Friday’s statutory deadline for the release of all the Jeffrey Epstein investigative files has come and gone and it seems, unsurprisingly, that the Justice Department is uninterested in complying with the law, instead releasing only a fraction of the full records, heavily redacted.
The department not only claims that it is suddenly once more pursuing investigations into the Epstein matter — conveniently one of the avenues to withhold records — but that it cannot act faster given the redactions it has to make of survivors’ names and identifying information.
There’s good reason to suspect the redactions are going far beyond this. As some observers noted, some files had already begun to disappear from the record, including one that featured a now-infamous picture of Donald Trump with Epstein.
These releases are only happening in the first place because unanimous bipartisan votes forced Trump’s hand, after he had falsely promised to release the files in full and then angrily insisted that he wouldn’t because there weren’t any and this whole story — of a billionaire and his cadre of friends, among the most influential people in the world, running a pedophile sex trafficking ring — was a nothingburger.
It does seem like Trump has at long last found himself between a rock and a hard place that he can’t wriggle out of. It’s abundantly obvious to everyone that he and his administration are twisting themselves into pretzels to try to delay and redact the information’s release in order to protect Trump. Potent as it is, Trump’s reality-distortion field has met its match with this issue, as even his supporters seem to have escaped its warp and can see this clearly, and many are not happy with him at all.
Trump bet during his victorious 2024 campaign that he could talk up his commitment to getting to the bottom of the Epstein debacle and then abandon that promise once he got in his office, just as he has abandoned many promises, lying to his supporters with the confidence that they would believe him always.
He doesn’t seem to have understood that his already-conspiratorially minded MAGA base really, really cared about this, and had bought into an entire alternate reality where he would be a savior bringing the Epstein abuses to light; there was no way to square that with what actually happened. We all should care about this, and let us say plainly that whoever it is that is incriminated in these documents must be known and dealt with, regardless of wealth, social status, party affiliation and political prominence or anything else.
So here we are, in this bizarro world with the Justice Department almost certainly violating the law in order to promulgate injustice and shield the president. What could possibly be in those files that Trump is willing to dynamite his credibility with his own base at a time when he’s historically unpopular and his MAGA movement is splintering?
We shudder to imagine, but know this, Trump: we will all find out, sooner or later. All of this maneuvering is just delaying the inevitable, but there are too many eyes watching; the truth will emerge here and everyone who worked to obscure it will face consequences. That’s as close as we can get to a full bipartisan consensus these days.
