Will Bill Clinton’s Past Doom Hillary’s Future?

Gawker has obtained flight logbooks for disgraced billionaire Jeffrey Epstein’s airplane, the “Lolita Express.” They disclose what appears to be a close relationship between Epstein and Bill Clinton:

Bill Clinton took repeated trips on the “Lolita Express”—the private passenger jet owned by billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein—with an actress in softcore porn movies whose name appears in Epstein’s address book under an entry for “massages,” according to flight logbooks obtained by Gawker and published today for the first time. The logs also show that Clinton shared more than a dozen flights with a woman who federal prosecutors believe procured underage girls to sexually service Epstein and his friends and acted as a “potential co-conspirator” in his crimes. …

Clinton shared Epstein’s plane with Kellen and Maxwell on at least 11 flights in 2002 and 2003—before any of the allegations against them became public—according to the pilots’ logbooks, which have surfaced in civil litigation surrounding Epstein’s crimes. In January 2002, for instance, Clinton, his aide Doug Band, and Clinton’s Secret Service detail are listed on a flight from Japan to Hong Kong with Epstein, Maxwell, Kellen, and two women described only as “Janice” and “Jessica.” One month later, records show, Clinton hopped a ride from Miami to Westchester on a flight that also included Epstein, Maxwell, Kellen, and a woman described only as “one female.”

In 2002, as New York has reported, Clinton recruited Epstein to make his plane available for a week-long anti-poverty and anti-AIDS tour of Africa with Kevin Spacey, Chris Tucker, billionaire creep Ron Burkle, Clinton confidant Gayle Smith (who now serves on Barack Obama’s National Security Council), and others. The logs from that trip show that Maxwell, Kellen, and a woman named Chauntae Davis joined the entourage for five days.

Chauntae Davis has this remarkable connection, which presumably is either a coincidence or an inside joke:

That last name—Chauntae Davies—shows up elsewhere in papers unearthed by the various investigations into Epstein’s sex ring: his little black book. Davies is one of 27 women listed in the book under an entry for “Massage- California,” one of six lists of massage girls Epstein kept in various locales, with a total of 160 names around the globe, many of them underage victims.

Today, Davies is an actress with credits including HBO’s Enlightened. In 2002, she was 23. According to her IMDB profile, in addition to her apparent massage work for Epstein, she landed a role that year as a “lingerie model” in Exposed, a movie produced by a softcore porn company called MRG Entertainment. … Exposed, appropriately enough, was directed by a pseudonymous auteur who went by the name of Clinton J. Williams.)

Will the Clintons be able to dodge questions about Bill Clinton’s relationship with Epstein? Time will tell, but what has come out so far seems irresistible, not just to tabloids but to the average voter. Bill will plead innocent, and the Clinton camp can take comfort from the fact that the most public of Epstein’s 30 or so underage girlfriends has said that she met Clinton several times, but never slept with him. But that leaves a lot of shoes that potentially could drop, not to mention a close and extraordinarily sleazy–to put the most favorable construction on it–association. Nor will many voters be willing to presume innocence in Clinton’s case.

An association with Epstein would be damaging to any candidate, but especially so for Hillary Clinton, who has always been overshadowed by her husband. The idea of restoring America to the relatively-golden era of the 1990s, however remote that prospect may be, is a big part of Hillary’s appeal. Independent of Bill, Hillary’s accomplishments are marginal. Her own campaign autobiography barely mentions her undistinguished tenure in the Senate. (She ran for a safe seat while she was First Lady, which it is hard to imagine anyone but a Clinton doing.) As for her time as Secretary of State, no one remembers anything about it except for the failed Russian “reset” and Benghazi.

That leaves her time as First Lady, which is her real claim to fame. But until now, no one has ever thought that being First Lady was a qualification for the presidency. You’ll notice that the Republicans aren’t touting Laura Bush as a candidate. The bottom line is that if Bill is tarnished, Hillary is tarnished too. Given his history, it may not take a lot more news about the Epstein connection to make voters queasy about putting Bill Clinton back in the White House.

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