The American people don’t need any help being suspicious about the government’s handling of Jeffrey Epstein.
But the Trump administration keeps giving them more reason to be anyway.
One of the most bizarre features of this whole saga has been the administration’s astounding number of missteps, delayed disclosures and false claims.
And that shows no signs of dissipating.
The most recent example is reporting this week that the government did not publish dozens of FBI witness interviews. Those include three related to a woman who accused President Donald Trump of sexually assaulting her decades ago, when she was a minor. (Trump has not been accused by law enforcement of any wrongdoing.)
The DOJ says it is reviewing whether any of those missing documents — first reported by NPR and independent journalist Roger Sollenberger — were improperly withheld.
In a statement, the White House called the allegations against Trump “false and sensationalist” and pointed to a previous DOJ statement that “some of the documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims against President Trump.”
But the plausibility of the woman’s claims isn’t the main point; the point is that an increasingly politicized Justice Department — one where a massive banner of Trump was hung last week — did not release documents containing allegations about the president.
In a vacuum, that would be problematic. But next to everything else, it’s really bad.
Recent polling from Reuters and Ipsos showed 75% of Americans said the government is “hiding information” about Epstein’s supposed clients, including 49% who say it “definitely” is doing so. And those numbers have risen — from 69% and 36% in July, respectively.
And a CNN poll earlier this month showed 67% said the government was intentionally withholding some information that should be released.
How might people have arrived at such conclusions? Perhaps because of the below.
The administration’s sudden reversal on the files
Prominent officials who now serve in Trump’s Justice Department had for years promoted theories about a government cover-up involving Epstein. After Trump’s election in 2024, they promised major disclosures.
But then they came into office.
They soon tried to pass off binders of largely old documents given to right-wing influencers as those major disclosures.
Then some officials suddenly changed their tune on what the documents showed, downplaying the prospect of a client list and saying Epstein had in fact killed himself. Eventually, they abruptly announced in July, in an unsigned memo from the FBI, that they wouldn’t release anything else.
Then we learned that sudden change in tune coincided with Trump being told his name appeared in the Epstein files.
Eventually, the administration consented to releasing the Epstein files — but only after it was clear they probably had no other choice. Congress had well more than veto-proof majorities to force the issue.
Trump’s questionable denials
Speaking of Trump’s name being in the files, that’s one of several instances of him downplaying his proximity to Epstein using claims that were subsequently undermined or called into question:
- Trump in July denied being told his name was in the files, shortly before we found out Attorney General Pam Bondi had indeed told him that back in May.
- In 2019, he said that he “wasn’t a fan” of Epstein’s and added, “I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him.” In fact, lots of evidence has suggested they were friendly before their falling out, including archived video footage and photos of them together uncovered by CNN’s KFile. The New York Times even reported Epstein once called Trump his “best friend.”
- Trump in 2024 said he was “never on Epstein’s Plane,” despite flight logs showing he had been seven times in the 1990s.
His opaqueness
When Trump hasn’t made demonstrably false claims, he’s often been opaque:
- He and his allies offered a number of claims for why Trump hadn’t written Epstein a lewd birthday letter published by the Wall Street Journal. While we don’t have proof that Trump authored the letter, the claims they used to deny it seemed to fall apart.
- Trump in July seemed to reluctantly acknowledge he had known that Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell recruited their victim, Virginia Giuffre, from Mar-a-Lago. Trump previously avoided discussing why he and Epstein had a falling out, including saying in 2019: “The reason doesn’t make any difference, frankly.”
- We then learned recently that Trump told a local police chief when Epstein was first under investigation in the mid-2000s that “everyone has known he’s been doing this.”
There have been other data points at least gesturing in the direction that Trump knew Epstein liked young women. But what he told local Florida police is perhaps the most compelling evidence yet that Trump knew something about Epstein’s crimes way back when.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said she couldn’t confirm whether that conversation happened. She added that if it did, it “corroborates” Trump having called Epstein a “creep” and broken ties with him. But Trump has never been forthcoming about why he decided Epstein was a creep.
The Maxwell prison transfer
Shortly after she interviewed with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche last summer, Maxwell was moved to a minimum-security prison camp.
You begin to see how that might look bad. Maxwell, after all, is a convicted sex offender. She was also saying things that could help Trump — even as he dangled a potential pardon.
But the administration spent months not explaining why the transfer occurred.
Eventually Blanche told NBC News shortly before Christmas that the Bureau of Prisons recommended the transfer, and he suggested he had signed off on it. Blanche said that Maxwell had been facing “numerous threats against her life.”
But in testimony earlier this month, Bondi said she hadn’t known about the transfer (despite being Blanche’s boss) and claimed Maxwell was transferred to “the same-level facility,” which doesn’t appear to be true.
The failures of disclosure
After Congress forced the release of the Epstein files, the administration’s problems have snowballed.
First, it blew the 30-day deadline to release all the files.
Then it failed to redact lots of victim information while apparently redacting more than the law called for in other areas, including the names of potential and suspected Epstein co-conspirators. The administration claimed it didn’t “redact the names of any men,” but it clearly did.
And now we learned that some key documents haven’t been released, including ones that contain allegations about Trump.
A DOJ spokesperson told CNN that any withheld documents were not deleted and were either “duplicates, privileged, (or) part of an ongoing federal investigation.”
But allegations involving Trump wouldn’t qualify for those buckets, unless they’re claiming some kind of privilege or Trump is under investigation.
The Lutnick situation
It’s certainly on a smaller scale than the above, but Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick hasn’t done the administration any favors in its efforts to downplay the Epstein files.
In an interview published by the New York Post in October, Lutnick recounted his experiences with Epstein, claiming he cut ties with him two decades ago. We’ve since learned from documents and his congressional testimony that that simply wasn’t true, although he insisted he did not “have any relationship” with Epstein
Lutnick in the same New York Post interview also contradicted the Justice Department by calling Epstein “the greatest blackmailer ever.” He suggested Epstein had indeed lured men to get massages from young women and then used the videos to escape justice.
He indicated he was surmising some of this, but given what we now know about their past contact, there are fresh questions about what Lutnick knew about Epstein.
GOP Sen. John Kennedy of Louisiana suggested to Bondi at a hearing that the FBI should interview Lutnick about his claims. There’s no indication that’s happened, and the administration has stood by him.