Judges will probably keep the Epstein files sealed, Bondi seems unlikely to release anything, and the Supreme Court’s version of blanket presidential immunity will thwart any criminal case against Trump. The post Epstein and Trump: Why We’re Unlikely to See the Files appeared first on Washington Monthly.
Richard Nixon did not resign the presidency because, in 1972, a ragtag collection of burglars and spies broke into DNC headquarters at the Watergate at the behest of his re-election campaign and White House aides. The 37th president did not leave office in disgrace for approving hush money payments to those involved in the case. In 1974, Nixon became the first and only president to leave office because of a White House cover-up of the criminal activity of his associates. “The cover-up is worse than the crime,” was the mantra back then. It remains so today. Is there a cover-up of Justice Department records relating to Jeffrey Epstein, the billionaire sex offender who died in federal custody in 2019, during Donald Trump’s first term in office?
We don’t know for sure, but we do know that when Trump campaigned in 2024, he pledged complete transparency regarding the Epstein files. His MAGA base enthusiastically applauded, suspecting there was a client list of sexual predators, and that it included prominent Democrats who would fall as hard as did the United Kingdom’s Prince Andrew, who has been all but stripped of his royal duties, following the accusations that he cavorted with teenage girls introduced to him by Epstein.
However, there is the possibility that Trump himself might be mentioned in some of the Epstein investigative documents. The Wall Street Journal reported on Wednesday that in May, Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy informed the president that his name is mentioned “multiple times” in the files. Trump was also supposedly told that the files do not indicate wrongdoing and, like most investigations, include unsubstantiated hearsay.
Some in the MAGA movement have now decided there’s nothing to see here. At the same time, other supporters of the president insist that all Epstein documents be released.
The interest in Trump and Epstein, long known to be friends before a falling out in 2004 over a property dispute, was given a jolt earlier this month when the Journal reported that it had uncovered a lurid birthday card Trump allegedly sent to Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003. In addition to a graphic drawing that Trump allegedly drew, the card contained an imaginary conversation between the two panjandrums with Trump musing about a “wonderful secret” the two shared, “things in common,” and “enigmas” that “never age.” In what seems to be an invented back-and-forth, Trump appears to relish that the “secret” was “clear” to Epstein the last time the two got together. With Epstein’s criminal conviction, this kind of curious badinage was bound to trigger scrutiny.
The birthday note, if authentic, may be a hint of Trump’s contemporaneous awareness of Epstein’s criminal behavior—as might his comment to a reporter less than a year earlier that Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
The Journal reported that the “birthday card is among the documents examined by Justice Department officials who investigated Epstein and [his co-conspirator Ghislane] Maxwell years ago.”
Trump disavowed the birthday card, claiming it was fabricated, and filed a libel suit in his favorite jurisdiction, Florida, against the Journal, its owner, Rupert Murdoch, and its reporters, seeking $20 billion . Yes, $20 billion. Given the current state of libel laws, Trump can’t expect a payout of that magnitude, or even a win. Still, it’s a good guess that the president wants to uncover how the document came to be published by the Journal and that a court might order the paper to divulge its sources, something it is likely to resist as news organizations try to protect promises of confidentiality.
“I hope Rupert and his ‘friends’ are looking forward to the many hours of depositions and testimonies they will have to provide in this case,” the president said. Was the leaker a disgruntled Justice Department official, attorneys for Maxwell, who is incarcerated pending further appeal of her conviction for abetting Epstein’s sex trafficking, or someone else?
After The Wall Street Journal published the letter, and Trump insisted that the Epstein affair is old news, some of his most prominent supporters did a stunning about-face on disclosure. House Speaker Mike Johnson, the Louisiana Republican, who initially supported disclosure of the Justice Department’s Epstein records, did a 180-degree turn. He said the full House would not vote on a non-binding Republican measure calling for the release of additional Epstein files before the chamber’s August recess, which is slated to begin at week’s end. By September, when the Speaker may or may not take up the matter, the flaming scandal may be a dying ember.
“My belief is we need the administration to have the space to do what it is doing, and if further congressional action is necessary or appropriate, then we’ll look at that, but I don’t think we’re at that point right now, because we agree with the president,” the Speaker said. Unsurprising! That’s why Johnson is there, to “agree with the president.”
Something is awry when one of the chambers of Congress shuts down early to avoid a vote about securing potentially scandalous documents in the government’s possession. A new Politico account indicates that those House Republicans demanding a vote on an Epstein resolution were on the verge of bringing business in the chamber to a halt unless they got their way.
