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The Epstein Chronicles
Inside the White House Fallout Over the Epstein Files (Part 2) (6/10/26)
00:21:38
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. In this episode, we're going to get right back to that New York Times article about Donald Trump and the Epstein files. This article was authored by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. At the start of last summer, as far as outside observers could see, Trump appeared to be at the pinnacle of his power. He had just bombed nuclear sites in Iran, completed a blitz of executive orders to reshape the immigration system, and ram through Congress his signature piece of domestic legislation, the big beautiful bill. He was using the levers of the government to go after his enemies. And out of fear and desperation, America's corporate titans were falling over themselves to genuflect. Look, a lot of those people, they wanted favorable deals and they knew that the Trump administration was gonna wheel and deal, so they're gonna do what's best for their companies. My beef is with the administration and their nonsense. The absolute greed and corruption that we see on a regular basis is just unreal. But behind the scenes, the Epstein crisis was paralyzing the Trump administration to a far greater extent than the public knew. In their public statements, Trump's advisors were full of bravado, dismissing the crisis. In reality, it. It was consuming the highest ranks of the administration. As no issue had for the President's team since the Russia investigation in his first term, his aides were determined to keep their rising sense of panic out of public view. Yo, this should have been more than Russia. That Russia shit. I hate to tell you, a lot of it was contrived. I know people don't want to hear it because it doesn't fit in with their confirmation bias and shit, but it's true and all the way back then that there wasn't enough there there to send anybody to prison. Meanwhile, the Epstein files were rife with all kinds of corruption. And if people would have just focused back then when this was all happening in real time, we could have actually got something done. But unfortunately, that never happened. The Justice Department had struggled with just how to dispose of the Epstein matter since the beginning of Trump's second term. The issue was all consuming for the President's political base, but also potentially compromising for the President himself in ways that officials in the new administration didn't fully understand. Any path forward would be fraud. Some of that complexity was self inflicted. Yes, it was. All of it. They created this problem for themselves. Donald Trump created this problem for himself. Here's an idea. Just live up to the promises you made while you were on the campaign trail. Let the Chips fall where they will let the American people decide. But instead you gotta gatekeep. Instead, you gotta protect your people. Instead you have to bring Leon Black's son into the administration. So yeah, all your problems self inflicted. Some of that complexity was self inflicted. In the engine room of the MAGA movement, the Epstein files were potent fuel. Elon Musk had used his social media platform to repeatedly question why a client list had not been released. Donald Trump Jr. And J.D. vance had invoked the Epstein files as a broader campaign message to argue that powerful people were hiding the truth from Americans. Tucker Carlson and the young conservative leader Drew Charlie Kirk had each insisted that the government should release the documents. And each floated the idea that there was an expansive cover up and progress. Well, that's because there is. And you don't have to agree with Charlie Kirk or agree with Tucker Carlson to understand that just because you don't agree with somebody doesn't mean they're not right. Look, I don't agree with Maggie Haberman all the time. She's right in this article. And I think that whole entire thing of having to agree with everything somebody says is dumb as hell. I'm not going to agree with everything somebody says ever. I have my own opinions on a wide variety of things and I'm willing to listen to anybody, whoever has the best ideas. That's who I'm voting for. Trump himself had been cagey. On the Lex Friedman podcast In September of 2024, when asked about releasing the client list, Trump responded, I'd certainly take a look at it, adding, I'd have no problem with it. The list probably will be made public, he said. But he sounded less than enthusiastic in private. Trump later told Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene that a release of Epstein material could hurt some of his friends. He repeatedly insisted that he had done nothing wrong and that the whole saga was fake news designed to harm him politically. And that's his go to move, right? Anytime that Trump is truly in jeopardy, he calls it a hoax. And he gets purchased with that because of what happened with Russia. I mean, the American people heard Russia, Russia, Russia for how many years, how many hearings? And then what came of it? So when people hear this, they're like, oh, just another routine move, another hoax to try and get Trump. That's what his base thinks. And you can say what you want about Trump and