We live in an age of unprecedented access to information and data. Still, despite the record number of professional investigators, courageous journalists, and serious-minded amateur sleuths, many major stories do not have viable answers as to why they continue to challenge investigators and unsettle American society.
The five biggest mysteries that have occurred over the past few years yet are still unsolved as of 2023 are:
- Why are the Democrats So Wimpy When It Comes to Defending Their Record and Biden?
- Why Did Merrick Garland Wait 21 Months Before Starting His Investigation Into Trump’s Insurrection?
- Why Wasn’t the Full File on the Kennedy Assassination Released When Biden and Trump Had the Chance?
- Why Haven’t Federal Agencies Passed Crypto Regulations?
- How Did Jeffrey Epstein Become So Wealthy?
In these cases, the question about why these mysteries remain unsolved is, in some cases, as big as the mystery itself. This column will not provide definitive answers, but it may offer some possible reasons why these mysteries remain unsolved and may never be answered.
Why Are the Democrats So Wimpy?
A few political pundits and Washington insiders have questioned why Democratic leadership, or the Democratic National Committee (DNC), has not been more forceful in promoting President Joe Biden’s significant legislative accomplishments over the last three years of his term. The excuses are that they cannot develop the “proper messaging” (whatever that means), lack the administrative ability to communicate, or don’t think it is a priority. In light of the Republican attacks and propaganda onslaught, the Democrats have lost the communications battle since Trump was elected, and FOX News became the defector political propaganda arm of the Republicans and then the MAGA party wing of the party.
But these are feeble, old excuses. The reality is that the presiding president is the head of their political party. Indeed, they do not have day-to-day responsibilities for this national grassroots task, but the oversight is left to the presiding president.
In Biden’s case, the conventional wisdom is that he has either done a poor job or entrusted his campaign management to inept administrators. Managing Biden’s presidential campaign has input from the Biden team; however, as of January 11, the official Biden-Harris presidential election site has about 37 open vacancies in the Wilmington, Deleware headquarters. Given Biden’s poor polling numbers over the past months, people would expect these positions to be filled and the campaign fully staffed. But that is not the case.
But there is another alternative for the Democrats ‘ lackluster offensive strategy: What if the head of the DNC today is not Biden, but ex-president Barack Obama?
On paper, the DNC is led by Jaime Harrison, who ran for the Senate from South Carolina and lost to Lindsay Graham in 2020. A committee elected Jaime, and their main job is fundraising and establishing a party brand. But if branding is a goal, they have failed miserably. They also have failed to respond to falling poll numbers from both of their top candidates.
As noted in this story on this website, one speculation is that former president Barack Obama is running the DNC from behind the curtain. According to a provocative interview with David Samuels in Tablet Magazine with author David Garrow, Samuels said: “I have heard from more than one source that there are regular meetings at Obama’s house in Kalorama ( Washington DC neighborhood) involving top figures in the current White House, with Secret Service and cars outside.”
Samuels is the editor of County Highway, a new American magazine in the form of a 19th-century newspaper, and is Tablet‘s literary editor. Samuels added, “Joe Biden is not
running the (Iranian negotiation) part of his administration. Obama is. He doesn’t even have to pick up the phone because all his people are already inside the White House.”
“There are large parts of White House policymaking that belong to Barack Obama because they’re staffed by his people, who worked for him, and no doubt report back to him. Personnel is policy, as they say in Washington.”
In the Tablet interview, Samuels speaks with David Garrow, the author of Dreams from My Father, a biography of Barack Obama; The FBI, and Martin Luther King, Jr.; and Bearing the Cross, a bio of Dr. Martin Luther King, which won the Pulitzer Prize. For the Obama book, Garrow said he interviewed about 1,000 people.
Garrow said that Obama considered himself a writer and professor who did not get involved in the mundane political world of drafting legislation, buttonholing other elected officials to get their votes, or solving constituents’ problems.
The reason, Garrow said, is that Obama is “too lazy. This is in the book. It goes back to him being Hawaiian. At one point, he (Obama) says, ‘I’m fundamentally lazy, and it’s because I’m from Hawaii.’ That’s close to the actual quote,” Yarrow said.
Obama’s poor administrative and leadership skills were also profiled in Richard Miniter’s book Leading From Behind: The Reluctant President and the Advisors Who Decide For Him. In the book, Miniter described how, despite the public front, Obama was not a visionary leader but one who was “indecisive, moody, and often paralyzed by competing political considerations.” When confronted with tough decisions, Obama deferred to advisors such as Nancy Pelosi, Hillary Clinton, and Valerie Jarrett.
In the book, Minter said that Obamacare was really Nancy Pelosi’s idea and that Obama postponed the attack to kill Osama bin Laden three times and then made an intelligence mistake that allowed many top-level al-Qaeda leaders to escape.
So, if Obama is leading the DNC today, it explains why Biden’s communications problems exist and why the DNC is not fighting to resurrect Biden’s declining poll numbers.
