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The Epstein Chronicles
Inside the White House Fallout Over the Epstein Files (Part 1) (6/10/26)
00:20:24
The Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files has become a political disaster because years of promises about transparency ran headfirst into the Justice Department’s refusal to back the most explosive public expectations. Senior White...
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What's up, everyone? And welcome to another episode of the Epstein Chronicles. Over at the New York Times, they have a new article out discussing the inside freakout, as they call it, at the White House, over the Epstein files. And I have no doubt that there was all sorts of freaking out, especially considering the way that they handled it. Could it have been any worse? Honestly, I don't know if anything has ever been handled more poorly by any administration in the history of the country, and I'm not even kidding when I say that. And then they have the audacity to turn around and say to you, we're the most transparent administration in the history of the United States. I mean, come on, they have to be trolling, right? I mean, that's what you would think. But unfortunately, this is the reality that we're living in and, and our lives are being managed by a bunch of scoundrels that not only broke bread with Jeffrey Epstein, but now have the audacity to cover it all up. So today we're going to dive into that New York Times article and we're going to see what's up Headline inside the White House Freakout over the Epstein files. This article was authored by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. On July 17, 2025, at around 6:00 clock in the evening, President Trump's top officials filed into the White House Situation Room, the secure bunker where classified and high stakes national security matters are discussed and decided. This was where President Barack Obama, along with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and the President's national security team, watch the raid that ended with the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011. Now, however, Trump's most senior advisers had gathered without him to figure out how to gain some measure of control over a very different kind of crisis threatening to engulf the presidency. The Epstein files. I've never seen an administration fumble so badly. They had everything queued up. They were going around during the campaign talking about how they're going to release all the information, they're going to hold people accountable, they're going to do this, they're going to do that. Then they get into office, they get a look at the files, and they realize that their boy, Donald Trump, and all of his friends are littered throughout the documents. So of course, that caused Donald Trump to slam on the brakes and kill the process before it even got off the ground. That was the goal. And if it wasn't for the discharge petition, it would have worked. And if you were wondering why Trump was so mad at Thomas Massie. That's why. Because without Thomas Massie and Ro Khanna, and without Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace, without Marjorie Taylor Greene, we never get a look at this. So, look, I'm not a big fan of all those people when it comes to all their politics, right? But when it comes to this issue, mad respect to all of them. They all stood up when everybody else was sitting down. Where were the rest of the members of the gop? Oh, that's right. Too scared of Donald Trump to stand up for people who have been victimized. And I don't just mean the survivors. I mean all of us. These people have been stealing from us hand over fist for decades. But I guess that's no big deal either. Ten days earlier, the Justice Department and the FBI had jointly released a memo that. That bluntly stated that their review had found no client list of powerful men for whom the notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein had allegedly procured underage girls and young women. No, I don't think there's a list, but I can give you two names right off the top of my head that girls were trafficked to. Jean Luc Bernal and Jess Daly. Jess Daley already admitted that he had consensual sex with one of Epstein's assistants. And if it's somebody that was also a victim, well, there you go. And unfortunately, Jean Luc Brunel and Jeffrey Epstein, they had a revolving door of girls that were being abused between the two of them. And never mind all the other scumbags that got involved. Should we talk about George Mitchell or Bill Richardson or Glenn Dubin or Les Wexner? Because all of them have been credibly accused. No investigation, nobody being brought in, nothing. And so with just those two dudes alone, it shows you that Jeffrey Epstein trafficked girls to other people. How many more people do you want? How many other co conspirators would make it Trafficking for you intended to put to rest years of speculation and end a pressure campaign to release the voluminous material in the department's possession? The memo instead had the opposite effect, setting off a backlash that was notably loud among the MAGA base. Look, people should be giving credit for that. The people that are maga, the people that were MAGA who decided that Donald Trump calling them a traitor was too much, that Donald Trump trying to cover this up was too much. Those people should be applauded. It's not easy to go against, you know, all your friends and all your other beliefs and all that stuff. So we should give them some credit, right? It's okay to have a little grace. Not everybody's your enemy. And I've told you a million times, you're going to have to work with people that you might not agree with politically on a whole host of issues to get something done here. But that's how politics works, right? That's what detente is. You don't have negotiations with people that you agree with. You negotiate with people that you might have some disagreements with. And the best way to do that is to find some middle ground. And if going after Jeffrey Epstein and his network is not middle ground, then I don't know what is. And it was about to get worse. The Wall Street Journal was preparing a damaging article about Trump's relationship with Epstein. The President's desperate attempts to kill the story had failed. His team now had to get everyone onto the same page about how to counter the growing swarm of attention. They needed a gesture of transparency to appease an increasingly angry base, but also a way to convey the message to that the President was sympathetic to his supporters concerns, which itself was a problem because he clearly wasn't. Well, that's true. He called us all traitors. He said anybody who's following along with this is his enemy. Basically, imagine the President of the United States being mad because people want accountability