the administration, but they're effective communicators when it comes to their own party, their own people, very effective. They know exactly what buttons to push. And he has carefully built this whole entire Persona of him being some kind of martyr, and he knew that it was going to be effective. He knew that if he used that strategy and said that, that it would protect him. And it sure has, hasn't it? All the people out here that were running their yap for all these years about Epstein who now say it's a hoax. What a bunch of morons. Like, why would anyone believe anything they have to say now? It's one thing if the evidence would have pointed you in a different direction after you had one belief, right? Like, if somebody was to show up tomorrow with all of the evidence of what happened in that jail cell and it turned out that it was 100% suicide, I'd be the first one to get on here and tell you, look, I've been wrong the whole time. It was obviously suicide, because for me, anyway, the only thing that matters is getting as close to the truth as we possibly can. And anybody standing in the way of that, well, I have questions. But his posture was overtaken by the growing frenzy among his supporters throughout 2024. Greene had made it a mission to force the release of the files. And there were so many others. The far right influencer Laura Loomer, the conservative activist Scott Pressler, Chaya Raichik from Libs of TikTok. But when it came to propagating the Epstein files as evidence of the deep state capable of evil, two podcasters were not to be outdone. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino. Well, there's no doubt that those two were the loudest voices talking about the Epstein files. And then they get access to them and we get nothing. We get told that there's nothing there and that it was all just a big mistake. And they really thought people were going to buy it. They really thought that they were going to get Joe and Jane America to buy into that nonsense. Well, how's it working out for them? Patel, a National Security Council director for counterterrorism and Defense Department chief of staff in the first Trump administration, had repeatedly claimed in podcast interviews that the government was hiding Epstein's black book or client list. And he frequently asserted that the FBI was deliberately withholding names to protect the powerful. They were. That's true, but so is Cash Patel. It's all one big ass club, folks, and none of us are invited. Patel promised that the second Trump administration would release everything to restore public trust, and they've made it worse. Broken promises on a boulevard of broken dreams on the Dan Bongino Show. Bongino's background as a Secret Service Agent had lent authority to his claims of a cover up. What the hell are they hiding? With Jeffrey Epstein? He'd ask his large audience of MAGA devotees. The release of the client list would rock the political world. He predicted the Washington swamp was not telling you the truth. Well, that's true too. They're not. And neither did Dan Bongino. Just another useless son of a bitch. Another person who promised that he was gonna do the right thing, gonna expose people, bring transparency. Didn't do any of it. In fact, tucked his tail between his legs and dipped right back to the podcasting world. So as they took office in 2025, Trump's advisors were subject to intense pressure of their own making. Attorney General Pam Bondi quickly made things much worse. First, in a Fox News interview on February 21, she appeared to confirm the existence of an Epstein client list, something that the MAGA base had believed was sitting in the files hidden, and hinted that its release was imminent. Asked whether the Justice Department might release the names, she responded, it's sitting on my desk right now to review. But many viewed what came six days later as even more of an egregious misstep. The whole entire thing was poorly planned, poorly managed, and poorly carried out. And if we can't prove a cover up here, it's not because there's no evidence. It's because the willpower isn't there. On February 27th, the White House Communications Office scheduled a lineup of cabinet officials to to brief popular right wing influencers in the Roosevelt Room. The session began with Vice President Vance, followed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio walking the influencers through the administration's agenda. In attendance was a who's who of online MAGA. Mike Cernovich, Liz Wheeler, Colin Rugg, D.C. drano. The president himself brought them to the Oval Office and gave them custom designed challenge coins as a token of his appreciation. Before everything went wrong, one of them would remark, it was the best day of my life. What a bunch of clowns those people are. All those people with the white binders. All part of the psyop, all part of the COVID up. Imagine sacrificing your morality to have a few minutes at the White House. When the Attorney General and her team walked into the Roosevelt Room carrying boxes, Bondi had brought binders as handouts for the influencers. Her aides would later tell colleagues that the FBI had prepared them with the assurance that they contained revelatory details. Someone on her staff said, watch this. This is cool. This is going