Inside the White House’s Epstein Strategy
As the questions surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s life and death—questions that Donald Trump once helped whip up—tornadoed into their bajillionth news cycle, the president’s team began to privately debate ways to calm the furor: appoint a special counsel to investigate. Call on the courts to unseal documents related to the case. Have Attorney General Pam Bondi hold a news conference. Hold daily news conferences on the topic, à la Trump’s regular prime-time pandemic appearances.
It dismissed every option. Any decision would ultimately come from Bondi and Trump together—or from Trump alone—and for days, the president was adamant about doing nothing.
Trump was annoyed by the constant questions from reporters—had Bondi told him that his name, in fact, was in the Epstein files? (“No,” came his response)—and frustrated by his inability to redirect the nation’s attention to what he views as his successes, four White House officials and a close outside adviser told us. But more than that, Trump felt deeply betrayed by his MAGA supporters, who had believed him when he’d intimated that something was nefarious about how the Epstein case has been handled, and who now refused to believe him when he said their suspicions were actually baseless.
[Jonathan Chait: Why Trump can’t make the Epstein story go away]
He—the president, their leader, the martyr who had endured scandals and prosecution and an assassin’s bullet on their behalf—had repeatedly told them it was time to move on, and that alone should suffice. Why, he groused, would the White House add fuel to the fire, would it play into the media’s narrative?
In particular, Trump has raged against MAGA influencers who, in his estimation, have profited and grown famous off their association with him and his political movement, according to one of the officials and the outside adviser, who is in regular touch with the West Wing. They and others we spoke with did so on the condition of anonymity because they did not want to anger Trump by talking about a subject that has become especially sensitive. Trump told the outside adviser that the “disloyal” influencers “have forgotten whose name is above the door.”
“These people cash their paychecks and get their clicks all thanks to him,” the adviser told us. “The president has bigger fish to fry, and he’s said what he wants: Move on. People need to open their ears and listen to him.”
But Trump’s haphazard efforts at containment—specifically, his effort to simply bulldoze through this very real scandal—came to an end last night, when The Wall Street Journal published an explosive story about a bawdy 50th-birthday letter that Trump allegedly sent to Epstein, which alluded to a shared “secret” and was framed by a drawing of a naked woman’s outline. (Trump denied writing the letter or drawing the picture, and has threatened to sue the paper.) Shortly after the article posted online, Trump wrote on Truth Social that because of “the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein,” he has asked Bondi to produce all relevant grand-jury testimony related to the Epstein case. Bondi immediately responded, writing, “President Trump—we are ready to move the court tomorrow to unseal the grand jury transcripts.”
The Journal story underscored, yet again, the part of the Epstein saga that Trump and his allies most wish would go away: that Trump was one of Epstein’s many famous pals and had a long—and public—friendship with the hard-partying, sex-obsessed financier who pleaded guilty in 2008 to two prostitution-related crimes and became a registered sex offender. Chummy photos of the two men, including at Trump’s private Mar-a-Lago Club, abound; from 1993 to 1997, Trump flew on Epstein’s private jets seven times, according to flight logs that emerged at an Epstein-related trial; in a 2002 New York magazine profile of Epstein, Trump said he’d known Epstein for 15 years and praised him as a “terrific guy.”
“He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump enthused to the magazine. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.” The two reportedly had a falling-out in 2004 when Epstein bought an oceanfront Palm Beach mansion that Trump wanted.
On Wednesday—after the White House had been alerted that the Journal was working on a big story, but at a moment when it still thought it might be able to kill it—Trump took to social media to blast as “past supporters” Republicans still discussing the Epstein matter. He also tore into them during an Oval Office appearance with the crown prince of Bahrain. The president declared that “some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans” had fallen for a hoax that he said had been created by the Democrats. The president also privately fumed at House Speaker Mike Johnson’s call for “transparency”—and for Trump’s Justice Department to release more files related to the Epstein case—while White House aides wondered if the apparent split could lead to further Republican defiance on other issues.
[Helen Lewis: ‘Just asking questions’ got no answers about Epstein]
Still, before the Journal story changed the stakes yet again, Trump did not have plans to make additional calls to MAGA media allies or Republican lawmakers, one of the officials told us; instead, the president believed that his public comments and Truth Social posts were sufficient. (Despite his ire, he did not, for instance, reach out to Johnson or his team.)
“He’s being tested and doesn’t like it,” the official told us. “He doesn’t want to talk about it.”
Former New York Governor Mario Cuomo once observed, “You campaign in poetry; you govern in prose.” And although the country does sometimes accept politicians who campaign in poetry and govern in prose, it is less willing to countenance those who campaign in conspiracy theory and then govern in a nothing-to-see-here-folks reality.
Epstein pleaded guilty in Florida state court in 2008 and was convicted of procuring a child for prostitution and of soliciting a prostitute. He received a generous (and controversial) plea deal and served a short prison sentence before being released. He was arrested again in August 2019 and accused of sex-trafficking minors, leading some to wonder who else in Epstein’s powerful orbit might have been involved and also face charges. He died a month later. Getting to the bottom of the details surrounding Epstein’s death in jail while awaiting trial—which has been ruled a suicide—and releasing additional information about Epstein’s sexual abuse of young women, and whether other well-known figures were involved, was never a top Trump-campaign promise. Trump answered when asked, but it was not a mainstay of his stump speech, something he regularly read from the teleprompter or riffed about at rallies.
