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Yahoo
29 minutes ago
- Yahoo
Trump's favorite lines of defense aren't working in the Epstein controversy
An editor once asked me President Donald Trump's position on an issue I was writing about. "On which day?" I replied. Since he burst onto the political scene in 2015, Trump has made claims, dropped them, adopted a new argument that contradicts the old one, casually admitted something he long denied, changed the subject and generally just thrown every possible argument at the wall to see what would stick. He spent years arguing that Barack Obama wasn't born in the United States, then simply admitted that wasn't true and falsely blamed Hillary Clinton for starting the rumor. He swore his 2016 campaign had only low-level contacts with Russia; then admitted his son, son-in-law and campaign head met at Trump Tower with a Russian woman claiming to have dirt on Hillary Clinton — and argued that anyone would do the same. Even his defense attorneys adopted this tactic, arguing during his impeachment trial over the Jan. 6 attack on the Capitol that he could be tried instead on criminal charges, then claiming when he faced criminal charges that he had presidential immunity. It's all reminiscent of Bart Simpson's infamous defense when confronted with a note from school: 'I didn't do it. Nobody saw me do it. You can't prove anything.' Faced with controversy over the release of any records related to the late pedophile and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, Trump has again tried the same defenses, but they don't seem to be working as well. By his own admission, Trump had a long history with Epstein that included socializing with him at a Mar-a-Lago party, attending a Victoria's Secret party together and flying on his private jet. (Trump has denied allegations of sexual misconduct and has denied any impropriety related to Epstein's crimes.) But after spreading a conspiracy theory related to Epstein's death in 2019, suggesting that his death may not have been a suicide in 2020 and promising in 2024 that he would declassify the Epstein files if re-elected, Trump has found himself in a bit of a pickle. The Department of Justice and FBI released a memo on July 7 concluding that there was no evidence of an 'incriminating 'client list,'' but that just fanned the flames. Trump then tried out several different arguments in succession: There's nothing interesting in the files: 'I don't understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody. It's pretty boring stuff.' Epstein is old news: 'Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy has been talked about for years.' This is a bad time to talk about it: 'I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein at a time like this, where we're having some of the greatest success and also tragedy, with what happened in Texas, too.' If there was anything incriminating about Trump in the files, the Biden administration would have released it: 'If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the MAGA Movement, why didn't they use it?' The Biden administration might have added false information to the files: 'You know, the Biden administration ran that for four years. I can imagine what they put into files.' Or maybe the Obama administration: 'These files were made up by Comey, they were made up by Obama, they were made up by the Biden.' It's all a hoax: 'I call it the Epstein hoax.' As before, these arguments abound with contradictions. Either there's incriminating information in the Epstein files, or there isn't. Either the files are boring but true, or they are salacious but a hoax. He can't simultaneously argue that the files are not very interesting but also hint that a secret cabal of Democrats planted explosive information in them. (At one point, he literally said of the records "it's sordid, but it's boring.") Trump put birtherism to rest by admitting he was wrong. It worked because as its chief proponent, he could effectively exonerate Obama of his baseless claims. Once again, Trump was one of the superspreaders of the Epstein conspiracy theories. But this time, he can't exonerate himself, and there's no one else who has the credibility to do it either. If we wait a few days, he may even have a new argument. This article was originally published on
Fast Company
30 minutes ago
- Fast Company
Trump is caught in an Epstein web of his own making
