaten to kill them if they don’t shut up, is it?
Figure 1. Morning Joe Segment on Stormy Daniel’s 60 Minutes interview.
“”
The story had been brewing for some time during the summer of 2016 in cyberspace, the same territory where Steve Bannon and his social media warriors waged their smear campaigns against Clinton in the national election. They countered the above story throughout this time by noting that someone else’s name appeared on the Lolita Express’ flight manifest: specifically Bill Clinton.
As a philanthropist, Epstein had socialized with both the Clintons and Trumps in New York at charity events and so forth. So it didn’t seem in those days, before the criminal case, all that untoward for Clinton to borrow Epstein’s plane to make two trips to charity events in Africa. On one he flew with comedian Chris Tucker. On the other he flew with actor Kevin Spacey.******
The linking of Bill Clinton to the Lolita Express, and the subsequent linking of the ex-President and his wife, eventually drew airplay on Fox News during October 2016. But these were nebulous associations linking Hillary to Epstein that carefully avoided Trump's ties to the same man.
The development of a concrete narrative came a little over a week before the election when on 30 October 2016 a Twitter user going by the handle David Goldberg posted a fake claim that disgraced ex-Congressman Antony Weiner’s emails linked Hillary Clinton to a pedophile ring. By this time, a number of intercepted emails given to Wikileaks by Russian intel had noted a restaurant, Comet Ping Pong, that had become really popular among Democrats. Even better, their advertising featured a symbol perilously close to one the FBI had identified as a pedophile code only a few months earlier.
Figure 2. Comet Ad.
Figure 3. FBI’s pedophile code.
The story grew until those living in that echo chamber convinced each other that an active sex trafficking ring was operating at that very pizzeria under the command of the Democratic nominee. The legend grew even more in the days before the election with some accusing former White House Chief of Staff of personally kidnapping Madeleine McCann, a four-year-old at the heart of an infamous missing person case.
For over a month, Comet Ping-Pong and its personnel suffered both online and offline harassment. On 4 December 2016, Pizzagate proponent Edgar Welch fired a volley of three bullets from an AR-15 rifle into the restaurant, and then took it over in search of the missing and exploited children. After finding none there, he peacefully surrendered to authorities while still insisting that the story was true.
In this case, the damage was minimal. No one was injured in the attack. And the shooter, who seemed to have decent intentions (his lack of cognition notwithstanding), was spared a murder charge that could have ruined his entire life. Yet, anyone with a couple of neurons to rub together can see how this could have gone horribly wrong, possibly devolving into the type of mass shooting that occurs every other day, it seems.
A number of institutional actors have called “conspiracy theories” to task, and understandably so given the reckless accusations made by those identifying with extremist elements. Moreover, other gullible adherents to false claims have drawn real blood, as in the murder of Charlottesville counter-protestor Heather Heyer on 12 August 2017.
To a large extent, these sorts of false accusations cite the principle of Imperium in Imperio as an excuse/rationale for their actions. In their eyes, they believe that they’re rescuing democracy from a secret, shadow government hell bent on destroying it.
Of course, were they looking at this from just about any other perspective they might be shocked to find that whatever shadow government exists benefits greatly from their unyielding, unwitting, and unquestioned support.
Or in other words, they’d be horrified to find out the side they’re really on, and probably guilt-ridden when confronted by the atrocities they executed for its glory.
______________
*For example, the story that Democratic nominee Hillary was gravely ill and not expected to live out the year made their initial appearances in right-wing message boards during the summer of 2016, with no background information or corroborating evidence preceding it. This expanded to such openly right-wing tabloids as The National Enquirer after Clinton took ill during a 911 memorial. While this affirmed (and for some still affirms) that Hillary was deathly ill, the fact that she is quite alive and well at the time of this posting should be sufficient to prove the accusation objectively false.
**For more information on this, see Dr. Karen Dawisha’s (Political Science, Miami University) 2015 book Putin’s Kleptocracy: Who Owns Russia? Among other things, Dawisha recounts how elements within the dying KGB siphoned off monies belonging to the even more moribund Communist party during the last days of the Soviet Union. The party, it would seem, relied upon the KGB to safeguard the money by keeping it in offshore accounts. Putin and his fellow KGB officers had different plans for that cash.
***For example, one of the leaks quoted Clinton as saying:
Politics is like sausage being made. . . . . It is unsavory, and it always has been that way, but we usually end up where we need to be. But if everybody’s watching, you know, all of the backroom discussions and the deals, you know, then people get a little nervous, to say the least. So, you need both a public and a private position.
I think the statement depicts a regrettable truth regarding the nature of American politics. And Clinton suffered a number of political attacks due to the expression of her private positions in public forums: e.g., her point-blank assertion that the AMA and large pharmaceutical companies were roadblocks to universal health care; her stated belief that her husband had subject to a vast right-wing conspiracy (later proven true when the Richard Scaife’s Arkansas Project came to public light, and affirmed by former self-proclaimed ‘right-wing conspirator’ in his 2003 memoir Blinded by the Right: The Conscience of an Ex-Conservative . Thus, one can understand her saying this as a hard-learned self-lesson. One can also note that contrary to context, the statement can easily seem hypocritical.
****by 2015, Ivana backtracked on this claim, saying that she didn’t mean the term rape literally, but rather figuratively.
*****Many have noted the oddity of this, seeing that Dershowitz’s fame came as an appellate specialist, not as a plea-bargainer. Likewise, a number of pundits took note of this arrangement and plea deal when Trump nominated and a Republican-majority house and Senate confirmed Accosta as Secretary of Labor.
******During the election, Spacey’s name had yet to surface in any scandal. One could imagine how alt-right pundits would have reacted were the actor’s proclivities known in 2016.