The Epstein Fiasco Has Been A Complete Nightmare For Civil Liberties

This is the second installment of my collaborative series with Matt Taibbi; it has been cross-posted at Racket News.

I’m often asked why I’ve bothered to devote so much time and energy to this interminable Jeffrey Epstein saga, and it’s forced me to come up with a bit of a stock answer. One major reason, I tell my kindly inquisitors, is that the sprawling multi-decade fiasco has been disastrous for civil liberties. Which gets comprehensively ignored, despite the hyper-saturation levels of media coverage. No one in their right mind wants to be accused of “defending Epstein,” even if what they’re manifestly doing is not “defending Epstein,” but pointing out that civil liberties have been worryingly abridged. The vindictive moralistic frenzy that attaches to this issue means that by simply calling attention to objectionable government conduct, you can expect to be instantly spun as somehow condoning the personal proclivities of Jeffrey Epstein. And who wants to deal with that headache? Therefore: out of sight, out of mind. Which is a recurring pattern for how civil liberties invariably end up getting eroded. It’s always a crowd-pleaser to direct punitive state action at the most reviled figures in society — the most notorious of which in previous eras have included “terrorists,” “domestic extremists,” “drug dealers,” and the like. The more untameable the public animus against a particular category of wrongdoer, the more readily civil liberties can be chucked aside. So when it comes to “pedophiles” and “child sex-traffickers” — forget it. All bets are off. Perpetrators of quadruple homicide are less culturally anathema these days. Here’s a neat trick for prosecutors and politicians: if you want to make the Constitution vanish, just say you’re punishing “pedos.”

However unpleasant we might find actual pedophilic criminality — though the definition of such seems to expand exponentially by the day — unchecked degradation of civil liberties affects the entire body politic, whether or not you give a hoot about Epstein. Some readers might be wondering what specific infringements I’m talking about, and their wonder isn’t unreasonable, as so little airtime has ever been given to these affronts. So let’s get specific. After he died in federal custody, the government predictably moved to dismiss the charges pending against Epstein, because he was no longer alive. Thus rendering any criminal proceedings against him moot. Or so one might have thought. Turns out, the presiding judge in the