Palm Beach Noir: The Billionaires, the Judges, and the Nation That Moved On

Epstein’s buried billions still haunt the Justice Department, Trump’s empire rots from within, and Canada quietly reminds the world how grown-ups run a country.

Good morning! You can almost smell the money rotting in the Florida sun this morning. Jason Leopold and Matt Topic’s Disclosure podcast dropped a revelation so foul it makes the usual Epstein headlines look like a Hallmark special: the Justice Department once had a full-blown money-laundering indictment ready to go against Jeffrey Epstein, and buried it. Assistant U.S. Attorney Marie Villafaña drafted an eighty-page memo and a fifty-three-page indictment tracing Epstein’s wiring of millions through shell companies, cash withdrawals, and payments to women around the world. Then Alex Acosta’s office quietly strangled the case, handed him a non-prosecution agreement, and called it justice.

Senator Ron Wyden now says Treasury’s FinCEN database shows $1.5 billion in “suspicious transactions.” A billion and a half. Meanwhile, Acosta swears he doesn’t recall any “financial aspect.” Of course he doesn’t, selective amnesia is Washington’s most reliable pension plan.

The emails Leopold unearthed show Epstein fuming because prosecutors had reached out to his patron Les Wexner and because someone had dared peek at the accounts where all the bodies were buried, figuratively, one hopes. Around the same time, another Palm Beach spectacle was unfolding: Donald Trump, broke as ever, “outbidding” Epstein for the Maison de L’Amitié mansion at a crisp $41 million. Epstein, who actually understood numbers, didn’t believe Trump had that kind of money, and he was right. Three years later, Trump flipped the property for $95 million to Russian oligarch Dmitry Rybolovlev, who never moved in and promptly bulldozed it. The proceeds, according to informed speculation, didn’t stay in one place long, Trump allegedly distributed the windfall through a web of shell companies and pass-through entities that make following the trail as dizzying as a funhouse mirror maze. Nothing screams “legitimate business transaction” quite like a mansion demolished for secrecy and a fortune laundered into thin air.

Perhaps Putin knows more about Trump than we thought.

So maybe Epstein’s real fury wasn’t social, it was professional. He recognized the scam: money cleaned through marble, influence polished through real estate. The whole Palm Beach set was one long rinse cycle for oligarch cash, and the Department of Justice hit “cancel.”

Cut to present-day Washington, where the judicial branch is at least pretending to remember what a backbone feels like. One federal judge blocked Trump’s attempt to federalize D.C. police, his dream of a uniformed loyalty parade crushed under the weight of the Constitution. Another, Justice Ketanji Brown Jackson, stayed the administration’s SNAP work-requirement rule, temporarily protecting millions from losing food aid during an economic free fall. Imagine that: two judges using the law for its intended purpose instead of papering over the crimes of men with gold toilets. The same system that once freed a billionaire predator is now, on its better days, stopping a wannabe despot from deploying troops on civilians and telling the government it cannot starve its own citizens for sport.

The rest of the planet is moving on. Canada just added 66,000 jobs while Trump’s “regime” presided over 153,000 losses in October alone. Prime Minister Mark Carney, who delivers budget speeches like a Bond villain but in the good way, announced that the decades-long economic tether to the United States is officially cut. “The United States is not a priority to us anymore,” he said, in the diplomatic equivalent of ghosting your toxic ex. Canada is busy signing real trade deals, with Indonesia, the UAE, the EU, and ASEAN, while the U.S. threatens tariffs on its own allies and calls that strategy.

Even Ontario’s conservative premier, Doug Ford, is bragging about job growth. When both liberals and conservatives are dunking on Washington, you know something has shifted. Canada’s plan is simple: diversify trade, lure the world’s best H-1B workers who can no longer get visas under Trump’s xenophobic bureaucracy, and build industries that actually exist. They’re turning international trade into a cooperative project instead of a hostage negotiation.

Charlie Angus of Midas Canada twisted the knife beautifully this week, describing Trump’s latest Great Gatsby-meets-Roach-Motel party, barely clothed guests, decaying chandeliers, and the world’s most insecure autocrat playing host while Americans lose jobs and groceries. “You do your worst, sir,” Angus said, quoting Churchill, “we will do our best.” It’s been a long time since moral clarity spoke with a northern accent.

Carney closed his Toronto speech with a hymn to national daring, building highways, universities, and the CN Tower, and the line that stuck: “Nostalgia is not a strategy.” Tell that to the American right, currently trying to resurrect the 1950s through tariffs, book bans, and prayer breakfasts sponsored by billionaires who don’t pay taxes.

Down south, the ghosts of Epstein’s billions are still rattling their chains through the Justice Department, whispering reminders of how cheaply power can be bought. In Washington, two judges managed to remember their oath long enough to jam a wrench into the cruelty machine, if only for a single, shining moment of legal clarity. And far to the north, Canada is quietly proving that capitalism doesn’t have to be a pyramid scheme, that you can build an economy on jobs, not grifts, and on trade, not tantrums. Thank you, Canada, for modeling this for us.

While America debates whether hunger builds character, Canada is out there building jobs. Maybe, just maybe, that’s what accountability looks like, a nation that invests in its people instead of laundering its shame through golf courses and golden toilets.