to be epic. Yeah, an epic disaster. Epically ridiculous. But as Bondi staff started distributing the binders, the blood pressure of other officials in the room skyrocketed. They had no idea what was in the handouts. The Attorney General was distributing something she was calling the Epstein files that had not been vetted by anyone in the White House. One official opening the binder began flipping through the pages to see if Trump's name was mentioned anywhere. A few pages in, right in the middle of the page, there it was. Boy, I bet they were happy to find the other, what, 38, 000 mentions? Keira Starmer, the British Prime Minister, was at the White House that day. If news broke that the Epstein files had been released before the President was to meet the press with the Prime Minister, that would be all the journalists would want to talk about. And Trump would be blindsided. Oh, poor Trump, gonna get blindsided. Gonna have to talk about his buddy Jeffrey Epstein again. Well, guess what? It's not going anywhere. Time to meet that shit head on. One of Trump's aides hastily steered the influencers out of the White House, telling them that the content of the binders was embargoed until after the President's news conference with Starmer. But the communications office would be more than happy to talk about the files afterward. As the influencers left, they snapped selfies in front of the White House, holding the binders, quickly posting the pictures on social media. They had now created a new shockwave of anticipation of what might be in them. And I remember when it happened, I knew for a fact that we were getting dog walked. I knew that we were gonna get nothing. And guess what? We got nothing, nada, zilch, un gotts. Like some others in the White House, Bondi had either grossly underestimated or simply been blind to the voracious appetite of the MAGA base for information about Epstein. Her binders contained information about him and his activities, flight logs, contact lists, summaries of items taken from the residents after his 2019 arrest, and other material. But nearly all of it had been previously released. Bondi had somehow simultaneously oversold and trivialized the Epstein files. And now the influencers made to feel like dupes. Well, they are. They're just a bunch of grifters. Do you think any of those people care about Jeffrey Epstein or the survivors or any of the story? It's about engagement to them. Oh, they cared about it. When they thought they were going to use it politically, that's when they cared. You know, just like the other side cares now. Oh, we got a political Inroad here, we all of a sudden care. Well, I hate to break the news to you, but if you would have cared when it mattered the most, when this was all happening, maybe, just maybe, we wouldn't be here today. And it was people like Maggie Haberman, the author of this article, who was calling people like me conspiracy theorists. Meanwhile, we've been over the target for seven years, and all you had to do was listen. Just listen to what the survivors were saying. Listen to Virginia, listen to what Maria had to say. Listen to all these women who actually lived it. And then you go and you look at all the court documents, you look at everything that came out, and the picture that it paints is not very hard to recognize. In the Roosevelt Room, Bondi told the influencers that this was just the first tranche of files. There would be more coming, she assured them, but that story would change, too. Yeah, everything they told us changed the campaign. It was, oh, we're gonna have everything out. Then it was, oh, no, there's nothing coming out. And then after the discharge petition, well, we're the most transparent administration in the history of transparency, so we're gonna get everything out for you. Nothing comes out, nothing of substance, and they fight tooth and nail the whole entire time. If Donald Trump wanted to be transparent, he could be. Him and his Justice Department could have been as transparent as they wanted to be, but instead, we had to jump through hoops, and it became a circus. And for what? So Trump could protect his donors? Protect a few of Jeffrey Epstein's best friends? Or is there something more sinister that he's trying to protect? The Justice Department officials were reviewing the Epstein material, but months would pass before the department or any of Trump's closest advisors knew just how many documents there were. More than 3 million pages of files related to Epstein, and potentially as many as 6 million. In the early months, officials were focused on going through the trove of what are known as 302forms. Records of FBI agents, interview notes with witnesses, some of whom were victims of Epstein. These were raw records, often containing unverified information. Trump was mentioned numerous times, as were other prominent men. Look, the 302 reports are telling. These are the words of the people who were interviewed, who the investigators think have knowledge of what's going on. So I would suggest that you take the 302 proffers seriously. Now, does that mean that people won't lie? Of course not. You have to be guarded. And I would suggest that you're very cautious with what sort of slop you're putting into Your brain when it comes to this topic. There's a lot of