She’d known all along.

Cindy, Senator John McCain’s widow, knew all about the infamous Epstein and, apparently, so did everyone around her.

“We all knew about him. We all knew what he was doing,” said McCain.

WAIT A SECOND.

Cindy Lou McCain knew all about this monster. . .

What happened to her ankle bracelet that proclaims: “See something. Say something”?

Also by Michael Lacey: Lawyers, Guns, and Money (And to Hell with Free Speech)

You’re telling us that Moms McCain knew all about Epstein — and said nothing. Her daughter Meghan — often the only watchable person on The View — never mentioned this when she was fencing with Whoopi Goldberg?

Cindy knew Jeffrey Epstein.

Did she know Jeffrey Dahmer?

(Hey , they’re both abnormally interested in young people…and they’re both named Jeffrey. That’s twice as much evidence as Cindy normally has )

Cindy McCain knew but was silent.

Frankly, that’s unbelievable. That’s not the Cindy McCain we’ve all come to know and roll our eyes at.

In February last year she was at the Phoenix airport and reported to officers that sex-trafficking was going on at one of the gates. Cindy was triggered because the child and mother were of mixed race (like Cindy and her adopted daughter ).

Police dutifully investigated and found no wrongdoing.

Not done with her personal drama, the Foghorn of Fornication rushed to KTAR news radio and broadcast to its listeners a version of events at the airport that cast her as a heroine who saw something and said something.

Responding to calls from local reporters about Cindy’s claims, Phoenix cops corrected the record.

Lost in Cindy’s portrayal of herself as a super-heroine in the League of Justice, was the poor woman with child at the airport who endured a grilling about whether or not she was trafficking her own baby.

Pleather Pants and Slop Troughs

The fact that Cindy was in Florida shortly before the Super Bowl is, of course, no accident.

She haunts Super Bowls like an ululating pigeon at the slops trough.

Sitting on stage wearing skin tight pleather pants — cartoonishly inappropriate — Cindy was the definition of a hot mess. She insisted that Jeffrey Epstein had molested a teenage classmate of her daughter.

(Are you getting the impression that Cindy has a certain Zelig-like quality? You say sex trafficking and she pops up )

Cindy has, for years, maintained that 300,000 underaged children are trafficked and sexually abused — every year — and that this tsunami of sexual deviance is centered on the Super Bowl, including the one that many of us just watched.

McCain, who oversees the Human Trafficking Advisory Council at the McCain Institute, warned the crowd at Florida International University, that the Super Bowl would, again, attract trafficking.

And, of course, the media and law enforcement fan these flames for funding and viewers.

Noted one press report: “Authorities are bracing for a wave of out-of- town visitors by stepping up their prevention efforts. In South Florida enforcement agencies, including the FBI and Miami-Dade state attorney’s office are teaming up with the NFL to circulate anti-trafficking messages on public transit and social media, and to promote a new hotline to report suspicious activity, 305-FIX-STOP.

“…McCain, now the widow of a Republican presidential candidate, told the crowd at FIU that awareness is the first step in getting rid of human trafficking…’It begins with prevention and education, awareness and education. Because not all of these people who are being trafficked are coming across the border. They’re living in our neighborhoods.’”

Perhaps it is worth mentioning that the premise of this accusation rests upon a man-hating assumption. This premise has as its fulcrum that our fathers, our sons, our uncles, our brothers, men in general want to molest children.

If you are claiming that men, a very large segment of men, are deviantly dangerous, it sounds like you have daddy issues.

Cindy’s Pop, the Bootlegger

Of course, it is no surprise that she has daddy issues; her father was a profitable swindler, convicted on seven counts of filing false liquor records, part of the felonious trail that led to his ownership of one of America’s largest Budweiser distributorships, Hensley & Company. Her dad’s background included bookies and racing wires linked to Al Capone.

