The White House Fumbles on Epstein, Again

Pro-tip: Don’t schedule a big White House strategy meeting about the Epstein files, call it off when word leaks, then hold it in secret anyway. Bad look! Sad!!

Just a quick note today from Edinburgh, Scotland, where I’ve got a full day around town with some friends and backers of our musical! The Scotsman said of our show Midnight at the Palace, “A five-star show about a forgotten counterculture theatre troupe leads our latest round-up of Fringe musicals.” Huzzah!

Okay, on to a bit of the news.

There was reportedly a meeting among top White House and Justice Department officials to discuss their Epstein “strategy” going forward. It’s a curious thing to convene because it implies there are some options other than complete release of the Epstein files that have any hope of making the story go away.

But what “strategy” could there be to stall full disclosure that would not render the current situation even worse for them?

Multiple media outlets reported on the planned meeting. All the key White House players in this drama, save Trump himself, were invited. It was to take place at Vice President JD Vance’s residence (um, why exactly?) and the proposed attendees included White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Deputy Attorney General and former Trump personal defense attorney Todd Blanche, who recently interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell.

Then word of the meeting leaked, leading JD Vance to refer to reports of the meeting as “completely fake news.” In the end, however, the meeting apparently took place anyway, this time at the White House. It isn’t clear which if any other White House official attended, other than AG Bondi and FBI Director Patel. But the very fact the Department of Justice was meeting in the White House with officials to discuss a strategy on how to handle a political scandal involving the White House is worth emphasizing.

I’m old enough to remember when a brief meeting between Bill Clinton and then Attorney General Loretta Lynch in 2016, while her plane was idling on the tarmac, was enough to send the GOP into apoplectic fits because of the appearance of any improper communications over Hillary’s emails.

Quaint times, those were.

If you’re counting, we’re now a month into the Epstein crisis, and it shows no signs of abating. If anything, there is a growing public consensus around the need for full transparency around the Epstein files. A Washington Post survey, taken about a week ago, revealed remarkable convergence on this question even among MAGA Republicans.

Around the corner in mid-August, there are bipartisan congressional subpoenas, along with FOIA requests from groups like Democracy Defenders, that the Justice Department will have to decide what to do with. And it’s starting from a pretty bad place. According to a fairly damning report by Bloomberg, Attorney General Bondi had earlier ordered every instance where Trump appears in the Epstein files to be noted, indexed and redacted.

Imagine if Loretta Lynch had ordered a comprehensive review of Hillary’s emails in 2016 and the redaction of all information she believed might be damaging to the administration. We’d never hear the end of it.

And it’s here we must also ask the obvious: They are redacting the Epstein files… for what purpose? To spare Trump from having to answer why his name appears in them? That fact is hardly news. Bondi told him that already back in May, and we’ve all seen or heard about the flight logs. Is there something more Trump just doesn’t want out there?

The mad scramble to control the narrative certainly suggests so. If Trump didn’t do anything wrong, as Ghislaine Maxwell would have us believe now that she’s been moved to a minimum security Club Fed, then why all the secrecy and redactions? Why try so hard to deflect from the story? And why suggest, as Trump now has multiple times, that Democrats planted his name in the files?

What else is the President hiding?

Whatever Trump did with Epstein—and we all have our educated guesses, given what “wonderful secrets” they shared—the mere threat of such evidence soon coming out was bad enough for an all-hands-on-deck moment. And the leak of an all-hands-on-deck Epstein meeting (no one knows yet who spilled the beans) was bad enough to claim there was no meeting planned at Vance’s residence, and then to move the meeting secretly to the White House itself.

What are they all afraid of?

The bottom line is clear. Trump long since missed his chance to shrug the Epstein matter off as a nothing burger. It now walks, talks and quacks like a duck, in this case of the truth. A cover-up of this scale implies a crime of equal measure. And that means many in the public won’t be satisfied until something really bad finally comes out—something big enough to justify all these elaborate efforts to suppress it. Anything less just won’t ever satiate the public’s suspicions.

And that in a nutshell is why the Epstein matter isn’t going away any time soon.