Jeffrey Epstein dead, of purported suicide

A lot of very powerful Democrats are breathing sighs of relief. Dead men tell no tales, and the man whose tales could sink the reputations of and potentially incarcerate a slew of the most important political figures in the US (and a member of the British royal family) will be making no deals with prosecutors implicating bigger fish. The cynics who insisted that he would never live to bring down so many powerful people have been vindicated. Of course, we don’t know any details of his demise, so theoretically it is possible that he took his own life for purely personal psychological concerns.

But that theoretical possibility is not strengthened by this, from the New York Times’ first account: Last month, a week after being denied bail, Mr. Epstein was found unconscious in his cell at the jail in Manhattan with marks on his neck, and prison officials were investigating the incident as a possible suicide attempt. It was not immediately clear on Saturday whether the authorities had put in additional safeguards to watch him after the incident last month. Let me translate: “not immediately clear” means that officials at the jail have not claimed the first thing that would come to mind if additional safeguards – which obviously were required -- had been in place. If he had been on suicide watch, as ordinary prudence would require, it is highly unlikely that he could have successfully killed himself. There should not have been any materials for a self-created hanging in the cell of someone who had previously attempted suicide. The death comes less than a day after a court unsealed a trove of over 2,000 documents implicating even more powerful figures. Including this, via Mike Cernovich: That’s certainly a coincidence, isn’t it? Over the decades there have been so many people in a position to harm Bill and Hillary Clinton who have come to an untimely end that the word "Arkancide" has been invented. A question going forward: what will become of his estate? There will no doubt be litigation and court proceedings that will establish how much wealth he actually had and maybe where it came from. It would not surprise me if it turns out to be a lot less than many have guessed, as was the case when Robert Maxwell, the father of Epstein's sometimes associate and accused procuress Ghislaine Maxwell, and of Armand Hammer, legendary oil man who got his start as an operative for Russian communists raising money by selling off the Czars' art, back when each of them died.