What happens when you spend decades seeding salacious stories about evil lurking in the halls of power, demanding evidence to prove basic truths, and questioning the veracity of that evidence once it's presented? Donald Trump is finding out. Over the last week, the president has been trying to fight his way out of a web of his own creation, as some of his truest followers in MAGA world call for the full release of the government's investigative files concerning convicted child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The outcry from Trump acolytes comes after the Department of Justice published a two-page memo earlier this month, stating that Epstein's supposed 'client list,' which Attorney General Pam Bondi previously said was on her desk, didn't actually exist. Following a weeklong uproar from both the left and right, Trump finally called on a federal court judge to unseal the grand jury testimony related to Epstein's case. The Justice Department has also subpoenaed Epstein's associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving her own 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. But the moves have done little to quell the outrage from the right, particularly after House Speaker Mike Johnson sent the chamber into summer recess early this week to head off a vote on releasing the files. The move prompted fury from the party's MAGA wing. 'Crimes have been committed,' Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia told reporters. 'If there's no justice and no accountability, people are going to get sick of it.' As all this has played out, Trump has cast about for someone to blame, pointing the finger at Democrats and his 'PAST supporters' for stoking the scandal. In truth, it's Trump who is uniquely responsible for cultivating the culture of conspiracy in which he's now floundering. Credit where it's due: Trump's long and well-documented history of conspiracy-mongering has been perhaps one of his greatest skills and has almost always worked out in his favor. His constant questioning of President Obama's birthplace was so successful that it transformed Trump, then a reality star and real estate mogul, into a cable news fixture. Later on, his success at convincing nearly three-quarters of Republicans that the 2020 election was stolen played no small role in securing his 2024 election victory. Even the speculation about which other A-listers were in Epstein's orbit were often fair game for Trump. In 2019, Trump fed rumors that the Clintons were somehow involved in Epstein's death by suicide in prison. 'Did Bill Clinton go to the island? That's the question,' Trump said at the time. Nevermind that Trump and Epstein were close friends or that he once told New York magazine that Epstein 'likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.' Trump is a devoted student of the 'I'm rubber, you're glue' school of politics—and for the most part, it's worked. But now it's Trump who's found himself stuck to Epstein, and he has no one to blame but himself. After all, it was Trump who taught his followers not to trust the abridged version of a story (see: Trump's campaign to secure Obama's long-form birth certificate in 2011). Now, it stands to reason those same people want more than a two-page summary of the DOJ's Epstein investigation. And it was Trump who convinced a certain subset of the American electorate to scour video evidence for alleged election night aberrations in 2020. Is it any wonder they're now spiraling over the missing minute (or minutes, according to Wired) in the video footage the government released of the night Epstein died? Meanwhile, the stories linking Trump to Epstein just keep growing. On Monday, The New York Times reported that one of Epstein's accusers encouraged the FBI to look into Trump as early as 1996. And The Wall Street Journal reported last week that Trump once sent Epstein a lewd birthday card, featuring a hand-drawn outline of a naked woman and allusions to their shared secrets. The Journal reported that the card is among the documents DOJ officials reviewed as part of the Epstein investigation. Trump has denied the story, calling the article 'fake news' and has since sued the Journal for defamation. That controversy prompted some conservatives who'd been critical of the Trump administration's approach to Epstein to leap to the president's defense. But that reprieve may be short-lived. As one Trump ally, Mike Benz, said on Steve Bannon's podcast over the weekend, 'You trained us to go after this issue.'
