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Congressional theater reached a new low this week when Rep. Jasmine Crockett trotted out an explosive accusation on the House floor claiming she had found campaign donations from “a Jeffrey Epstein” to a list of prominent Republicans while defending Delegate Stacey Plaskett. The gambit was designed to inflate Democratic outrage and paint Republicans as morally compromised, but it quickly collapsed under basic fact-checking and media scrutiny.
Crockett even rattled off names and suggested the Federal Election Commission filings would back her up, forcing Republicans to scramble to correct the record. Once the filings were actually examined, reporters found the donations traced to different men who happen to share the same name — not the disgraced financier everyone had in mind.
The uglier truth is that some of the entries in the FEC database appear to be trollish or sloppy, and several donations came from a Dr. Jeffrey Epstein and a New Jersey distributor — contributions that postdate the financier’s death in 2019. Instead of admitting a mistake, Crockett doubled down, giving Republicans the perfect retort and handing conservatives a clear example of Democratic opportunism over substance.
When pressed on CNN, Crockett insisted she “never said that it was that Jeffrey Epstein,” claiming time pressure and a sloppy Google search as her excuse for dragging a horrific scandal onto the floor without verification. Her attempt to wiggle out of responsibility drew a sharp rebuke from critics and even from the GOP official she named, who publicly corrected the record and mocked the careless smear.
Fox’s The Five and other conservative commentators were right to point out that Democrats tried to weaponize the Epstein scandal and instead walked straight into the trap of their own making. This was less about exposing wrongdoing than about scoring cheap political points, and the predictable result was humiliation for the party that claims to stand for accountability.
Americans deserve better than grandstanding that trades on the names of victims and the memory of a monstrous criminal for partisan advantage. Republicans should press for transparency and strict vetting of any claims tied to campaign finance or criminal files, and the press should stop letting raw smears go unchallenged. If Democrats want to be taken seriously on ethics and truth, they’ll start by cleaning house and holding their own to the same standard they demand of others.
