“Dangling bits of red meat no longer satisfies. They want the whole steak dinner and will accept nothing else.” So announced MAGA stalwart Marjorie Taylor Greene recently in response to the Trump administration’s “nothing to see here” Epstein files pivot.

We agree with MTG. We know you’re ravenous.

Here at the Freakshow, we don’t have the FBI vault’s stash of Epstein filet mignon. But we’ve been serving up some well-done steak nibbles – a Jeffrey-Donald bromance history and reasons why it’s not improbable to think Melania Trump, née Knauss, could have met Epstein before she met Trump.

We have some more meat this week: a close look at the claque of dirtbag lawyers buzzing around Epstein, Trump, and Ghislaine Maxwell. Ruthless lawyers abusing the American legal system for purposes of political manipulation and private gain are a hallmark of Trump’s career. So, of course, he could find men to engineer the probably illegal move of Ghislaine Maxwell – the woman who holds “the key” to the Epstein story, per no less a source than implicated Epstein pal Alan Dershowitz – to a luxury minimum security prison.

Remember that the Trump White House reportedly thinks the “birthday book” that the Wall Street Journal got its hands on came from Maxwell’s side. We may never know for sure, but if she has stashed her “keys” with anyone, now, when Trump’s feet are to the fire and she wants a pardon, would be the time to rattle them at him.

Enter the cleanup crew. The plumbers of Epsteingate.

Start with Timothy C. Parlatore, the lawyer who handled Trump’s classified documents case in Florida. Just two months after the FBI raided Mar-a-Lago and seized a hoard of purloined documents, Parlatore hired Epstein’s lifelong attorney, Darren Indyke, into his firm.

Parlatore never had to win the documents case. The feds and Jack Smith had Trump dead to rights, but a Trump-appointed lackey of a federal judge slow-walked and then killed the case in time for last year’s election.

Parlatore next sailed to DC on his client’s coattails, savagely defending Pete Hegseth during his nomination fight and threatening the California Republican who accused him of roofie rape in a police report with legal action if she spoke out during the hearings.

He is now at the Pentagon, one of Defense Secretary Hegseth’s top advisors. Such a relationship in the Before Times was considered a conflict of interest since he is also Hegseth’s personal attorney. Now, of course, conflicts are the way we do bidness.

If a man is the company he keeps, then Parlatore, and by extension, clients Hegseth and Trump, are all tainted by Parlatore’s formal association with Epstein’s personal Better Call Saul, the Long Island-born and raised Darren Indyke. Parlatore’s law firm website launders Indyke’s history from the get-go: “For more than 20 years, Mr. Indyke served as general counsel to family offices, serial entrepreneurs, investors, and other ultra-high-net-worth clientele.”

Nice try. The “family office” Indyke worked in was Jeffrey Epstein’s, in a building on East 66^th Street where Epstein routinely housed foreign and underage models (including “sex slave” Nadia Marcinka, at age 15), girlfriends, models, employees, and even French pedo and fellow “model agency” mogul Jean Luc Brunel.

The work was lucrative, even with a dead client. Indyke and Epstein’s accountant, Richard Kahn, are the two executors of Epstein’s fortune. As such, they reportedly stood to reap $145 million last year in tax refunds from what was left of the estate. Some Epstein victims sued Indyke and Kahn claiming the two men helped Epstein build “the complex financial infrastructure” that enabled Epstein to sexually abuse hundreds for decades. The case was quietly dismissed in April of this year.

Another taxpayer-funded Trump personal lawyer on the case is Todd Blanche. Blanche tried and lost the Stormy Daniels hush money case. He is now Deputy Attorney General at the Department of Justice, empowered to do double duty for his formerly personal client by, against all procedural norms, personally and without a transcriber or video camera present, meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell, someone Trump might like to pardon for – ahem – personal reasons. (AUTHOR NOTE: After we posted this, CNN reported that the administration is considering releasing a transcript - redacted to “protect victims” of the conversation between Blanche and Maxwell. )

Before we move on, let’s absorb the lawless depravity here: According to the New York Times, Maxwell was ineligible under Bureau of Prison regulations to be moved. Inmates designated as sex offenders are generally supposed to be held in high-security prisons, like the facility in Tallahassee where Blanche met with Maxwell, and not in minimum-security facilities, like her new digs in Texas.

Last but not least, let’s have a look at Maxwell’s current lawyer David Oskar Markus, whose chief mentor in law and in life was none other than Alan Dershowitz, a Harvard law professor and OJ lawyer who flew frequently on Epstein’s jet, and who litigiously denied allegations from victim Virginia Giuffre that he participated in Epstein’s smorgasbord of nubile sex.

Markus has been defending not just Maxwell but Epsteinians in general for years: besides Dersh, he wrote a Miami Herald op-ed arguing that Alex Acosta, the federal prosecutor who cut Epstein’s infamous 2008 sweetheart deal, was getting “unfairly criticized.”

As Maxwell’s lawyer, Markus sat in on the meetings between his client and Todd Blanche. He has insisted she deserves clemency because the Alex Acosta Palm Beach Epstein plea deal gave immunity to all Epstein’s co-conspirators.

It is possible the lawyers will have gone a bridge too far with Epstein. Maxwell’s own lawyer and some rightwing media are testing a rebrand of Maxwell as a victim. Anyone wondering why this will fail needs only glance at the harrowing testimony at her trial.

Meanwhile, Trump, his saurian eye always keen to danger, tried a new tack, claiming he “never had the privilege” of going to Epstein’s island. And he accused Epstein – for the first time ever – of “stealing our people” from the Mar-a-Lago spa, including, apparently, former locker room attendant, the late Virginia Giuffre.

One can easily imagine the faces of the cabal of lawyers as they listened to this clip of the president, digging himself into the briar patch.

A third of Republican voters disapprove of how Trump is handling the case, according to a Quinnipiac University poll. A Washington Post survey of over 1,000 Americans found a significant majority, including a large minority of Republicans, are actually paying attention and growing ever more uneasy about the legal sleight of hand and Trump’s dodges. These polls show Americans aren’t buying what Trump’s trying to sell – which is perhaps why he’s pivoted to threatening to arrest former President Obama and menacing Russia with nuclear subs on social media.

NIna Burleigh is a journalist, author, documentary producer, and adjunct professor at New York University's Arthur L. Carter Journalism Institute. She has written eight books including her recently published novel, Zero Visibility Possible.

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