Cool project. Reminds me how peculiar it is that I had to endure rittenhouse and floyd trials livestreaming and analyzed by herds of talking heads and yet I don't even think they have a feed into ghislaine maxwells' trial that is now under way.
Yes I agree. Not discounting it by any means but it seems like the news cycle is dominated by the new COVID variant, yet I've seen literally nothing on this trial. Makes you wonder what's really going on and how deep the rot runs in this country.
The story has been on the front page of every news website I've checked today. Loading a few of the usual news sites shows it's still near the top, although the tragic school shooting is obviously the higher priority news story right now.
But you're right: The topic of discussion all over Twitter and Reddit is about the lack of mainstream news coverage, which is such a weird claim to make when it can be disproven with 60 seconds of loading any news website.
> it was only pushed below the fold on the front page because of the school shooting
Is this known or a guess?
Reading Manufacturing Consent (as well as @nyt_diff) has led me to believe that we should not jump to come up with charitable excuses for why media does not cover stories in the way we think they should.
There is definitely coverage but the fervor from the media, the usual suspects and subsequently the general public is not even remotely to the fever pitch we've seen recently. It also doesn't help that this case involves a literal conspiracy with wealthy people in power of all domains and so people defaulting to deep distrust of how it's being handled seems perfectly sound.
The simple answer is that the trial is not partisan, and a lot of news engagement is due to partisanship.
If Joe Manchin and Susan Collins teamed up to make a bipartisan death ray pointed at us from outer space, it would get less media coverage than the Rittenhouse trial, because bipartisan stuff is not engaging news.
Yeah. Bill Gates just got divorced over this. Judy Woodruff, probably deeply disturbed that Bill was able to get a spot on the New Hour because he is a major donor to the News Hour (and PBS), used the opportunity to corner him with questions about Epstein at the end of the segment (he was talking about curing Malaria and general pandemic preparedness) and she tied it to his recent divorce. He pretty much locked up and went into politician mode punctuated by a goofy, nerdy loss of words. I was not expecting it at all and was completely slack jawed the whole time. I had a lot of respect for Bill and Melinda, still do but this was deeply disappointing to me.
That was your mistake right there. Bill Gates has been a criminal for longer than I can clearly remember, the only thing that kept his company from being split up was his political connections. Bill Gates did not deserve anybody's respect past the point where he started to use his wealth to buy access and cover for his misdeeds. And make no mistake: the rot that this caused has never really left Microsoft, it has only caused it to get smarter about how it presents itself.
I see that whole philanthropic work as a giant white-wash operation. And: it's working. But if you first commit a series of crimes to amass a great fortune and then you go around playing Santaclaus I am not going to be one of those easily swayed to move you to the 'good' column. The origin of your wealth matters as much if not more than what you do with it.
Hacker news is the only thing I use close to resembling social media. I am basing this off of people I know in real life, youtube channels and small talk before my zoom meetings. The difference in people having a position in the matter seems stark. Perhaps it's less controversial of opinion one way or the other so the rage bait isn't their to be reaped.
HN has its own share of extremism, uninformed opinions, and misinformation, just like any other social media. The participants here are just more civil and articulate.
These companies are not simply a mirror back at society. People were interested in Rittenhouse because they were told that it was important. They could have elevated one of dozens of shootings by minors last year to media sensation status if they so chose.
The Rittenhouse incident was all over the internet the night it happened. It dominated Facebook, Reddit, and Twitter while armchair detectives scrutinized every leaked cell phone camera angle and posted their hot takes.
The media didn't tell people to get interested in it.
There are stories on all of those sites about this trial, no doubt, though the article is not prominent (with the exception of CNN).
That said, it is hardly a conspiracy theory to point out that the media has a disincentive to give this story the attention it deserves because of the amount of prominent figures implicated. Amy Robach of ABC even claimed that they squashed the story initially because they were worried that covering it would impact their ability to air the Harry/Markle wedding.
Even now, that leak is mostly reported by unreliable sources like The Sun above and Project Veritas rather than more established news organizations despite the video's apparent legitimacy.
