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The Epstein Chronicles
Inside the White House Fallout Over the Epstein Files (Part 3) (6/10/26)
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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 pick up where we left off with the New York Times article that was authored by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan. On July 7th, the Department of Justice and the FBI released a memo. It was brief, an unsigned 1 1/2 page statement explaining that after an exhaustive search of its database, hard drives and and network drives, as well as physical searches of squad areas, log cabinets, desks, closets and other areas where responsive material may have been stored, and a corresponding review of more than 300 gigabytes of evidence, the department concluded that there was no evidence Epstein had maintained a client list. The memo also reaffirmed the official finding that Epstein's death in 2019 had been a suicide. The memo was accompanied by the release of video footage from the federal jail and in Manhattan where Epstein died, footage that officials said supported the conclusion of suicide. And with that, the memo indicated the Trump administration would not be releasing further information regarding the Epstein case, and no further investigation of uncharged third parties was warranted. Imagine after all that hubbub, after all the carrying on, after telling us this time's going to be different, to send out that memo and just spit in everybody's face. Less than five months after Bondi had referred to a secret client list of high profile predators, the case was closed. Or so it seemed. If the administration expected that the memo would be the last word on the Epstein case and that the President's most ardent supporters would accept the purported conclusions of the Department of Justice simply because the department and its investigative agencies would were now controlled by Donald Trump, they were sorely mistaken. The memo was an earthquake, and it was received by a part of the MAGA base as an outright betrayal. It amounted to an abrupt disavowal of the sinister conspiracy theories that some of Trump's closest confidants had hyped during the Biden presidency and that they had promised to expose once Trump returned to power. The release of the surveillance video, which Bongino and Patel had intended as a gesture of transparency, further fueled the fire. The Department of Justice ended up releasing roughly 11 hours of prison video intended to show that nothing nefarious occurred. But the footage was missing a minute, a visible timestamp jump from 11:58:58pm to midnight. Bondi initially attributed this to a nightly system reset, and the footage was later restored and released. To many of Trump's followers, however, this was yet more evidence of a cover up. White House officials complained privately that they hadn't been told about the gap before the release. Social media lit up with blame, not just for Bondi, but for Patel and Bongino too. None of the three had ever experienced anger at this volume from Trump's conservative base. It was disorienting, especially for Patel and Bongino, whose power and influence had been built online. And, you know, it was a shock for them, having everybody come after them like that. That must not have been very much fun. But guess what? They should have done the right thing. If you say you're gonna release something, release it. And if not, you better have a good explanation as to why. And unfortunately for them, no explanation came. The movement that had treated them as heroes was suddenly turning on them. The two men were now tightly connected to a memo that stated in black and white that while information in the government's possession showed ample evidence of Epstein's own wrongdoing, there's no evidence of a wider conspiracy. The day the memo was released, Bongino showed up to a daily Justice Department meeting with the FBI staff and the Attorney General. He was in a volcanic mood. As soon as he entered the room, he erupted at Bondi, sh. Shouting at her. You this thing up from the start, Bongino yelled. The way you've been talking about this, that dumb charade with the Epstein files, the they're on my desk nonsense, all the promises to folks out there, look, he's not wrong about that. And when somebody's right, they're right. Not exactly what I would call the biggest fan of Dan Bongino, but he's not wrong here. And he had every reason to be fired up. This dude basically staked his career on this. Patel and Bongino both subsequently told the White House official that Bondi needed to resign. Two days later, on July 9, the two men were summoned to a meeting with Wiles and Bondi in the Situation Room. They were the last to enter the small wood paneled room, seated around the table where Bondi, Wiles, Blanche and and Taylor Buttowich, one of Wiles deputies. The moment Bongino sat down, Wiles told him that she had been informed that he leaked a sensitive story about Epstein and Trump to ABC News. I'll tell you what, Bongino replied. I'll give you $100,000 cash right now. I'm not kidding. Walk out to West Exec, put that reporter on speaker and get him to admit that I leaked it. $100,000. Wow. Snapback. Well, we got ourselves into this. Bongino cut her off. No, no, no, no, no, we didn't get ourselves into anything. I warned you guys about this the whole time and you ignored me. And exactly what I said was going to happen happened, and now you're pretending I was in on this. I was never in on this. It's always nice to see the rats try and flee the sinking ship, huh? Bongino's aggressive response to Wiles startled the others. She was the White House Chief of Staff, essentially a stand in for the president. Wiles put Bongino on the spot. Going forward, she said, we're all in. We're all going to agree to move forward. Are