When the United States woke up from the longest administrative shutdown in its history, Jeffrey Epstein was still there.
In the 43 days in which the tap of public money remained partially closed, the memory of the terrible crimes of the millionaire pedophile – who has persecuted Donald Trump since his death in 2019 – took a backseat to other emergencies: from the payment of food stamps for 42 million people at risk of starvation to the thousands of flights canceled due to the shortage of air traffic controllers.
Once this crisis was overcome – and once the House of Representatives reopened, together with the Administration – the refusal to disseminate the materials on the case in its possession once again put the White House on the ropes and reopened the fault line that separates the president from part of the Republican Party. The party that, returning to work this Wednesday, signed a petition to force a vote in Congress and ask the White House to release the Epstein files that are “on the table” of Attorney General Pam Bondi.
It was four Republicans – Thomas Massie, Nancy Mace, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert – who joined their rivals in adding the 218 supports needed to demand the release of that dossier, parts of which have become known over the years.
The latest one arrived this Wednesday and was split into two phases. First of all with the three emails released by Democrats to the House Oversight Committee in which Epstein states that Trump “spent hours with one of the victims” of the financier and that he “knew about the girls”, referring to the underage victims. Then it was the turn of the over 20,000 documents published without filter by the Republicans, which certify the millionaire’s dense network of relationships with those in power and who followed Trump closely until his end (with suicide, according to the medical examiner and the government, although conspiracy theories that cast doubt on this abound).
And so it is that what should have been a day of glory for the President of the United States, in which he celebrated the fact that the Republicans had bent the arm of their rivals in the Senate to reopen the Administration without much in return, became another day in the negative streak in which Trump is involved. In just a few days, his party suffered a severe defeat at the polls, the Supreme Court was skeptical about the constitutionality of his tariffs and a civil war broke out in the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement over how much (anti-Semitic) extremism there is in its ranks, after the controversial interview between Tucker Carlson and Holocaust denier Nick Fuentes.
Trump called on his social network, Truth, for his people not to be “distracted from what is important,” in a thinly veiled attempt to pressure them not to vote in favor of releasing the Epstein documents. An effort that only fuels the suspicion that something must be hidden.
The president even called one of the dissidents, Lauren Boebert, to order. According to American media, she asked some of her closest allies to pressure her in an imposing (and hermetic) place like the Crisis Room (Situation room), the scene of serious decisions such as those used to start wars or how to assassinate Osama Bin Laden in the best way. There was no way: Boebert left there with the same conviction with which she entered.
In the crisis room of the White House
Johnson was thus forced to call the vote on the pedophile’s dossiers after having avoided them for months with all sorts of expedients. It will be next week. If the proposal passes the House of Representatives, where the Republican Party is preparing for further defections (“between 40 and 50”, according to Massie, one of its sponsors), it may not make it in the Senate. It could also incur a presidential veto.
Boebert or Greene are part of the far-right wing of the party, a faction not exactly inclined to join the Democrats. In one of those classic Washington contortions, the latter, who for years have dismissed as a hoax the far-right’s conspiratorial obsession with what these documents might contain about Epstein’s rich and powerful friends – such as former President Bill Clinton or former Prince Andrew of England – have put themselves at the head of the demonstration of those demanding to see them.
And nothing indicates that they will release the prey. “It’s very similar to the effort they made during the First Presidency with the Russian meddling hoax,” he says Political Laura Loomer, MAGA activist, a movement that took up arms against its leader after learning in July that Bondi would not disclose the Epstein documents that he had promised for months, and who has now welcomed the latest news with a certain indifference. Maybe it’s because they just can’t see themselves sharing obsessions with the so-called mainstream media.
There is no evidence in the new declassified documents that Trump knew about his friend’s crimes for 15 years until the two broke up in 2004. The president claims they split when he kicked Epstein out of his club, Mar-a-Lago, for his “odd” behavior with some employees. In the messages, the billionaire pedophile denies that this was the reason. There is also an email in which he appears to imply that he spent the 2017 Thanksgiving holiday with Trump, the new president’s first, although there is no certainty that this was the case.
The White House accuses Democrats of cherry-picking certain emails to harm Trump and selfishly blacking out the name of the victim who “spent hours” with him, according to Epstein. Government spokeswoman Karoline Leavitt said she was Virginia Giuffre, who committed suicide in April, a month after being hit by a bus in Australia, where she lived.
Leavitt also recalled that Giuffre told the judge that he did not see Trump have sex with minors in his time with Epstein and his recruiter, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in prison as an accomplice in the financier’s sex trafficking ring. In her recently published posthumous memoirs, Giuffre writes that Trump could not have been “friendlier” to her.
Republicans now turning against Trump are also having trouble coming to terms with reports, published this week, that Maxwell is receiving preferential treatment after being transferred to a minimum-security cell in Texas. This came after the prisoner spoke for nine hours, spread over two days, with the Justice Department envoy, Todd Blanche, Trump’s former lawyer. A confidant assured the oversight committee that the director allows Maxwell to enjoy a special meal and is helping him with the paperwork to apply for a pardon from Trump.
And if he gave it to her, then it would be really hard to believe that he doesn’t have something to hide.
