Why the Epstein Coverup Matters
In free societies, government coverups are difficult. In authoritarian ones, they’re routine.
Jeffrey Epstein damage control continues at the Justice Department, with Pam Bondi announcing this morning that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche is seeking a prosecutorial interview with Epsitein’s co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell. “The Department of Justice does not shy away from uncomfortable truths, nor from the responsibility to pursue justice wherever the facts may lead,” Blanche said in the statement Bondi posted.
Which is pretty funny when you think about it: They didn’t even try to talk to Maxwell before initially declaring the Epstein matter closed? Happy Tuesday.
Will the Coverup Succeed?
by William Kristol
Wow. It turns out the Donald Trump administration is able to assemble, organize, and release large groups of government files.
In the last few days, the administration has made public—with considerable hooplah—batches of documents on the 1968 assassination of Martin Luther King Jr., on Hillary Clinton’s use of a private server as Secretary of State from 2009 to 2012, and on some of the intelligence community’s work on 2016 Russian election interference. There’s been a veritable blizzard of government files and revelations raining down on us.
There’s one exception to this torrent of transparency, one set of files that have been resolutely kept under lock and key: Those covering the crimes of Jeffrey Epstein.
How could that be?
After all, the Epstein files are precisely those which Pam Bondi early in her tenure promised most vociferously to release, and which she said were literally on her desk. According to Sen. Dick Durbin’s very helpful letter detailing information his office received, information that hasn’t been challenged, Bondi put about 1,000 FBI personnel to work going through those files back in March. That work proceeded at a frenetic pace—but seems to have abruptly stopped at the end of that month. Durbin, in his letter, explains that his office was told that “personnel were instructed to ‘flag’ any records in which President Trump was mentioned.”
So records were frantically reviewed and mentions of Trump were flagged—and then for three months all was quiet on the Epstein front. Presumably the attorney general, the FBI director, and their boss Donald Trump were deliberating on how to proceed. And then two weeks ago, on July 7, we received no files at all, but instead an unsigned memorandum from the Justice Department and the FBI telling us there was nothing to see here.
Since then we have learned of one document, though not thanks to the administration—a 2003 birthday note from Trump to Epstein which was made available to the Wall Street Journal. While a lot of attention has been paid to the artwork on the note, it’s worth recalling the text that Trump dictated of an imaginary conversation between him and Epstein. Here’s an excerpt:
Donald: We have certain things in common, Jeffrey.
Jeffrey: Yes, we do, come to think of it.
Donald: Enigmas never age, have you noticed that.
Jeffrey: As a matter of fact, it was clear to me the last time I saw you.
In his invented dialogue, Trump seems to suggest—to relish the fact that—this might have been something they had “in common,” something that was “clear” to Epstein the last time the two got together.
The birthday note suggests at the very least Trump’s contemporaneous awareness or knowledge of Epstein’s criminal behavior—as does his comment to a reporter less than a year before that Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
My sense is that Trump understood how damning the birthday wishes were, which is why he tried to suppress it. Having failed in that, Trump claimed it was a fraud and filed a lawsuit against the Journal. He also ordered Bondi to seek to go to court to have “pertinent” grand jury interviews released, a diversion which will buy some time—since one has to go to court for permission to do that—and which covers only a tiny portion of the material the government has.
Who knows what other material is in those files? Who knows what happened when the investigators started flagging Trump’s name? How much is there in these files along the lines of the already public 2020 court filing in which a witness testifies that when, in the 1990s, she was a 14-year old being raped by Epstein, he introduced her to Trump? And that Epstein “elbowed Trump playfully,” asking him: “This is a good one, right?” According to the witness’s testimony, “Trump smiled and nodded in agreement. They both chuckled.”
Trump wouldn’t want more material like that to be made public. Thus the coverup.
Will the coverup succeed? It’s hard to say.
On the one hand, coverups are hard, and Trump, Bondi, and Patel may not be up to the task. And they have lots of patriotic subordinates who may balk at going along. One presumably already has.
On the other hand, in the past, coverups failed and possible coverups unraveled because there was a special counsel, with the weight of the Justice Department and the federal government behind him, seeking to uncover the truth.
There are no special counsels here. The White House has weighed in against one. There are no honorable figures at the most senior positions in the Justice Department or elsewhere resisting the coverup either. Trump controls the federal government and all its apparatus of criminal investigation and law enforcement in a way his predecessors didn’t. So it’s possible Trump could get away with it.
As a general rule, coverups are difficult in free societies with democratic governments. They are routine for authoritarian governments. The Epstein coverup will be an indicator of how far we are down the road to authoritarianism. The success of such a coverup would take us much further down that road.
On the other hand, the failure of the attempted coverup would show resistance to a government based on lies on behalf of the strongman. And the failure of the coverup, either in terms of the material coming out or Trump paying a significant political price for the coverup, would in turn encourage further resistance to authoritarianism.
So the Epstein matter isn’t a diversion from the broader fight against Trump and his authoritarian efforts. The Epstein coverup has turned out to be an unexpectedly crucial battle in that struggle, and a test of our resolve in that fight.
AROUND THE BULWARK
Tim and JVL Watch Mehdi Hasan Humiliate 20 Far-Right Clowns… TIM MILLER and JVL react to Mehdi Hasan’s appearance on Jubilee, where he takes on twenty far-right conservatives in a brutal, revealing debate.
Epstein Is Trump’s Nightmare. Don’t Let Up! SARAH and LAUREN EGAN talk about the political silence around Epstein—why Trump hasn’t faced real fallout, how Democrats are tiptoeing around it, and what it says about who gets protected in American politics.