for a human trafficker. Like, have we fallen that far? Where people hear this, look at this and just shrug their shoulders and they're like, ah, yeah, you know what? He has a point. No, he doesn't have a point. He's trying to cover this up. And this is what I've been telling you guys. Everybody wants that splashy, gotcha moment. But in the real world, this sort of is messy, it's not splashy, and a lot of times it's not salacious. You get people like this on financial crimes, you get them on covering up for other people. That's how it's always worked. And for all these people that have been carrying on about Donald Trump now for eight years with all kinds of crazy stuff, Russia, pgate, you name it. But what you have here is an actual cover up. And instead of focusing on that, you have people focusing on other things that are unprovable. Now, that doesn't mean I don't believe that it happened, but it's not what I believe. It's about what we can prove. And I don't think you need to be some kind of famous investigator to realize that the fix is in and that there's a gigantic cover up being run and managed directly by the White House. And I thoroughly believe that. Vice President J.D. vance took a seat at the head of the table in the John F. Kennedy conference room of the Situation Room complex. This is a huge problem, he told the group. Arrayed around him were the White House Chief of Staff, Susie Wiles, the White House Counsel, David Warrington, the Press Secretary, Caroline Levitt, the Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Buttowich, the Communications Director, Stephen Chung, the Deputy Attorney General, Todd Blanche, the Associate Attorney General, Todd Baby Billy Blanche, and the Deputy Chief of Staff, James Blair, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the FBI Director, Kash Patel joined on speakerphone. The Vice President appeared panicked to others in the room about the way the subject of Epstein was already dividing the MAGA coalition. Yo, he knows what's up 100. He knows. This whole entire thing has caused big problems, and I think there's a lot of people that are going to be sitting out the midterms because of it, and I think it's going to have disastrous repercussions for the gop. Some senior officials had the impression that Vance had bought into the darkest theories about Epstein and a cabal of predators hidden within the country's ruling class. Well, is that wrong? Maybe not to the level that some people are trying to make it out, but predators nonetheless. What being predators in a financial sense is okay? I mean, people just don't get it. And it. It drives me crazy. Breaking news. We're all slaves, every last one of us. You got debt. Congratulations, you're a slave. And you're a slave to Jeffrey Epstein's people. The same people, by the way, that ruined the whole entire World in 2008. So if you think this is just about girls being trafficked or kids being abused, you have not been paying attention. Wiles would tell others that the Vice President had proved himself to be a major conspiracy theorist. Another top official said later that Vance had been pounding on the Epstein issue since the release of the memo. He was privately pressing for the administration to release all the Epstein files, everything in the Justice Department's possession, even encouraging a congressional investigation. And look, he's not wrong for that. I think that Vice President Vance is on point, and that was the campaign promise that was made by the administration. So I think that Vance is just trying to live up to that promise right now. Look, don't take it for, I think Vance is doing a great job or I support him. I don't. But of all these robber barons that populate Donald Trump's administration, it looks like Vance is the only one that even cared. Vance told the group that he believed that all files should be released as soon as possible. He argued that Congress was going to force the release of the files eventually. It was already clear that a bipartisan coalition in favor of such action was forming on Capitol Hill, and the momentum was going in one direction. If the administration got out ahead of this and released everything voluntarily, including whatever material existed about the president, it would at least get credit for transparency. The alternative was to let the story drag on for months as information dripped out, each new revelation renewing a cycle of suspicion and and fury. Better to rip the bandage off and move on. Yo, they would have been so much better served to listen to J.D. vance. He had the right of it here. Get out ahead of it. Look, it might be embarrassing and it might cause you some grief, but the more you hide it, the more you act like nothing's going on, the worse it gets when people figure out that they've been bullshitted. And I think JD Vance was hip to that. But unfortunately, the rest of the administration is dancing to Donald Trump's tune. Vance even floated to colleagues an extraordinary PR gambit that the White House enlists Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein's longtime girlfriend and co conspirator Glenn Maxwell in prison. It might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein. Well, that's a bad idea. That was stupid because nobody believes Ghislaine Maxwell, only the people that want to believe what Trump's saying. Right. It's all about confirmation bias with a lot of people. Me, I'm following the evidence wherever it goes, and the evidence certainly looks like Donald Trump is engaging in a cover up. That's what the evidence is telling me. And the more we hear from insiders, the more we hear about what was going on on the ground, the more convinced of it I am. Even unsubstantiated allegations and anecdotes about Trump should go out. Vance argued they were going to surface regardless, and if the administration published them first, it would demonstrate good faith and take the oxygen out of the conspiracy theories. His arguments fell on skeptical ears, but some advisers thought it would be good to have Justice Department officials call a news conference to explain their position on the Epstein affair, going beyond the memo that precipitated the crisis. At this point in the meeting, Blair spoke up. With all due respect, he said, the communication strategy of this group got us here. I don't know what's going to get us out. And if you're going to go in front of the press You've got a lot of work to do. He began to ask pointed mock questions, demonstrating how difficult a news conference might be. As the President's former defense attorney, Blanche had a unique vantage point in the discussions. He was better equipped than anybody else in the room to weigh the ideas being discussed against Trump's personal and political interests. Blanche laid out what he saw as their best option. And here's how the COVID up works. Donald Trump gives Blanche the orders and