Why Did Merrick Garland Wait 21 Months Before Starting His Investigation Into Trump’s Insurrection?
Trump’s complex and full legal appearance and arraignment schedule is the fulcrum of his effort to postpone all his trials and appearances until after the next presidential election on Nov. 5, 2024. Trump’s life-or-death goal is to wait for all the cases so that if he wins, he can pardon himself from all charges.
This is an existential timetable that can fundamentally change the entire political structure of the U.S.. So, it is a mystery why Attorney General Merrick Garland waited almost one year before he appointed Special Counsel Jack Smith to begin the prosecution of Trump for the Attempted insurrection on Jan. 6, 2021. Smith was the former prosecutor and chief prosecutor for The Hague’s special court.
Smith was appointed on Nov. 18, 2022, about 21 months after the insurrection. In Garland’s defense, the Justice Department was prosecuting the people who attacked the Capitol on Jan. 6, but the U.S. Justice Department is a vast organization, employing some 115,000 people, including 10,000 lawyers. Their organizational chart includes the FBI, DEA, Civil Rights and Anti-Trust divisions, and the U.S. Marshall’s Service.
Given the severity of the insurrection and the fact that Trump announced his intention to run again in the 2024 election on Nov. 15, 2022, three days later, Smith was appointed.
Garland knew the vast scope of the case and its complications. His advisors also learned that Trump would continue his legendary legal strategy to “delay, delay, delay.” So. Getting a quick start on the historic insurrection case and knowing it would probably end up in the U.S. Supreme Court were all flashing red lights to indicate that speed was essential.
But Garland waited. Garland had been a judge and public prosecutor his whole career. In typical cases, speed is dictated by the glacial pace of the legal system, and the federal system is even slower. But history presented Garland with a new challenge: to accelerate a case that would determine the fate of U.S. Democracy.
What would have happened if Garland had begun Trump’s case months earlier? Would some of these cases already be in court? Would Trump have run out of delaying tactics?
We will never know. But Garland’s biographers would have to conclude that this delay could have determined the election if Trump had won. I bet there was no need to wait ten months to appoint Smith. If Trump wins, historians will have to look at Garland’s inaction as a significant cause of how the U.S. democracy was shattered.
Why didn’t Trump and Biden Release the Full Kennedy Assassination File?
The assassination of President John Kennedy assassination has challenged investigators for decades. Still, then-President Trump repeated what he had said years before that he would release all of the Kennedy assassination papers.
Trump’s lies are well-known, and during his four years in office, he failed to release these papers. The reason Trump gave was that the documents cite “identifiable national security, law enforcement, and foreign affairs concerns.”
“In 2017, Trump oversaw the release of over 19,000 documents but eventually broke a promise to release the remaining material fully. Siding with the CIA and FBI, Trump eventually kicked the can on the remaining records to 2021,” according to Business Insider.
On the campaign trail, Trump again said: “When I return to the White House, I will declassify and unseal all JFK assassination-related documents,” Trump wrote on his social media platform, Truth. “It’s been 60 years for the American people to know the TRUTH!”
This is probably another lie. However, President Joe Biden also said he would not release the entire file. So, what’s in the file that is so sensitive and secret?
There are many reasons and hundreds of possible sources about what’s so secret. But one especially interesting is the 2009 sourced documentary “Dark Legacy, available on numerous video streaming services, with some possible answers. A few are that George H.W. Bush, the former head of the CIA and father of George W. Bush, was a vital member of the team and worked as a CIA operative in the Kennedy assassination.
And if this is confusing, it’s because there were two Bush’s who became president, plus Jeb Bush, governor of Florida at the time of the 2016 presidential election and is widely assumed to have thrown the state’s electoral votes to his brother and prevented a recount. George W. Bush won Florida in the 2016 election by 537 votes after thousands of Black, Hispanic, and people convicted of felonies were prevented from voting. If this is not an example of what right-wing Republicans call the Deep State, they don’t mention it because the Deep State is most often Republican.
Among the documentary’s findings:
- The single bullet theory was debunked in the documentary using graphic photos, interviews, and forensic records.
- George H.W. Bush’s grandfather, the late U.S. Senator Prescott Bush, was a director and shareholder of companies that profited from their involvement with the financial backers of Nazi Germany, according to the Guardian. The newspaper also said, “Prescott Bush
Prescott Bush and son, George H. W. Bush. The elder Bush was a Nazi financier. The younger Bush was the head of the CIA and president. Is this the Deep State? was a director who was involved with the financial architects of Nazism. His business dealings continued until his company’s assets (including those of Union Bank Corporation (UBC), where Prescott Bush was a director, in New York) were seized in 1942 under the Trading with the Enemy Act.”