Washington Post
31 minutes ago
- Washington Post
Interrogating a cold-case killer: ‘Honey, your DNA was in the crime scene'
Eugene Gligor tried to deflect. 'It's guilty until proven innocent. I get it,' he told the detectives. They were accusing him of killing his ex-girlfriend's mother, a crime that went unsolved for two decades. Gligor had never been questioned in the case. And now, inside a small, gray interrogation room, he didn't budge as the detectives bored in. 'Well honey,' one of them said, 'your DNA was in the crime scene.' Gligor, seated on a small metal chair, waved his hands up and down, struggling to collect his words. What came next wasn't a confession. But it wasn't exactly a denial, either. 'I don't remember,' he said, his voice rising. 'I don't know. I don't know. I don't know.' The exchange, recorded on police video obtained Tuesday by The Washington Post, offers the clearest window yet on the day Gligor's 23 years of getting away with murder ended. As he could tell, the detectives knew he'd gotten inside Leslie Preer's home in Chevy Chase, Md., slammed her head repeatedly onto the foyer floor, strangled her and then carried her bloody body to an upstairs shower stall before he vanished. Over and over, Gligor claimed ignorance, repeatedly saying 'I don't know' or 'I don't remember.' He wore black slides, black socks, jeans and a black polo shirt, the same outfit he'd put on that morning before he was suddenly arrested while sitting atop the stairs outside his apartment under bright blue skies. Now, his left ankle chained to a metal hoop in the floor, he tried to keep calm and chose his words carefully. 'I'm really confused, and I'm really at a loss,' Gligor said. 'I don't have any recollection of being involved with any of this.' 'You keep saying you don't remember and you don't have any recollection,' the detective said. 'But if somebody was not involved it would be an adamant, 'I didn't do it.'' 'Oh, I didn't do it,' Gligor responded. 'I definitely didn't do it.' At times the conversation grew testy, as when Detective Tara Augustin suggested his crying was fake. 'There's no tears coming out of your face,' Augustin said. 'I'm very dry right now,' Gligor said, adding that he was tired and drained and didn't know what was going on. 'You want me to drink water so I can tear? … What are you trying to say?' 'I'm just trying to say that this seems a little put on,' Augustin said. Over the 24-minute interrogation, Gligor gave no ground. But the detectives from the Montgomery County Police Department had a lot anyway. For two years, they'd homed in on Gligor by analyzing DNA left at the crime scene against genetic markers in huge databases built in part by the family ancestry industry. And just nine days earlier — to confirm those findings — investigators furtively collected Gligor's DNA at Dulles International Airport during a phony 'secondary screening' they'd set up for him. By that evening, Gligor was locked in jail. He later pleaded guilty to second-degree murder and faces up to 30 years in prison at his scheduled sentencing on Aug. 28 — a hearing that could finally answer the big remaining question: Why? In high school, Gligor dated Preer's daughter. After Preer's murder — about nine months into the investigation — his name popped up. A previous neighbor of Gligor's called police to say they 'thought that he may be somehow related to the Leslie Preer murder,' according to court records. But the tip lacked specifics, police have said, and Gligor appears to have never been pursued as a suspect. Instead, he went on to a life of hiding in plain sight in the D.C. area: successful jobs, marriage, divorce, a circle of friends who knew him as warm and gregarious. Preer's daughter, Lauren, never thought he could have done it. A second police video from the case, recorded by an arresting officer not long before the interrogation, shows Gligor's final moments of freedom. He was sitting on his apartment steps in Washington last June, taking a break from his at-home work for a company that operated video surveillance systems. He scrolled his phone and sipped coffee. A team of undercover officers who had been surveilling the building from inside unmarked trucks and a minivan can be seen walking toward him. Their clothing — sneakers, shorts and untucked baggy T-shirts covering their holstered guns — suggested a group of civilians out for a brisk walk. Reaching his steps, they turned to quickly ascend them. 'Hands up!' one of them shouted, cursing loudly as birds chirped. The officers placed Gligor in handcuffs. 'What is this about?' he asked. 'You got a warrant, bro,' an officer answered. They led him down the steps toward a black Ram pickup. A man walking his dog passed and stared at the group. 'Can, can you let my girlfriend know?' Gligor asked, indicating she'd be worried about him failing to return. 'Yeah, yeah, yeah. We will,' an officer answered. Taken together, the two videos show key moments of a homicide case years in the making. They also show the everyday occurrences — a remote worker going outside for a break, concerns over a cellphone left behind, a cop joking about much the job has aged him — that are inevitably mixed into such investigations. 'We can't pretend, just because you look like a businessman, that you ain't going to hurt us,' one of the officers said by way of explaining the suddenness and language of the arrest. 