you in or not? No, I'm not, Bongino said. This is not my plan. I'm not part of this going forward. Forget it. I'm out of here. He stormed out of the Situation Room and onto West Executive Avenue, where he climbed into the back of Patel's armored SUV and directed the driver to take him to FBI headquarters. Some of Bongino's close friends hoped that he would resign right then and there, an act of protest that would have made him a MAGA martyr and only increased his following. Look, I would have had a lot less to say if he did that. At least he would have shown some integrity and some backbone. But no, he stuck around and ran cover. But the White House advisors intervened, urging him to stay. If he quit over Epstein and went public, it could severely damage the President. Bongino told associates he would remain for Trump's sake and keep pushing for more Epstein information to be released. But privately, he seethed in conversations with confidants. He lamented what the job had cost him, millions of dollars in podcast revenue, family time, his audience. He was getting torn apart over a strategy he had opposed from the start. The relationships at the top of the Justice Department were by now beyond dysfunctional. In another July meeting in Wilde's office, Bongino and Patel told the Chief of staff they suspected that Bondi had leaked negative stories about them. Yo, this is a shitshow. No wonder everything was so screwed up, folks. What an absolute clown show. Blondie fucked this whole thing up, Bongino later told the confidant, echoing Loomer's derisive nickname for the Attorney General. She was the one on TV saying over and over, they had all this stuff. There was never anything. We were always clear about that. But now everyone thinks we did something wrong and I gave up everything. Bongino complained that he'd given up his high rated show and millions of dollars and now it's all disappeared because people think we screwed something up with Epstein. You did. You're a coward and a chump. Dan Bongino A real man would have been a whistleblower. A real man would have stood up. Bongino paused. This is going to be President Trump's Iran Contra. While he's not wrong about that, it sure is. On July 12, the president took to Truth Social to defend Bondi against criticism, to urge his boys and gals to stop wasting time and energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about. And that's hilarious, considering that Trump himself and the administration couldn't shut up about Epstein for so long. Trump told aides he was very unhappy with some of his most influential supporters, including Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, all of whom were publicly urging the administration to come clean. Kirk had held the turning Point usa. Eventually, the previous day, that turned into an Epstein grievance fest, with one speaker after another bashing Bondi over the handling of the situation. Trump had called Kirk and scolded him. Trump is so thin skinned that he's willing to go after his most ardent supporters even if they just step out of line once. If they don't agree with everything, then you're a traitor. I just can't get down with the whole absolutism. Sometimes I'll agree, sometimes I won't. And if that's a problem, well, I don't give a shit. It's not my problem, it's yours. Nobody in Trump's orbit had a better feel for the younger part of the MAGA base than Kirk, who saw that the Epstein cover up, as it was now viewed, was capturing attention to an alarming extent. Donald Trump Jr. And J.D. vance, both of whom spent considerable time on X, were tapped into the same younger and hyper online portion of the base were also worried. They urged the White House to change course and force the Justice Department to release more of the files. So basically we had a MAGA civil war and like usual, the Trump faction won. Vance made it clear to colleagues that he feared losing some of the so called low propensity voters, the young men who are not traditional Republicans but but who had voted for the Trump vance ticket in 2024. Bingo. Almost to a person. Those people are out. They're not voting for Trump, they're not going to vote for this. So either they're sitting out the midterms or they're going to vote against Trump's candidates. And I've heard that from numerous people. This was the audience that tuned into the Manosphere podcasters like Joe Rogan. And it was worrisome that the podcast host themselves were now rebelling. But there was one major obstacle in the path of a solution. The President himself still had no interest in transparency. He wanted the whole Epstein issue buried, and he was snapping at anyone who mentioned it. His staff largely avoided the subject in their conversations with him, forced to worry among themselves. Finally, on July 16, in an exasperated Truth Social post, seemingly desperate to make the case in a language that might resonate with with his base, Trump, somewhat nonsensically called the Epstein case a hoax by Democrats and then proceeded to heap abuse on members of his party and his base, disavowing their support, calling them past supporters and weaklings who had bought into this bullshit hook, line and sinker. And look, the line was drawn at that point. The line was drawn, and anybody that's still trying to place Trump as some kind of hero here is crazy. Donald Trump is the one single biggest impediment to transparency right now, and that's just the truth. Whether you want to believe it or not, I don't care. But if this man wanted this stuff to be out there, it would be out there. As the President was trying to redirect everyone away from the Epstein on social media, members of both parties began to push the other way. Many Democrats embraced the growing Epstein scandal as a top focus in their messaging and as a weapon against Trump. That's a big problem, too. All these same Democrats, or a lot of them, they were nowhere to be found in 2020, 2019, but all of a sudden, they feel like they can use it politically, so now they care. So, look, I'm not under any impression that they're some kind of great crusaders. They're just a vehicle that we're using to get to where we want to go. Same thing with Massie. Right? They were joined by a few renegade Republicans, which added to the political pressure on the President's team. Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican, and Ro Khanna, a Democrat, filed HR 4405, the Epstein files Transparency act, in the House. And although they did not yet have the votes for the bill, it would become the next battleground as the President dug in the against releasing information, which is hilarious, considering they're the most transparent administration of all time. You would think that it would have to be a battle, that Trump would be the one saying, you know what? It's time for full transparency. They were joined by a few renegade Republicans, which added to the political pressure on the President's team. Representative Thomas Massie, a Republican. And Ro Khanna, a Democrat, filed HR4405, the Epstein file Transparency act, in the House. And although they did not yet have the votes for the bill, it would become the next battleground as the President dug in against releasing information. Word reached the White House in late July, meanwhile, that a subpoena would soon be coming from the House Oversight Committee led by James Comer, a Republican from Kentucky. It had been pushed by committee Democrats with the help of some Republicans, and it compelled the release of files by the Justice Department had on Epstein. On the day that the Trump team learned about the looming subpoena, another Epstein crisis meeting was convened in the Situation Room to discuss the pressure coming from Congress. It included most of the same people, Wiles and Vance, Blanche, Warrington, Patel, Bondi, Blair, Chung, Budowich and Levitt. Blair told the group that they would try to make sure that they were cooperating fully with the White House subpoena, but that the priority was to release information that demonstrated Trump was not involved in Epstein's crimes. That's the priority, huh? Disgusting. Folks, look, this is a damning article and if it's true, there is no doubt that there's a cover up. Blanche gave an assessment of the Epstein material that he personally reviewed or been briefed on, including a volume of child pornography. The conversation turned to how these files should be released to the public. The idea already in the works was to put all Epstein related material on a website. That way they could overwhelm the magasphere with far greater volume of real information in the form of a huge database. That's called flooding the zone. And it's what they do when they're trying to confuse people, put out a bunch of shit and hope some of it sticks. The website had been easy to build and they were looking at potentially going live. Within a week. They had already accumulated amount of material that Blanche had been scrolling through, and it included piles of documents from both civil and criminal cases. They planned to release it all. Blanche could then appear on Rogan's podcast to promote the transparency from the White House. But as it turned out, this searchable website would not go live on their initial timetable, and the version of the site they originally conceived would never be released to the public. The whole last thing has been nothing but a scam. From the very beginning, they never had any desire to tell the truth. Never. By late summer, it was plainly apparent to the President's top aides that the Epstein saga was not the same as the countless other crisis they had weathered during their service. To Trump. To their great surprise and growing disquiet, Trump's old tricks of deflection and denial weren't working. In late July, the Trump team had discussed in their crisis meetings. It was Blanche who interviewed Maxwell over two days. She told him she had witnessed no troubling behavior by Trump and didn't recall him sending the birthday card drawn in the shape of a nude woman. Soon after, she was quietly moved to a minimum security federal prison in Texas, a transfer left unexplained at first, which only deepened the public outrage. Blanche said nearly five months later that Maxwell had faced numerous threats against her life. Lies. All lies. So anybody who gets threatened gets moved. That's news to me, and I'm sure that's news to everybody that's locked up. As the calls for transparency grew louder, the top ranks of the Trump administration spent even more time in the bunker. By now, the Situation Room itself had become inseparable from the crisis, a guarded space where Trump's inner circle worked to steer the President around a scandal that would soon taint or consume careers at the highest levels of business, science and politics. Yeah, only about 10 years too late, but I guess. Welcome to the party. On Aug. 13, Trump's team met again in the secure complex at 6pm for two hours to refine the Epstein defense strategy. Again, the group included Wiles Bondi, Blanche Patel, Blair, Budowich Chung and Levitt. Vance phoned in from Britain. The Vice president once again pushed to release as much of the Epstein files as possible. And with an eye on the public messaging, he proposed that he should be the one to appear on Rogan's influential podcast. Vance had just gotten off the phone with Rogan, and he later told the others that Rogan said he wouldn't have Blanche on his show, but he'd take Vance. Vance argued that if he were the one to appear on Rogan's show, then only a part of the conversation would be about Epstein. The rest of the interview, he told the group, could be about the President's recently passed legislation and what it would do for work and families. But