The cover-up in question was pretty plainly a news org not wanting to get sued by incredibly litigious participants (namely Dersh and Prince Andrew).. It's insane to me that people think a Clinton sex scandal wouldn't get covered because of some mysterious reasons.. Were none of you alive during Watergate?
The accusations against Epstein (and association with Trump/Clinton/Dersh/Prince Andrew/etc) have been reported for like 15 years now but for whatever reason it took the Miami Herald's reporting in 2019 to break through..
You're correct, though I have to say as someone who reads the Financial Times and The Economist, I haven't seen any headlines today; this is the first time I've heard of the news.
I don't expect conspiracy, though; it's far more likely that the Omicron variant is far more relevant to markets. The FT also did publish two stories on Ghislaine Maxwell about 23-24 hours ago, but it's fair to say that the paper isn't emphasizing the story (by comparison, the Theranos Elizabeth Holmes trial had a story on the front page this morning).
That observation is incorrect (as of November 30, 8:46 pm ET, about two hours after your comment). It doesn't appear in the top five "most read" stories, which are:
1. Moderna chief predicts existing vaccines will struggle with Omicron
2. The inside story of the Pfizer vaccine: ‘a once-in-an-epoch windfall’
3. Powell signals support for quicker ‘taper’ of Fed’s bond-buying scheme
4. Holmes accuses former business partner of abuse in Theranos trial
5. Inditex shares fall after it appoints founder’s daughter as chair
Even if the observation were true, it doesn't contradict my note that the FT omitted it from the front page stories this morning (US edition, FT, iPad app).
However, in the interest of reporting updated information over being 'right,' a new story about Ghislaine Maxwell (published "an hour ago" at the time of this comment) has since been published after my original comment, and now appears on the front page (website and iPad app).
That said, from my observations, it's clear that the Theranos story today was more popular than the Ghislaine Maxwell story, with my inference that it was more widely-promoted. I'm not arguing that there was an effort to suppress reporting, but I am arguing that it's reasonable to conclude that one story may have been marketed more heavily than the other, from seemingly-minor decisions in web design and the stories selected for the mobile apps.
In an alternate timeline: Why is the media reporting so much on this Maxwell trial that has no material importance to society at large? Meanwhile, they're burying the new COVID variant that is killing people. Guess they're distracting us from a public health issue with a salacious scandal of the week.
Not from USA, but it seems quite common and reasonable that any trials of sex crimes (and especially sex crimes against minors) would be closed, if for no other reason than to protect the victims.
I practice general search engine avoidance; I don't use a general search engine (google, bing, duck, yandex, etc) if I believe a more specialized search engine will give me what I am looking for. In this circumstance, it's easy to figure out what sort of trial Rittenhouse got by searching for Rittenhouse on Wikipedia directly. With my search keyword for Wikipedia, I can search "wiki rittenhouse" and it takes me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rittenhouse which in turn leads me to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kenosha_unrest_shooting
That page clearly states "Under Wisconsin state law, Rittenhouse was charged as an adult with the following crimes: ..."
I would say this trial isn't as polarizing, so we don't get social media fights between two groups of people. That's, after all, type of an engagement that boosts the trial's virality.
It's really a shame. The Rittenhouse trial was fascinating and educational, this trial likely wouldn't be as educational, but the information should be out in the open.
If you're interested in learning more about the Rittenhouse trial, Rekieta Law on youtube is a lawyer who had a panel of lawyers analyze the case live with him. Absolutely awesome to get live strategic analysis on a criminal trial.
Most of it was pretty predictable, not fascinating unless you're talking about the political aspect. For example, the dude who was shot in the arm testified and everyone was like "big win for Rittenhouse, he admitted he got shot only after he pointed a gun at Rittenhouse". Really? you have a video of the entire incident, do you need a testimony to figure it out? The one bit that was interesting though is how the shooting of Rosenbaum would be interpreted, as the video wasn't that good and it wasn't clear if self defense would qualify. But I kind of knew from the beginning after watching the videos that it's very unlikely the jury would claim it wasn't justified self defense beyond a reasonable doubt. I think without the political aspect it would've been a short and predictable trail. It's funny to me how much build up and cross interviews for an incident that was captured almost fully on video.
The most interesting aspect for me was watching the polar opposite reactions to the same content. I was personally interested in the facts of the case, which I have been following since 8/25/2020.