As reported in Phoenix New Times: “James Hensley profited handsomely from his association with liquor magnate Kemper Marley, a man police suspect ordered the 1976 murder of Arizona Republic reporter Don Bolles , who had written about Marley’s business and political dealings. The man convicted of placing a bomb beneath Bolles’ car testified that Marley also wanted then attorney general Bruce Babbitt murdered… Marley, who died in 1990, was never charged in the Bolles case…”

This is the basis of Cindy McCain’s epic fortune which financed her husband’s political career and propels her mindless drive about 300,000 underage victims of men.

Do you know how large 300,000 is? St. Louis, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Orlando, Newark, St. Paul, all have populations of roughly 300,000. This is how many men Cindy McCain believes wish to molest little kids.

The Awareness Alarm in Miami included training hotel staffs, airline stewards and stewardesses, all arms of law enforcement. Soap bars have contained warnings. Billboards are erected.

The 300,000 figure is lifted from a fraudulent report by Richard J. Estes and Neil Weiner at the University of Pennsylvania in 2001.

In 2015 Glenn Kessler at The Washington Post wrote: “As we have previously noted, the Estes-Weiner report has been the subject of criticism by social scientist for years, and yet for some reason it remains the go-to source for anti-trafficking advocates.”

When interviewed by Village Voice Media one of the two authors of the 300,000 epidemic number identified San Diego as a hot bed of trafficking. Why?

Because if was near Tijuana and American kids could hop on a trolley to cross the border.

Yes…so what?

That was the academic rigor of this study.

The Estes-Weiner “report” had an editor/advisor, David Finkelhor, a respected authority who runs the Crimes Against Children Research Center, at the University of New Hampshire.

He has said, for the record, that the Estes-Weiner paper and its 300,000 victims, is without scientific value.

Finkelhor, an advisor to the authors of the study, insisted that if the authors were going to use these apocalyptic numbers they needed to at least admit that these weren’t real numbers. They were shabby estimates. He got the authors to write : 300,000 “ at risk”

That was the wiggle room. AT RISK.

Of course, when the media were told by the anti-trafficking zealots about the University of Pennsylvania study, the “at risk” safety belt was dropped.

This is no surprise. It even has a name.

The Woozle Effect “…occurs when one writer reports an estimate based on a typically weak methodology or guesstimate that is subsequently cited by other writers , but without the  first writer’s caveats. Estimates of juvenile prostitution seem to have taken this path…”

The Woozle Effect happened at The New York Times, CNN and throughout the nation’s mainstream media.

But . . . enough of academic rat holes.

Let’s embrace the idea that funding is needed for kids who make bad choices because it happens. And no one argues that any child is responsible.

And let’s return to Cindy McCain and her dire casting of events surrounding the Super Bowl between the Kansas City Chiefs and the San Francisco 49ers.

How many thousands of cases of underage sex trafficking did the authorities uncover?

As press reports before the Super Bowl made obvious, when it came to sex trafficking, Miami was woke.

As press reports after the Super Bowl made obvious, four juveniles were recovered, three adults arrested.

Four is not nothing. These are four kids who need help.  But four is not the crescendo of a Super Bowl pandemic that Cindy McCain continues to elevate in order to indict men and sports.

And yet she persisted to burnish her brand.

Unconfirmed reports this week claim four underaged children were seriously injured after standing between Cindy McCain and a microphone.

Editor’s note: A veteran newspaperman with 50 years of experience in journalism, Michael Lacey co-founded Front Page Confidential with business partner Jim Larkin to report on all matters related to free speech. Lacey and Larkin are the former owners of Village Voice Media, a 17-paper chain of alternative newsweeklies known for its relentless investigative journalism targeting powerful individuals such as John and Cindy McCain. The two men now face retribution for their decades of muckraking in the form of a 100-count federal indictment related to the classified listings giant, Backpage.com, which they sold in 2015. Their trial is scheduled to begin May 5, 2020 April 12, 2021 in federal court in Phoenix, Arizona.