people out there just serving up a bunch of nonsense. In June, four months after the circus in the Roosevelt Room with the influencers, Bondi and Blanche briefed the President on the status of the Epstein review. We have gone through the files, Blanche told Trump. There's not a lot there, a lot of child pornography. Obviously we can't put any of that out. There are some mentions of you, but nothing substantive. Most of Trump's advisors had rejected out of hand the idea of releasing the FBI's raw interview notes. More important, they wanted to avoid putting out anything that could damage the President. Cover up, folks. That's what this is. This is a cover up emotion. Everything's being done to protect Donald Trump. It has nothing to do with justice. It has nothing to do with real transparency. It's about protecting Donald Trump on Donald Trump's orders. If that's not a cover up, I don't know what is. With full transparency, a non starter, a small group of White House and Justice Department officials decided to draft a memo that would explain why the department was not releasing any further information about Epstein. But even the process of composing the memo was fraught, in part because no one wanted their name on it, and in part because of a deep concern within the leadership of the FBI. You know what we need here? A whistleblower. We need somebody that was working on this behind the scenes to come out and drip all that tea. You know, that there were people that weren't down with what was going on. You know, there were people that wanted to go a different way. But all of this was done at the behest of Donald Trump. And it seems like every time we get new information, it just reaffirms that. For weeks, Patel and Bongino, the Deputy FBI director, had grown more infuriated as they realized the scale of the mess for which they were now being blamed. They repeatedly raised alarms internally that the Epstein crisis was gathering momentum with Trump supporters. Bongino wanted to convey something definitive to the MAGA base. And he and Patel pushed for the immediate release of the surveillance footage from the federal facility where Epstein was found dead in his cell. That proved to be a disaster as well. What an absolute and utter disaster. Missing minute, nothing adding up. Couldn't see anything. And then, of course, there's the orange blob that nobody's explained. Oh, it's Tova Noel. Well, no, it's not. She says it's not her. So who is it? Bongino hated the Justice Department's nothing to see here memo being drawn up for public release. He told Patel this would in no way align with their promises of transparency after taking over the FBI, and he objected to putting the FBI seal on the letterhead, but he was overruled. Patel privately shared the many of Bongino's concerns, but in an internal email on July 2, the FBI director gave his support for the memo. But what's he going to do? Donald Trump wants the memo out. They're going to put it out. These people aren't courageous. They're not willing to stand up to somebody like Donald Trump if that means their career is going to be over. Thanks for the edits. I still believe that this is the correct vehicle forward, patel wrote, with the occasional typo to a small group of colleagues, including Blanche. I'm happy to add any additional sentences to compete the shortfall, but I do think we address specifically why Maura can't be released as it relates to specific topics, I. EE. Court order, CSAM, victims protections, etc. Bondi rarely used her Justice Department email and was not on the chain where the group worked on the memo. She was aware of both the memo and the release of the prison video, but was not involved in editing the document. So what was she doing? Just a figurehead. I think that Blanche has been the boss this whole entire time. That's what I believe. And I think that he was put there by Donald Trump for this exact reason. If goes south, Blanche takes the reigns and he guides the ship home. And that's exactly what's happening right now as we speak. But Blanche needs to understand that Trump's not going to be president forever, and at some point this bill is going to come due. Inside the White House, Trump had no interest in releasing anything, and senior officials, including Wiles and Blair, were initially unconvinced about the reach of the Epstein crisis. They told colleagues that Republican voters didn't care, and they had early data from Trump's chief pollster, Tony Fabrizio, to demonstrate it. The Epstein brouhaha, in their view, was driven by fringe conspiracy theorists and amplified by noisy online influencers who didn't represent a meaningful bloc of voters. If the White House engaged, it would only pump it up, putting the official stamp on the matter. Wiles, Blair and others around Trump had seen him weather every storm imaginable for years, and in their view, this wasn't a storm, as it was a passing cloud at most. I wonder if he feels that way now. Bongino told anyone who would listen that this was a grave miscalculation. It's not an online story he told White House advisors. You don't understand. All right, folks, we're gonna wrap up right here, and in the next episode, we'll finish this bad boy off. All the information that goes with this episode can be found in the description box.