> For example, the dude who was shot in the arm testified and everyone was like "big win for Rittenhouse, he admitted he got shot only after he pointed a gun at Rittenhouse".
This was a very big deal. It was on the video, but as we've seen on social media, different people see different things. The other party in said videos being trapped into admitting that Kyle was right to shoot him was vidicating, both legally and personally for everyone who was rooting for Kyle.
Before anyone gets horrified at my views on the case, Kyle was a good kid, being dumb and idealistic, trying to help, and protecting himself when that went south.
I wish he hadn't stayed out that night, I wish his assailants had valued their lives more highly, and I hope that this will be a good example for everyone: don't put yourself in danger unless you're prepared for the consequences, and secondarily, fuck around and find out.
I think many people missed the point of the whole self defense argument. In Michigan, you can't claim self defense if you unreasonably put yourself or others in danger. To me, the part that made this case a tossup, was whether or not you believe it is reasonable to go out into public at night, while there is civil unrest, unnecessarily, carrying a loaded rifle.
I find that completely ridiculous and unreasonable. Regardless of one's technical right to do so.
But some people done agree and think it is totally acceptable to do so.
The Rittenhouse shootings were in Wisconsin, not Michigan. The jury instructions[1] have no law like what you're describing.
The self-defense standard explained by the judge is simply that the defendant must believe that the level of force used was necessary to terminate an imminent threat of death or grave bodily harm, and the defendant's belief must be reasonable.
However, "a person who engages in unlawful conduct of a type likely to provoke others to attack, and who does provoke an attack, is not allowed to use.. self-defense against that attack." The judge ruled that it was legal for him to be carrying a gun that night, so while carrying a gun might provoke others, it's not unlawful conduct that provokes others.
> This was a very big deal. It was on the video, but as we've seen on social media, different people see different things.
So now people on social media are the standard? People on social media are not objective. They see what they want to see, based on the team they are rooting for. There is a video showing the exact moment of the shooting and facts are facts.
Neither are juries. Trials are about feeding the Jury the story they need to come to a specific conclusion. Removing any possible doubt from that story is vital.
Prosecutors are supposed to bring charges based on “the interests of justice.” I can’t say that they actually meet that standard. They famously bring harsh charges and try to negotiate plea deals. They also famously get creative with how to interpret different laws.
There is the concept of malicious prosecution ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Malicious_prosecution ), but that only applies when the prosecutor pursues a case without proof of even the basic elements of the crime. If they filed charges that they were incredibly unlikely to prove (which is what I heard from all the commenters on this case: “the prosecution has a hard case to make” or something similar), then they spent a lot of time and money, caused somebody to spend a lot of money for the defendant, etc., but they didn’t cross the line into malicious prosecution.
Rittenhouse was charged with violating a law that only applies if you're younger than 17 years old or have a rifle with a barrel less than 16 inches. Since both of those things are trivial to disprove (the prosecutor admitted that Rittenhouse was 17 at the time and the rifle was longer than 16"), would that be considered malicious prosecution?
I would love to learn the answer to this: if some charges are arguably justified, but others aren’t, can you claim malicious prosecution for the ones that aren’t? I would think so.
Unfortunately, for this specific case, I don’t think it qualifies. The judge only dismissed the charge because he couldn’t write clear jury instructions for it ( https://apnews.com/article/why-did-judge-drop-kyle-rittenhou... ). I think that could be enough to say “we brought the charge because we honestly thought it applied; the confusion wasn’t malice, it was just difficulty understanding a convoluted law.”
I don’t know about Wisconsin, and I don’t know if Rittenhouse has some way to afford bringing a malicious prosecution lawsuit or some other lawsuit against Kenosha. I get the feeling that kind of reaction (followed by a negotiated settlement) is more common in some parts of the country than others.
As I mentioned, the first shooting and killing of Rosenbaum wasn't a clear justified self defense based on the video, so it justified the trail. Also the politics around the case played a role.
The prosecutor had to prove beyond reasonable doubt that it was NOT self defense. Good luck proving a subjective negative. After I learned that particular I just awaited the official aquittal.