then Blanche puts him into action. And then later on down the road, if anybody says, hey, Trump told him to do that, he has plausible deniability. And he'll also say that our conversations were privileged. So it gives Trump that armor, but it sets Todd Blanche up to take the fall. And I think that that might occur at some point. I think that if there's a real investigation into this cover up, I think that Todd Blanche is going to be the one that's holding the hot potato. Option one was to petition federal district courts in Florida and New York to unseal grand jury testimony, the secret transcripts of prosecutors, presentation of witnesses and evidence in their efforts to obtain indictments in past Epstein related cases, as those were almost certain to contain no significant new information. Everyone agreed that this option was a good idea, and not only because the release was unlikely to damage the President. And look, there's no doubt that that was the goal. We talked about it at the time and I told you that the whole entire point of what they were looking to do was to slow things down and then, of course, get some information out there that is recycled. Then they can say, look, we're working hard to get you all this information. We're doing everything in our power every single day to be transparent. Meanwhile, behind the scenes, they're doing everything. But I. Under the federal rules of Criminal Procedure, the secrecy of grand jury material is regarded by most federal judges as almost always inviolate, and the bar for any release is exceptionally high. If the court refused to unseal them, as Blanche predicted, they could shift blame for withholding the Epstein material away from the Trump administration and onto the judges. Exactly what they tried to do and exactly what I pointed out at the time. And all the better if the judges had been appointed by Democratic presidents. Blant's suggestion would make it appear that the White House wanted the materials released when it was almost certain not to happen. We call that a cover up where I'm from. Option number two was to have Justice Department lawyers question Maxwell and publicly release the transcript. A twist on the idea proposed earlier by Vance, Blanche offered to interview Maxwell himself. What if we get her to talk to Congress? Vance suggested. Blanche raised the possibility that Maxwell's lawyer might expect something in return for her candor. Oh, she got it, didn't she? Nice little move down to Club Fed. Everything's all good for Ghislaine Warrington. The White House counsel responded by laying out the available choices without advocating any of them. Maxwell could be given a pardon, he said, or she could have her sentence reduced. At that, several around the table spoke up to register their strong disapproval. Pardoning Maxwell, a trafficker of young girls, would create a huge PR problem. Chung said he predicted that in the wake of a pardon, the Epstein accusers would be fanning out on tv, telling their stories and ripping the administration to shreds. Blair was also adamantly opposed to a pardon. We can't offer Glenn Maxwell anything, he said. I don't know why we would. And B, if we give Glain Maxwell any sort of break whatsoever and then she turns around and says nice things about us or says nice things about us and we give her a break, it'll undermine the entire point of her saying good things. That'll feed the conspiracy theory, period. If there's nothing for her to say that hurts us, we shouldn't have to offer her anything. That's a pretty fair assessment, no. The consensus was that calling for the release of the grand jury material was the best course of action. Wiles told the group she would discuss the matter with Trump and ask if he would send a truth social post calling for the release of the Seal grand jury documents. Just then, the Wall Street Journal article they had been trying to kill was published online. Cell phones are forbidden in the Situation Room, so a staff member brought in printed copies of the explosive report, which detailed how Trump and many others had created birthday cards and letters to be assembled by Maxwell into a special birthday book for Epstein in 2003. The birthday card attributed to Trump depicted a nude woman, hand drawn and inscribed with an imagined dialogue between the two men about a wonderful secret. Imagine a wonderful secret is it. The drawing was signed with what appeared to be Trump's distinctive jagged sharpie signature in a place of the woman's pubic hair. Another part of the COVID up that looks to be provable. If this was something that was forged, why is there no investigation? You would think, like I've said a million times, that if the President of the United States is being impersonated by someone, we should probably know and there should be a gigantic investigation into who and why we haven't seen that though, have we? Well, that's weird, considering Donald Trump likes to use the FBI to go after everybody, but not the people that allegedly forged this letter. Seems a bit suspect to me. In the days before publication, Trump, in the effort to quash the story, called News Corp. Executive Robert Thompson, News Corp. Owner Rupert Murdoch, the Journal's editor in chief, Emma Tucker, practically shouting. The president told Tucker, who was British, that she must hate America. He told her he would file a lawsuit. But none of his bullying had worked and now the group sat quietly reading the full story in the Situation Room whiles readied a public denial for the president, which he soon posted on social media. Shortly after this, the president posted again he was going along with the plan his advisors had hashed out in the Situation Room, though it was clear he didn't like having to do it. Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I've asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent grand jury testimony subject to court approval. This scam perpetuated by the Democrats should end right now. Scam? Imagine calling this a scam. No, Mr. President, the only scam that's being run is the one you're running on the American people. In response to a request for comment, a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, repeated Trump's claim that he was innocent in all Epstein related matters, adding that by releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee's subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency act, and calling for more investigations into Epstein's Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein's victims than anyone before him. Why don't you ask the survivors how they feel about that comment? Because I assure you, they do not agree. Alright, folks, we're gonna wrap up episode one right here. And in the next episode dealing with the topic, we're gonna pick up where we left off. All the information that goes with this episode can be found in the description box.