Can We Unpolarize? On the Mona Charen Show, More in Common co-founders TIM DIXON and MATHIEU LEFEVRE join to talk about rising polarization, the “exhausted majority,” and how loneliness, media incentives, and misinformation are fueling division.
Quick Hits
SEE NO EVIL: House GOP leaders are having a tough time. Donald Trump doesn’t want them to pass legislation demanding that the administration release the Epstein files. But they’re already sick of Democrats forcing them to take votes against releasing those files every time they want to conduct committee business about anything else. Rather than endure that embarrassment again, these GOP leaders decided just to scrap several planned votes this week, doing a bit of quiet quitting ahead of the August recess that begins this weekend.
They’re not having much fun explaining their reasoning, either. Enjoy the spectacle of Majority Leader Steve Scalise trying to explain how, when you really think about it, people who want to see the files released shouldn’t mind Republicans repeatedly trying to stop that from happening: “At the end of the day, look, Democrats are yelling and screaming,” Scalise told Politico. “They spent four years covering up for Epstein, and you know, at least President Trump’s in the courts right now trying to get documents released, and I really think you’re gonna see, hopefully, a lot unsealed from that, and then we’ve got some other options.”
Options that, apparently, don’t include Scalise facilitating a vote on a resolution calling for the release of the files.
HITTING BACK: Donald Trump has already sued the Wall Street Journal over its report on an alarmingly suggestive birthday note he allegedly wrote Jeffrey Epstein more than 20 years ago. But the retaliation isn’t stopping there. Yesterday, the White House booted a different Journal reporter from the traveling press pool for Trump’s upcoming trip to Scotland. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt didn’t try to pretend it was a coincidence: “Due to the Wall Street Journal’s fake and defamatory conduct,” she said in a statement, “they will not be one of the thirteen outlets on board.” CNN reports:
Until earlier this year, pool assignments were determined by the White House Correspondents’ Association (WHCA), an independent group that represents the press corps. However, in February, Leavitt cut the group out and took control of the pool, giving the administration a new form of leverage.
LET IT GO, HUNT: Hunter Biden, for reasons best known to himself, is on a media tour this week. He’s got a lot of axes to grind and scores to settle, sniping at the likes of George Clooney and Jake Tapper. His thesis statement: Democrats made a fatal error when they opted out of ridin’ with Biden Sr. into a rematch against Donald Trump.
“Look, that debate was awful,” he told YouTube interviewer Andrew Callaghan. “But we could have survived if it weren’t for the fact that people in this, in the Democratic party, the inside elite beltway group of people, were not going to allow it to happen.”
He broke the occasional, remarkable bit of news, too. For instance: Did you know Joe Biden was taking Ambien ahead of the fatal debate last year? Hunter insists he was! “He flew around the world. He’s 81 years old. He’s tired. They give him Ambien to be able to sleep and he gets up on stage and looks like a deer in the headlights.”1
Hunter’s filial urge to defend his father is understandable. But the whole spectacle is just a sad reminder of the family hubris that, as much as anything else, helped set us on the path to our current dark timeline. If it’s still Biden family lore that Joe would’ve outpunched Kamala in the end—instead of, say, faceplanting so heroically that Republicans swamped out three or four more Democratic senators and swept into 2025 with the run of the place—maybe they should do the rest of us a favor and keep it to themselves.2
Cheap Shots
President Biden took about two weeks in between returning from his international trip and doing the debate. That’s a lot of Ambien!
On the other hand, if Hunter realizes he has some more grievances of which he just can’t help but unburden himself, we’d note that The Bulwark has a thriving YouTube presence as well.
What vital national interest is being served by a trip to Trump owned golf courses in Scotland? Secret Service, Air Force One, a coterie of aides and makeup people all going too, food and lodging for them but we can’t afford Medicaid for children. Taxpayers demand answers
The lie was always the same, they were the truth-tellers, the light-bringers, the last defense against a shadow government that hid everything from us. That was the origin story. The sacred rot that birthed the Red Hat cult.
Epstein was their north star. Their prophecy. The holy grail of the conspiracy, the proof that all their rage, their bile, their suspicion was justified.
"When the files come out, you'll see. When the names drop, it’ll all burn down."
Well. The vault is open. Their messiah has the keys, and what’s he doing?
He’s sealing it tighter.
Mocking the victims. Suing the press. Flagging his own name in the files before shoving them back into the dark. The very institutions they swore were hiding the truth, the DOJ, the FBI, now kneel at his feet, and the moment he seizes control of the secret they’ve spent a decade clawing for?
He buries it.
If the Red Hats don’t scatter now, if they don’t recoil from this with horror, then it’s time we stop pretending they ever will.
This isn’t hypocrisy. Hypocrisy requires shame. This is the full disintegration of the moral lie. Epstein doesn’t expose the fringe of MAGA, he exposes the *core*. Because it was never about justice. Never about protecting kids. It was about building a religion around a predator who made their cruelty feel holy.
They watched him seal the vault. Watched him smother the very list they once swore was sitting on Bondi’s desk. The man who promised to drain the swamp is the swamp, and always was. Now, as he steals the thing they held most sacred, their 'precious,' their holy grievance... they don’t rise up.
They clap.
If they can watch the truth being buried by the very hands they trusted to reveal it, and still fall in line, then it’s time we stop waiting for a reckoning.
They have no line. No compass. No bottom.
Only hunger.
When millions of people decide the only truth that matters is whatever keeps their rage intact, you get a death cult. One that doesn’t blink when the real horrors begin.
One that will smile.
One that will ask for more.