the larger conversation before them was how to handle the crisis and the public relations risk for the administration. The challenge would be any embarrassing or damaging allegations about the president, even if they were unsubstantiated, if everything was publicly available on the website they had planned, it could include all kinds of potentially humiliating material. Well, here's an idea. Don't hang out with Jeffrey Epstein and there won't be humiliating material. Thanks for coming to my TED Talk. Suddenly, one of the officials in the situation room raised the subject of a disturbing but uncorroborated accusation against Trump that had come to light in unsealed filings from a 2015 defamation case brought by Virginia Roberts against Maxwell, which had been settled two years later. The secondhand accusation alleging a specific type of sexual abuse was a perfect example of something that would show up on the public website and put the spotlight on Trump, whether it was true or not. Roberts, who had met Epstein when she was a teenage spa attendant at Trump's club Mar a Lago in Palm beach, became one of the sex offenders most outspoken victims. Roberts stated in late 2016 that to her knowledge, Trump had done nothing improper. She died by suicide, allegedly In April of 2025, three months after Trump returned to power. The old Roberts case file included emails sent to a journalist by another Epstein victim, Sarah Ransom, who later sued Epstein and Maxwell. Epstein had also settled that case. In the emails, Ransom claimed that she knew a girl in Epstein's sex trafficking ring named Jen, who said she had sex with Trump. Ransom also claimed that Jen had told her that Trump had a predilection for nipples and that he had aggressively flicked and sucked hers. Ransom wrote that she had seen evidence when she shared a bathroom with Jen. They looked incredibly painful and they were red and swollen and I remember wincing when looking at them. Ransom's credibility was not uncomplicated. She had made another claim, that she possessed video footage of prominent men having sex with young girls in Epstein's entourage. She later retracted the claims, saying she feared for herself and her family in if she proceeded. But after a federal judge ordered the unsealing of some of Robert's case files in 2023, the document that connected Trump to the claim about abused nipples was among the material that came out. It was an unconfirmed allegation and had not been made publicly. But the disclosure led to some articles that were quickly lost in the swirl of election year news. Some of Trump's advisors in the situation Room had never heard of the nipple claim. Those who had, and the ones who had, were only passingly familiar with it. Many in the room thought this was just discredited nonsense, but it might not matter. The Ransom emails could get new attention if they were included in a public facing and searchable Epstein library that carried the branding of the Justice Department. An administration official had already searched for Trump related material on the still private test version of of the website, and the nipple material was among the first items to show up. None of the credibility issues would come into consideration if a government endorsed database gave Ransom's claims about Trump a stamp of validity. This is out there, one of the officials told the group in the Situation Room. They're going to make a huge scene of this even though it's not true and everybody knows it. Blanche argued that in context, the Ransom document and Ransom's disavowal of some of her other claims would make clear why the allegations related to Trump had never been pursued for prosecution. Besides, these allegations were already available online because of what had been unsealed, so there was no reason to leave them off the Justice Department's website. The vice President said that he thought the president would be okay with releasing the nipple related documents, arguing that Trump had been accused of worse. I think we should put it out, he said. It would cause people to say we're going further than we need to. Wiles quickly responded that the president would not in fact be okay with it. It was a point no one wanted to continue debating. One official would later describe it as surreal. Experienced to be discussing nipples in the White House situation Room. Yeah, I would say so. Talk about embarrassing. As if we have nothing else going on in the world in the country. But these people are busy with their cover up. This was in miniature the entire problem the White House had with the Epstein files. Pyle's accusations were impossible to disprove and equally impossible to make go away. Every door they opened led to another room, and in every room there were more claims from more women. For a few weeks they thought that they had found a way out. The subpoena from Comer's committee had specifically requested Justice Department documents, communications with the White House, and material from the Epstein and Maxwell criminal case, not material from civil litigation such as the Ransom emails. They could comply with the letter of subpoena, post the Justice Department material to a stripped down version of the plan website, and leave the rest aside. Civil cases were separate matters outside of the remit of the Justice Department, and the subpoena allowed for another escape hatch. The Justice Department could withhold certain documents as long as it explained to the House lawmakers what they were and why they were held back. But that strategy collapsed quickly. More Republican lawmakers would press for additional disclosures, including former Trump allies like Greene and Lauren Boebert. And the Trump administration was slow to comply with even the initial limited set of documents required by the House subpoenaed, all by design, trying to gum it up. The slower