'I understand,' said Gligor. The 2001 killing stunned Preer's quiet neighborhood just north of Washington. Investigators found DNA thought to have been the killer's throughout Preer's home and under her fingernails — the latter an indication she had tried to fight off her attacker. But all they knew about who left it was that he was male. The investigators spoke to Preer's family and associates, collecting names of possible suspects. Those men were asked to provide DNA samples. No matches. In 2022, Montgomery County cold-case investigators dove into the case. They obtained a court order authorizing them to conduct genetic genealogy analysis of DNA left at the crime scene. The method doesn't so much lead directly to suspects but can point investigators to possible relatives, even distant ones, who had submitted their DNA for ancestry testing. In this case, it pointed to two women — completely innocent — in Romania. From there, Augustin slowly built out a family tree, eventually learning there were distantly related Americans with the surname Gligor. The name caught the detectives' attention. In the old case records, Eugene Gligor was listed as a former of boyfriend of Preer's daughter. To confirm their family tree work, the detectives needed to get a sample of Gligor's DNA. They didn't want to spook him, so they set up the 'secondary screening' ruse at Dulles, complete with water bottles waiting for him to drink from. Gligor did so, leaving behind the bottle and his DNA. They matched it with DNA evidence from the crime scene, the arrest team went out to pick Gligor up, and they brought him to a police station. He was later moved into the interrogation room equipped with a video camera. The recording would later be submitted as a court exhibit during a Jan. 24 hearing. Gligor's attorneys sought to have the video disallowed at his pending trial, because, among other reasons, the detectives kept questioning Gligor after he repeatedly said he wanted to consult a lawyer. Circuit Judge David Lease agreed and ruled that much of the video could not be played at the trial. The video shows detectives acknowledging that they couldn't continue questioning Gligor after he asked for a lawyer, but the conversation continued — many times after their prompting, sometimes from Gligor himself. Ten days after that hearing, Gligor's attorneys and prosecutors jointly asked Lease to seal the video from public release. They gave two reasons: The video contained several references to specific medical information, and allowing the public to see the video — much of it now ruled inadmissible — could taint potential jurors. Lease granted their request. Gligor subsequently pleaded guilty, meaning there would be no trial and no jurors to possibly be tainted, and The Washington Post asked Lease to unseal the video. Lease granted the request this week, with a small section containing medical information redacted. In the interrogation video, detectives Augustin and Alyson Dupouy can be seen walking into the small room and starting off gently. They advised Gligor of his rights to remain silent and consult an attorney. Then they eased into their questions. 'So we were working on a case that came from Chevy Chase, and when we were going through the case file, your name was in there as someone that was related to the family. We have a big list of people, friends, family,' Augustin said. 'So do you recall back in 2001, Leslie Preer?' Gligor kept his hands clasped on his lap and looked directly at the detective. 'Yes, that she was murdered,' he said politely. The three spoke about him earlier dating Preer's daughter, Lauren, and how he used to hang out at her home. The detectives asked how he'd learned about the murder. From Lauren, Gligor answered. 'She had actually told me that,' he said. 'She had come into where I was working at a restaurant, and she had told me what had happened.' Lauren Preer, in a later interview with The Post, recalled a similar encounter. She said that after her mom's funeral, she ran into Gligor at a bar in Bethesda, Md. She said she told him that her mom had died, and he looked at her and replied, 'I'm so sorry.' The detectives pressed more. 'We wanted to reach out to you and see if you remember or recall anything about the time when Leslie was killed, anything that you remember about your life at the time that, like, could be relevant,' Augustin said. 'I really don't recall,' Gligor said. The detective said that back in 2001, investigators found DNA presumably left by the person who killed Preer. Gligor soon began asking for a lawyer. 'That's totally fine,' Augustin said. 'And we don't have to ask you any more questions, but we are going to just tell you some stuff, okay.' 'Okay,' Gligor said, still seated in the small metal chair. She spoke about secretly collecting his DNA and how it matched DNA from the scene. Gligor kept asking for an attorney and — at times after prompting by the detectives — kept talking. 'I know I wasn't involved, and I just don't understand how this has come to this,' he said. 'I really wish I knew, and I really wish I could tell you, give you some answers and give you more feedback from an honest perspective.' Augustin said there was another person who knew — Leslie Preer. 'And she can't tell us.'