Nevertheless, when Trump retook office, his supporters were eager for a big reveal. The wave began to crest when Bondi, asked in a February Fox News interview if she would release a list of Epstein’s clients, replied, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.” Less than a week later, she did herself no favors when, with much fanfare, she invited MAGA influencers to the White House to receive what she claimed were binders full of the declassified Epstein files, only for the beaming, gleeful sleuths to realize that the most scandalous thing about the binders was just how little information they contained. But a two-page memo that the Department of Justice released last Monday—which, in bureaucratese, offered a version of Trump’s current time-to-move-on mantra—is what finally sent the MAGA wave crashing down on Bondi and the president.
Laura Loomer, a Trump ally and far-right provocateur who called for Bondi to be fired over the memo, told us on Wednesday that she is sensitive to the challenges of separating fact from fiction—but that although not everyone in Epstein’s orbit is inherently guilty, those who are guilty should be revealed. “They’re trying to say there’s no list,” she said. “There’s a difference between people who were caught on video engaged in foul pornography and people who were caught in Jeffery Epstein’s contact list.” Demonizing everyone in Epstein’s purported black book would be like tying her to the misdeeds of everyone saved in her cellphone—“I have 7,000 contacts,” she said—“but they should release the names of the people involved in the child pornography.” Although Loomer and others have raised questions about video recordings of child sexual abuse collected by investigators, Bondi has said that Epstein downloaded those videos and that they were not records of crimes committed by him or his friends.
Loomer has also publicly called for a special counsel to investigate the Epstein case and release the files. In our conversation, she reiterated that appeal and suggested that having “Pam Blondi”—her derisive nickname for the flaxen-haired attorney general—“apologize for either deliberately lying or overexaggerating” her claim that the key files sitting on her desk in February would help to mitigate the base’s angst. Still, Loomer acknowledged, a Bondi apology would at this point be but “one step.” “Obviously, now this has taken on a life of its own,” she observed.
The Epstein news cycle has also distracted from the accomplishments Trump hopes to showcase—his trade deals, the massive legislative package he just muscled through—and has embroiled his West Wing in a familiar cycle of drama. As the MAGA movement turned not just on Bondi but also on FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, Dan Bongino, over their handling of the Epstein files, tensions among the three became public. Bongino and Patel seemed to blame Bondi for their reputational hit, and last Friday, Axios reported that Bongino had simply refused to show up for work. Trump was upset with Bongino and Patel, and Vice President J. D. Vance was dispatched as a behind-the-scenes peacemaker. (A White House official told us that the president has no plans to fire Bondi, Bongino, or Patel, but noted pointedly that Trump is very supportive of Bondi, and merely supportive of the other two.)
What additional information could, and should, be revealed remains genuinely unclear. Questions worthy of further scrutiny were raised by Wired’s recent reporting on the footage that the Justice Department released from the lone security camera near Epstein’s jail cell the night before he was found dead; the video’s metadata were shown to have likely been modified, and nearly three full minutes were cut out. But it is also possible that Epstein kept no written log of his crimes, and that whatever has not yet been released is simply to protect Epstein’s victims. (There is also, of course, the competing theory that information is being withheld to protect Trump, or others close to him.)
[Listen: The razor-thin line between conspiracy theory and actual conspiracy]
The White House official told us that the Justice Department did a thorough investigation and that much of what remains unreleased falls into one of these categories: documents that are sealed by courts (though Trump and Bondi’s Thursday appeal may change that), child pornography, and material that could expose any additional third parties to allegations of illegal wrongdoing.
This, perhaps, has been the most confusing and upsetting part for Trump: his inability to manage his uber-loyalists and regular allies. Last month, during an unrelated fight with Elon Musk—Trump’s on-again, off-again benefactor and buddy—Musk posted on X, “Time to drop the really big bomb: @realDonaldTrump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.” He later deleted the post, but more recently, as the Epstein controversies resurfaced, he again posted an appeal for further disclosure. “How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?” Musk wrote.
In the run-up to the Journal story, Trump personally appealed to Rupert Murdoch, his longtime friend and the paper’s owner, not to run the article. He also appealed to Emma Tucker, the editor in chief of the paper, whose editorial page has long been conservative and generally friendly to Trump (except on the matter of his tariff policy). But again, the limits of his power over normal allies became evident; the president was unsuccessful, and the story ran. But even if he lost the skirmish with the Journal, he may have at least briefly regained his purchase in the broader battle.
This morning, Trump posted a long, angry screed attacking the paper and promising to sue the Journal, its parent corporation, and Murdoch himself. His base likely still has questions surrounding Epstein, but for now, at least, Trump has redirected them back to the more familiar and comfortable territory of fighting with the media.
“This is yet another example of FAKE NEWS!” his post concluded, not accidentally.