- Prescott Bush had powerful financial and political connections. “One of the first jobs Bush’s father-in-law gave (Prescott) Bush was to manage UBC. Bush was a founding bank member, and the incorporation documents list him as one of seven directors…Harriman and Bush’s father-in-law set up the bank to provide a U.S. bank for the Thyssens, Germany’s most powerful industrial family.”
That’s one link in the Nazi link chain, but it is not the last. So, did George H.W. Bush have a role in the Kennedy assassination? The documentary says it’s very possible. It also links the CIA and debunks the single bullet theory from the gun fired by Lee Harvey Oswald.
Trump and Biden may have chosen not to release the Kennedy files because they mention the Bush family, a cherished institution, the CIA, and possibly some others who still have relatives in office.
We will never know, but the contents of those unreleased files must be very provocative because Congress passed a law in 1992, the President John F. Kennedy Assassination Records Collection Act, that directed all materials related to the Kennedy assassination “be housed in a single collection in the National Archives and Records Administration and that all records be publicly disclosed by 2017.” That 2017 deadline has passed, so we have every reason to ask: “Why?”
Why Haven’t Federal Agencies Passed Crypto Regulations?
Crypto may be the most extensive global Ponzi scheme in history, but it fulfills the get-rich-quick gene in humans. In 2023, crypto was the vehicle of choice for some vast frauds. That explains why, between January 2021 and June 2022, over 46,000 people reported losing over $1 billion in crypto to various scams, according to the Federal Trade Commission (FTC). “This figure only includes people who willingly shared this information with authorities,” Techopedia said.
According to CNN, some of the largest frauds committed were Sam Bankman-Fried, Changpeng Zhao, Alex Mashinsky, and, less prominently, Heather “Razzlekhan” Morgan and Ilya Lichtenstein.
So, where are the U.S. regulators?
Despite considerable pushback from well-funded crypto lobbyists, the SEC and CFTC tried to enact some regulatory oversight. Still, there is a disagreement about whether crypto is a commodity or a security. There are also valid concerns about the role of crypto in the first place.
Further, Congress faced the prospect that Stablecoin “threatens the ability of the U.S. government to oversee monetary policy.”
However, the main effort is at the state level, where some 160 different laws were pending (as of March 2023) that affected crypto transactions, the issuance of tokens by states, or the regulation of private keys that affect digital purchases.
This site contends that crypto is a Ponzi scheme and only has a few purposes: To destabilize central banks, launder money, evade taxes, scam greedy, naive individual investors, serve as a placeholder for the expanding world of online sports betting, and as a means for professional traders to make fast, short-term profits via scalping from naive retail investors.
The problem is that the crypto industry has big lobbying money. As OpenSecrets has reported, federal lobbying spending by the crypto industry hit $21.6 million in 2022 to buy off lawmakers to obtain favorable regulatory relief and perks. These lawmakers include Cynthia Lummis (R-Wyo.) and Kirsten Gillibrand (D-N. Y.) in the 2022 lobbying reports.
A CNBC report found that seven Republicans bought or sold crypto, including Sen. Pat Toomey (R-Penn), the ranking member of the banking committee, while only one Democrat reported a transaction, Rep. Marie Newman (D-Ill).
So, it’s little wonder that federal regulators have not favored crypto regulation, even as no one in Washington can explain what need crypto fulfills. Like QAnon, MAGA propaganda, attacks on the leading U.S. universities, anti-vaxers, raising questions about the outcome of a legitimate election, and threats on elected officials and state legislatures, crypto is just another link in the effort to destabilize U.S. society.
How Did Jeffrey Epstein Become So Wealthy?
The sex trafficking case of Jeffrey Epstein continues five years after his death. But the mystery remains about how a man who was essentially a pimp to the rich and famous became so wealthy?
Epstein was a high school dropout who was worth $600 million when he was arrested. During his adventures, he met politicians, Hollywood stars, academics, and other wealthy people with some interest in what this man was offering. Unfortunately, like the Kennedy assassination records, the papers related to Epstein’s business do not shed any light on how he accumulated a net worth of $600 million over about 20 years.
Epstein said he was a “financier,” but that job description can mean anything. We know he had links to Leslie Wexner, who gave Epstein unprecedented access to his finances, including letting him sign his tax returns and get bank loans. Wexner is a billionaire and CEO of L Brands, which includes Victoria’s Secret and Bath & Body Works.
The New York Times reported using Wexner’s money, “over the years, Mr. Epstein obtained a New York mansion, a private plane, and a luxury estate in Ohio — today valued at roughly $100 million altogether — previously owned by Mr. Wexner or his companies. At the same time, he drove a wedge between Mr. Wexner and longtime associates and friends.”
The Times said,” It is a mystery” how Epstein conjured a Rasputin-like hold on Wexner and why the billionaire gave him unprecedented access to his fortune.
So, was Epstein’s money taken from Wexner, and why did Wexner allow this to happen?
It looks like Epstein could have been the most successful con man and pimp in history. But, as the Times proposed, “it is a mystery.”