I thought that "self defense" was something you had to prove yourself, where you've admitted to committing a crime (killing someone) but that you had a specific circumstance that mitigated the charge.
I assumed it was similar to a "not guilty by reason of insanity" plea, where you admit you committed a crime but there are special circumstances (that you have to prove) that mitigate it. You can't just stay silent the entire time and force the prosecutor to prove you were insane - you have to actually provide some evidence you were insane.
Did you follow the (nearly simultaneous) trial of the killers of Ahmaud Arbery? That prosecutor didn’t seem to have too much trouble at all proving that particular negative — those guys are all going away for life.
What? Not at all. Arbery attempted to gain control of the gun and was killed, and the defense attempted to claim self-defense. I was responding to the claim that self-defense is some kind of automatic not-guilty verdict. It evidently is not.
Arbery, like Rittenhouse, was not the aggressor. Rittenhouse had a firearm to defend himself, Arbery did not. If Arbery was successful in taking the firearm from his assailants, self-defense would be a very viable claim.
This section, and the example that follow it, are particularly relevant:
> Second, don’t go immediately for the killer question. Take the time to build toward your ultimate question with multiple questions, each question about one fact.
> Questions that include one and only one fact is the technique that gives you the most control of a witness.[4] You must ask about facts, not conclusions, when you want to control an evasive, non-cooperative witness. The witness will never agree to your conclusions, and their disagreement with you on any point may seem completely reasonable unless there has been the proper “set-up” (see the following questions and the next section dealing with “set-up”). The advantage of the “one fact – one question” technique is that when a witness “runs”, i.e. they try a long non-responsive narrative; the question can be repeated easily again and again. Each “run” makes the witness appear less credible and frequently results in the witness admitting the fact imbedded in the question. Stringing together multiple questions that are “one fact-one question” allows the jury to derive larger, case-critical conclusions that are inescapable, even if unstated.
I think they do it in pieces to get them to start saying yes to stuff, both to get them on a roll and to have a place to pick back up that's not the very beginning if they say no to something along the way.
I have also heard that depending on the situation, an attorney may want to bore the jury. If you overload them with information you can reduce the effectiveness of facts that may be detrimental to your case.
I don’t think it’s because they love wasting time or billing unnecessary hours. I think it’s because they are professional lawyers who know way, way more about questioning witnesses than you do.
Rekieta law ended up being a panel of right-wing lawyers who constantly mocked a prosecution attorney over their weight. I think just watching the trial was sufficient in itself and didn't need a bunch of Jack Posobiec tweeting attorneys to help me understand it.
I really enjoyed listening to Andrew Branca. He is a very articulate attorney and knows self defense law very well.
I got the impression that Barnes would have also made a very good defense for Rittenhouse, but at a very great expense to the Rittenhouse family. To me, it looked like he was an ambulance chaser looking to make a lot of money on a very high profile case. Spend spend spend, then ask for more donations to cover what was spent.
Some of the others were more distracting when trying to hear what was said during the case.
As a gun guy, Branca has been great in navigating the laws that every American gun owner should know. He's a grifter, but he makes a very valuable product.
Barnes is obviously extremely smart, worth the big bucks, but definitely requires big money to hire.
Nick Rekieta himself is a fun guy, and I'm really glad he took off. He's re-sparked my nascent interest in criminal law, and it's great to see a lawyer dad who's up on his memes.
The rest of the panel is fun, not always super helpful, but the value of the panel was great. Good to see something new in the world of streaming.
Looking at these logs is it reasonable to comment that up until 2005 if you were offered a lift by Jeffrey you wouldn't think "oh, but he's a sexual predator !" ? That up until that date the only public information on poor behaviour by him was the sort of financial sleaze that people in his position usually have in their backgrounds ?
I'm only going off a quick Wikipedia read but if it's true I think it's worth saying because there are a number of "famous" people who got their rides in the jet well before that date.
Not wishing to make a case for sleaze balls but interested in truth as well.
