So the travels of Jeffrey Epstein in Africa with Bill Clinton have resurfaced as a passing reference in the news with Epstein’s new arrest on child sex trafficking charges dating to the early 2000s.

This is a nonpartisan blog; I was a Republican during Bill Clinton’s time in office and never voted for him, but I am not a member of either party now and I did vote for Hillary over Trump. I was not part of the “vast right wing conspiracy” going after the Clintons in the 1990s, although I knew people who were.

But here we are, confronted with the fact that shortly after leaving the presidency and a few years before my time working for IRI in East Africa, Bill Clinton as a recent ex-President is doing Clinton Foundation business as described in the title to this post.

At the time, Clinton explained:

“Jeffrey Epstein: International Moneyman of Mystery,” New York, October 28, 2002:

“Jeffrey is both a highly successful financier and a committed philanthropist with a keen sense of global markets and an in-depth knowledge of twenty-first-century science,” Clinton says through a spokesman. “I especially appreciated his insights and generosity during the recent trip to Africa to work on democratization, empowering the poor, citizen service, and combating HIV/AIDS.”

I certainly recognize that the Clinton Foundation has been a “real” organization that raised a lot of money to fund bona fide charitable programs to help poor people in African countries and elsewhere (in a favorable comparison to Donald Trump’s foundation which seems to have been wholly insubstantial). Nonetheless, this type of judgment and conduct by the former President reeks of foolishly facilitating the exploitation of the real and perceived poverty of “Africa” as a prop to convey “virtue” in reference to the situation of the neediest and least empowered (assuming that Clinton knew nothing of the conduct of Epstein regarding child rape and sex trafficking of the young and economically vulnerable that was discovered in the FBI investigation in 2006 and leading to his original 2007 plea deal and the current New York trafficking prosecution, or Spacey’s conduct toward minors.)

Would Clinton have toured Appalachia or the Mississippi Delta or Hope, Arkansas with Epstein and Spacey?

So what were Epstein’s great ideas for “democratization”? I have not found any explanation. From outside this looks like the very antithesis of democratization, at least as I had in mind in moving to Kenya to join others to do work in that field.

There are so many examples of half-baked, self-serving notions from presumably bored or restless rich people from elsewhere using Africa as a malleable stage. In many cases the intentions are “good” if non-serious or even frivolous, but certainly not always.

An interesting tidbit is the question of why Epstein’s alleged leaked address book (published by the Gawker website) from those early 2000s (as allegedly obtained by the FBI years after his 2008 plea bargain from a former Epstein employee who withheld the evidence during the prosecution and tried to sell it later) had a subheading for Kenya, listing the Muthaiga Club of Nairobi? Did he visit? (The Clinton Foundation does have substantial programming in Kenya which former President Clinton and his other family members have visited subsequently, so it is natural to wonder whether the address book entry could relate to one of the two trips which President Clinton has said Epstein flew him on to Africa. It may be completely unrelated.) I have not had the occasion to visit the Muthaiga Club myself in doing democracy work, and in this century I am well aware that it is not the Happy Valley jumping off spot it started out as in the “Roaring Twenties”. Nonetheless, the imagery is unfortunate.

UPDATE: For a reality check about how little Epstein really had to offer in terms of any genuine scientific or medical credentials and how little of his money he really delivered behind his self-aggrandizing and manipulated reputation as a “philanthropist”, read this investigative report from Jodi Kantor, Mike McIntire and Vanessa Friedman in The New York Times: “Jeffrey Epstein was a sex offender. The powerful welcomed him anyway.”

UPDATE 2: In terms of the general subject matter, here is a recent post from USAID’s Impact Blog: “How USAID is working to prevent sexual misconduct and exploitation“.