The Trump administration’s shameless flip-flop on releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files is one of the laziest, most brazen cover-ups in American history.
Donald Trump and his team spent the 2024 campaign promising to release what the government had on Epstein and the criminal network around him and claimed right up until this past week that they had the files and were ready to set them loose. Then they did a complete 180.
Attorney general Pam Bondi once claimed that a “truckload of evidence arrived,” that she had Epstein’s client list “sitting on my desk right now, to review,” and that “everything’s going to come out to the public.” Bondi now says she was never referring to a client list and that all the Epstein material is simply unreleasable child porn. FBI director Kash Patel previously charged the government was withholding the files “because of who’s on that list,” and he was “not going to withhold information from the American public, ever”; now the official position of both Patel’s FBI and the Department of Justice headed by Bondi is that there is “no incriminating ‘client list’” and that they will make “no further disclosure” — all in the name of “combatting child exploitation,” no less.
To be clear, there is likely no actual “client list.” What there is — as Julie K. Brown, the Miami Herald journalist who broke the Epstein story, has repeatedly said — is a trove of heavily redacted and unreleased files that the FBI and DOJ have been sitting on for years, which could give us an idea of who Epstein consorted with while still protecting the identities of victims. Yet the Trump team has conveniently steered attention away from this to a phantom client list and Epstein’s pornographic…
Auteur: Branko Marcetic