it goes, the better off for them. By mid November, the partisan coalition the Trump team had worried about since the summer, finally had the votes to force the administration's hand. The Epstein File Transparency act passed the House and Senate in quick succession. And on November 19, Trump, yielding to the inevitable, signed it into law. The new law went further than the House subpoena. It sought a broader tranche of files and contained a warning to the administration that no record shall be withheld, delayed or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary. It sought everything that Trump had spent the better part of a year trying to suppress. The legislators who passed the bill had no idea how many files they had mandated to be released when within a month, the pages would end up numbering in the millions and the president and his family and places like Mar A Lago estate would be referred to more than 38,000 times. According to a New York Times analysis. The Trump Justice Department said that there was no client list, but the entire episode was another flashing light in an era where belief in the American system of justice had corroded to the point of collapse. Well, this isn't just a making of the Trump administration. All the administrations leading up to it, too, they bear some of the burden. They should have stepped up. They should have stopped Epstein. They should have been the ones to release all this. But nobody has. And that's the biggest problem. Both sides are in on it, and that's why everybody has to be held accountable. Raw witness accounts and evidence from incomplete criminal investigations were never meant to be seen by the public. There were long standing systems in place to protect both the accused and the accuser. The files amounted to a public dump of any Justice Department document that mentioned Epstein's name, no matter whether the information was confirmed as accurate or not. The release pages did not name many powerful men. Among them was Epstein's former close friend, now the President of the United states. In a January 2020 email, a federal prosecutor told a colleague that Trump had flown on Epstein's private jet far more than anyone knew. Flight records in the files showed at least eight trips between 93 and 96, sometimes with the second wife, Marla Maples, sometimes with his children. That's nice, huh? Bring your kids on Jeffrey Epstein's plane. Come one, come all. In January 2024, Trump declared that he would never have been on the plane. Just another lie. Everything this man says about Epstein is a lie. So why would that be any different? What else remained undisclosed? The question would only sharpen his people comb through what was redacted or Missing. The Justice Department, after more than three and a half million documents were made public, said no others needed to be released. Trump, characteristically, was creating his own reality. He had long claimed that everyone else was corrupt, especially his critics. These files, he would say despite the avalanche of references to himself, were the proof. There are a lot of questions about it, he told reporters at the White House in February of 2026, but nothing on me. Imagine having that kind of worldview and having that kind of, you know, tunnel vision. Nothing on you, buddy. There's a whole shit ton on you. Trump had declared Epstein a dead issue during the summer, but as he began the second year of his presidency, his own team could see the voter concerns about Epstein were still breaking through at an alarming extent. In an eternal memo circulated to roughly a dozen Trump advisers in late March of 2026, the President's pollster, Fabrizio summarized findings from two nights of focus groups conducted that month. Fabrizio's memo listed the Epstein files as the sixth most important issue raised in the focus groups, behind inflation, the economy, foreign policy, immigration and healthcare, but ahead of data centers, military issues, crime and safety, and being pro working class. In this section on key takeaways of the focus group, Fabrizio's memo stated, there is a consistent mention of the Epstein files, which, which come up in every group and is a real negative with some of these voters. Yeah, I'd say so. The way it's been handled is completely unacceptable. And anybody who's not in the cup for Donald Trump knows there's a cover up going on and it's infuriating to the regular person. They see it, they know it's happening, but there's nothing they can do about it. The Epstein crisis had exposed something that some of Trump's closest advisors spent months refusing to see. The President could break institutions, redirect the federal government against his enemies, and bring the world's richest men into the Oval Office bearing tribute. But he could not, it turned out, make Jeffrey Epstein disappear. And look, that's because of you. Not me, not any of the people talking about it behind a microphone, but because all of you, you deciding you're not going to move on, you deciding you want accountability, and you deciding that the administration is talking a bunch of bullshit. And no matter what they do, no matter how hard they try to sweep this under the rug and make it all go away, it's not gonna happen. I think that we've come too far at this point, and there's nothing that the Trump administration or anyone can do to get people not interested in what's going on. And I think the more they dig in, the more and the more they try and hide things and the more they're being secretive. And all it does is confirm what all of us already think, that Donald Trump and the White House is engaging in an ongoing cover up. And if they think we're going to move on, they got a whole ass other thing coming. All right, folks, that's going to do it for this one. All the information that goes with this episode can be found in the description box.