The irony here is that the Trump administration enthusiastically releases voluminous government files when so inclined. A tsunami of government files has washed over the public in the last few days. Some relate to the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., others to then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s emails on a private account, and work product from the Intelligence Community related to the Russiagate investigation into Moscow’s efforts to sway the 2016 election.
But amid this flurry of document releases, those related to Epstein remain embargoed.
The federal government has no obligation to dump grand jury and other materials related to a concluded criminal case. Nor do states and counties. The norm is that such documents are not released because, as with any investigation, they’re likely replete with false leads, dead ends, aspersions on the character of innocent people, and spurious rumors. But because there’s a widespread belief that politically influential persons have been spared embarrassment or prosecution, there’s been a demand to release the files that Trump and his allies have amassed.
Early in her tenure as Attorney General, Pam Bondi promised to release Epstein-related documents, which she said were literally on her desk. This was a startling claim from the nation’s top law enforcement officer. According to an interesting letter from Senator Richard “Dick” Durbin, the Illinois Democrat and ranking member of the Judiciary Committee, Bondi tasked a stunning 1,000 FBI personnel to review the Epstein files in March. That work went forward only to have it end that month. Durbin explains he was told that “personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned.” The Journal’s new report that Trump was told there were multiple mentions of him echoes Durbin’s letter.
If that’s the case, this frantic search was followed by what they cheekily called a lull during World War II—not a blitzkrieg but a sitzkrieg. On July 7, the Justice Department and the FBI released an unsigned memorandum, conceding there were perhaps thousands of undisclosed documents. Still, they told the public there was nothing more to see.
Trump, understanding the optics of seeming to delay an Epstein release that he had once promised, ordered Bondi to seek to have only “pertinent” grand jury interviews released. Bondi promptly moved the federal court in Miami to open the grand jury testimony relating to the Epstein investigation in that District. Bondi knew that she could have made the application in the Southern District of New York but knew that the law was against disclosure in Miami, and had her dream come true when the matter came before Robin Rosenberg, a federal judge nominated by Barack Obama. Miami is in the ultra-conservative Eleventh Circuit. Rosenberg promptly denied the application as she was required to under settled Eleventh Circuit law.
The danse macabre smacks of a legal shell game. First, Bondi made only the weakest case for releasing the grand jury testimony and knew it would be denied in Miami. Second, I have a hunch that there would be little value in the grand jury testimony even if a judge did choose to release it. It will mostly underscore what came out in Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial.
Who knows what other material is in those files and what probative value it might have? Grand juries hear all kinds of accusations, most of which don’t pan out. Who knows what happened when the investigators started flagging Trump’s name? How much is there in these files? Only the tip of the iceberg may be public like the 2020 complaint for damages filed in federal court, where a woman claimed that in the 1990s, when she was a 14-year-old, Epstein raped her and introduced her to Trump. And she claimed that Epstein “elbowed Trump playfully,” asking him: “This is a good one, right?” According to witness testimony, “Trump smiled and nodded in agreement. They both chuckled.”
And what else does Maxwell, the daughter of the late British publishing executive Robert Maxwell, know? What do the former prosecutors, Jeffrey Berman and Maurene Comey, both summarily fired from the U.S. Attorney’s office for the Southern District of New York, know? Comey is the daughter of Trump nemesis and former FBI Director James Comey. He warned of a “grave danger” in maintaining trust in federal prosecutors after Bondi’s Justice Department fired his daughter.
On Thursday, Maxwell will meet Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche at the U.S. Attorney’s office in Tallahassee, Florida, to discuss what she knows and, presumably, the possibility of a presidential pardon or commutation of her federal sentence. In 2021, she was sentenced to 20 years in prison after she was found guilty of five criminal counts against her, including sex trafficking of a minor and transporting a minor with the intent to engage in criminal sexual activity. She’s serving her time at the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee.
We don’t know if there’s a cover-up; no independent special counsel has been appointed to let us know. It’s unlikely that Bondi will ever release embarrassing documents about the man who appointed her, or that any judge will open the files. If there’s something in the Epstein files that could embarrass Trump, it’s unlikely ever to emerge. Even if it did, the Supreme Court under Chief Justice John Roberts, in an opinion he wrote for the majority in a previous Trump case, has made it all but impossible to prosecute this president or any other, in office or after they leave. Back in the Watergate days, a president like Richard Nixon, who broke the law, had something to fear when leaving office. And that is why Nixon famously accepted Gerald Ford’s presidential pardon “for all offenses against the United States which he, … committed or may have committed or taken part in.”
It’s a brand-new ballgame.
The post Epstein and Trump: Why We’re Unlikely to See the Files appeared first on Washington Monthly.
