by Tom Luongo, Tom Luongo:

Ghislaine Maxwell was caught in New Hampshire. Jeffrey Epstein’s partner-in-crime is now in U.S. custody in the darkest of all places, the Southern District of New York (SDNY).

The first thing on everyone’s mind should be, “Which faction actually has her and how long will she survive?”

I can’t answer those questions but it doesn’t hurt to run out a few scenarios, all of which, at this point, are pure speculation. When Epstein was arrested the same questions hung in the air.

Was this the Deep State getting a hold of him to shut him up? Was this Donald Trump trying to tie up a ‘loose end?’ Or was Trump and new Attorney General William Barr putting operational tempo on their opponents forcing Epstein into a potentially explosive situation?

The raid on Epstein’s home was conducted under the auspice of an indictment filed in the SDNY, a place “where the worst crimes in the world…go unpunished,” as I noted recently in a piece about Trump and Barr going after U.S. Attorney there Geoffrey Berman.

Trump and Barr took another shot at getting someone less controlled by the Deep State in charge of the SDNY and it looks like, for now, that they missed the mark.

With Berman gone, but in such a way as to allow his hand-picked assistant, Audrey Strauss, to take over, rather than anyone picked by Barr and Trump, this arrest seems way out of place.

Now, Strauss, a woman who prosecuted legendary mobster and one of Trump’s mentors, Roy Cohn, has to be considered suspect. Because the furor over Berman’s removal died down immediately after she was put in place.

And she’s in charge of the fate of the most important person in the world at the moment, Ghislaine Maxwell. Because Maxwell knows everything. If Epstein was the CEO of their international blackmail operation, Maxwell was the COO, in charge of the day-to-day operations.

Strauss’s indictment dog and pony show announcing Maxwell’s arrest focused on all the salacious bits pertaining to the indictment which only covers the period from 1995 to 1997.

It neatly avoided any of the real implications of Maxwell’s apprehension, the systematic entrapment and blackmailing of major political and economic figures the world over.

L’affair Epstein is the big one with the potential to uncover decades of endemic corruption that is truly global in nature. So, while we all joke about the Clinton body count, the truth is that there were plenty of people who wanted him dead.

And those same people today want Ghislaine Maxwell dead.

The problem, of course, with analyzing this situation is that all theories about who those people might be are entirely reasonable.

Logic dictates that Trump is not one of those people, despite the pictures and the old society page quotes from Trump linking him to Epstein. And we know this simply because after Epstein died in prison he disappeared from the news cycle.

If there was any real truth to Trump’s deeper involvement with Epstein that information would have already come out and Trump would no longer be president.

The man who led the raid on Epstein’s home was Geoffrey Berman.

The man slow-rolling the investigation into Epstein? Berman.

The guy William Barr fired for not actively pursuing DoJ priorities pertaining to Epstein and Joe Biden while pursuing frivolous complaints about Donald Trump? Berman.

The guy who refused to resign to force Trump to fire him and block a recess appointment to his job at the SDNY? Berman.

And the histrionics surrounding Barr’s removing Berman died down the minute his hand-picked (plucked from retirement) assistant was given the job.

Forgive me for not feeling comfortable with Maxwell’s future relationship with oxygen.

If anything, what’s happening here is that Trump and Barr keep pushing the tempo against the people who are trying to remove him from office by any means necessary.

Maxwell’s arrest could be a dare to them to kill her too to protect themselves, again. It’s also, in my opinion, a signal that Trump isn’t going down without a fight and that he may be at the point where he’s willing to burn the entire rotten edifice down on his way out the door.

Because at this point it should be clear to everyone that if Trump loses this November he and his family will be hounded into oblivion. Anything he’s accomplished as president, some of which is very good, in trying to reform and remake the judiciary and federal agencies, will be undone within days of his leaving office.

Trump has nothing left to lose at this point. So, why not pull the trigger on arresting Maxwell, forcing the SDNY’s hand and try to force out into the open the evidence Berman sat on in relation to Epstein?

Read More @ TomLuongo.me