The Iran war distraction from the Epstein files is also a distraction from the continuous raiding of the United States Treasury by the trump administration. (I don’t capitalize trump because he refuses to capitalize the Supreme Court after their ruling against him on tariffs).
One of this week’s example of raiding is the Michael Flynn settlement with the Department of Justice. In 2017 during trump’s first term, Flynn pled guilty to making materially false, fictitious, and fraudulent statements to the FBI. Trump pardoned him in the raft of pardons he issued before he left office at the end of his first term. In accepting that pardon, Flynn according to Supreme Court case Burdick v. United States further impliedly admitted guilt. But Flynn filed a lawsuit in 2023 for malicious prosecution asking for $50 million! This week the DOJ under Pam Bondi settled that lawsuit without disclosing how much we paid Flynn. A supposed leak says it was $1.2 million. Any amount of settlement after a guilty plea/implied admission of guilt is outrageous. But I don’t trust that figure from this DOJ who continues to hide the relevant Epstein files.
Why not publicly announce the figure? But there is worse news. Trump filed an administrative claim against the DOJ in August of 2024 for $115 million claiming that the search of his Mar-A-Lago home in 2022 was malicious prosecution. This kind of situation is decided by the deputy attorney general, who happens to be Todd Blanche. He is one of trump’s former criminal defense lawyers in this very search case who has already condemned the search and has publicly bragged that over 200 FBI agents who were even remotely connected with the search have been fired. (This is the same Todd Blanche that asked this week why there was any objection to sending ICE to polling places.
The only way we will ever know how much of our taxpayer money was paid to Flynn and if Trump is paid anything is if our Senators Marshall and Moran and representatives Mann, Estes, and Schmidt do their jobs and demand transparency, which is supposedly what this administration is all about.
Ron Svaty
Ellsworth