I poked around and this is running off a GraphQL endpoint at https://api.epstein.flights/ - I pointed the GraphiQL desktop app at it and the following query returned some interesting data:
{
passengers {
pageInfo {
count
}
edges {
__typename
... on VerifiedPassenger {
id
slug
name
biography
wikipedia_link
flightCount
image
histogram {
month
count
}
}
... on LiteralPassenger {
literal
}
}
}
}
Yep, it's all GraphQL - I built the site a few years ago to play around with Apollo and AWS's serverless GraphQL offering and then it kind of snowballed from there.
Not much - I made all GraphQL requests GETs and cached them in CloudFront, which has some drawbacks but is pretty effective at keeping costs down because it allows Aurora to scale to zero as long as every request is in cache. The last week has been interesting (60,000 page views) and if things continue at that scale (doubtful) I might be looking at $60/month, mostly in Aurora costs. Most other months of the year had less than 100 page views total, nearly all cached, and it cost under $3 to run for the whole month.
Hey - creator and admin of the site here. Didn't ever expect to see this on HN! I built this about two years ago - looks like it's picking up some traffic this week due to the new trial. Happy to answer any questions.
(Account is new because I don't want this project associated with my regular account and my professional portfolio. Shoot me an email at the address on the site if you'd like me to confirm I'm the admin.)
> Shoot me an email at the address on the site if you'd like me to confirm I'm the admin
Why not cut out the email step and just add to the "contact" section on the about page a note that you are also on HN as 'epsteinflights'?
People who want to take you up on your verification offer are going to have to go to the "contact" section on the about page anyway to get the email address, so might as well take care of the verification right there.
There are several with Bill Clinton, Kevin Spacey, Chris Tucker, Epstein, Maxwell, and a bunch of other people literally jumping from continent to continent, dropping people off and then picking them back up on subsequent flights.
The Clinton flights in the logs were part of some Clinton Foundation trip to Africa to raise funds for AIDS support. Tucker/Spacey were along to raise awareness.. all reported contemporaneously, eg;
Realistically, if you want to get away with committing crimes, the best way to do that is to also not commit crimes.
"I make this flight 15 times a year for philanthropic reasons, sometimes even with famous people" is a much better cover for sex trafficking than anything else I can think of.
Maybe many of the famous people are squeaky clean, and it's a select few famous people and a lot of wealthy but unknown people who were flying Epstein air for nefarious purposes.
Well, when you think about it - it makes total sense. I imagine it felt like true freedom for them being 30000ft in the air with no one to barge in or stop them from doing what they wanted. The flight destinations were just pretense.
Which is totally why you'd fly from straightlaced Singapore to teetotaling Brunei with the ex-President of the USA on board -- so convenient and inconspicuous!
You can think of Bill Clinton all you want, but do you think he would be stupid enough to do it with Secret Service on board and basically watching him? Not one flight mentions him before his presidency.
I'm saying that would be nearly impossible, therefore improbable and implying the Secret Service would cover it up is also improbable. So no, he didn't do anything on these flights.
Business Insider also made searchable versions of both the black book[1] and the flight logs[2] - they're done to a much more professional standard than my buggy little side project is, but they're both unfortunately behind a paywall.
> This entry does not appear on the website because it is included in the second group of records (described above), which are not yet completely digitized. This is not a political or editorial choice, we simply have not had time to add the logs from this release yet.
But I suppose the only way is to check the linked DocumentCloud documents, if you assume that the flight logs that came out through court discovery are reliable.
epstein.flights says their data is from:
"The original PDF source for the data comes from documents revealed during two court cases:
Epstein v. Edwards
Giuffre v. Maxwell
"
Business Insider recently claimed they got more flight data
https://www.businessinsider.com/faa-accidentally-released-je...
"The FAA accidentally disclosed more than 2,000 flight records associated with Jeffrey Epstein's private jets"
If you search for Forester in this allegedly more complete dump, you get 4 more hits:
The obsession with a dead horrible person on the internet is frankly ridiculous. People seem to be unable to not keep talking about him and whoever he ever talked to.
“The obsession“ is over the still yet living patrons/associates/partakers of this particular “dead horrible person”.
And the intrigue that, perhaps finally, the wealthy elite may face actual consequences to the morally bankrupt behavior they exhibit.
There are many dead horrible people. There are very few that have connections to the most powerful people and died mysteriously under intense supervision with videos malfunctioning and guards avoiding their duties.
