This is a case that was dead and buried.
This is a case that was dead and buried.
I f it’s possible to mishandle a criminal case worse than the Trump administration has mishandled the Jeffrey Epstein case, I’m stumped trying to come up with it.
Yet again, attention is drawn to this matter — a matter to which the president and his minions should be drawing absolutely zero attention — because the Trump Justice Department announced that it would be interviewing Epstein’s now notorious accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, this week. The interview reportedly took place on Thursday and Friday, at a federal prison in Florida where Maxwell is serving her 20-year sentence on convictions for trafficking minor girls for sex.
This is a case that was dead and buried. Almost literally: The principal target is no longer among the living, his accomplice (at least the one we know of) has seen her convictions upheld on appeal, and the pedophilia and sex-trafficking crimes took place over a quarter-century ago, so there’s scant likelihood of new bombshell revelations.
Yet, here we are, witnessing a previously unimaginable confederation of Trump supporters and Trump detractors united in the determination that we must never stop talking about Jeffrey Epstein. Maybe there really is a uniparty!
The president finds himself in unfamiliar territory: rebuffed by his MAGA base when he pleaded with them to move on — as supporters of Bill Clinton, the scandal-plagued former pal of Trump and Epstein, used to say at times like these.
How did this happen? The president can thank the loose cannons he brought in to run the top federal law-enforcement agencies — i.e., to conduct lawfare against his political enemies, under the intelligence-insulting guise of ending the “weaponization” of the justice system. During the 2024 campaign, in their wisdom, they calculated that hyping the government’s undisclosed Epstein files would make Democrats squirm.
Look, through the years, Democrats have indeed been squirmy whenever Epstein’s name came up because, well . . . see Clinton, President William Jefferson, supra.
Still, aside from Maxwell (the aforementioned accomplice) and the Bills (Clinton and Gates), Epstein’s most notable friend over the decades was Donald Trump. These guys were pals from the early 1990s until their falling out in 2004 — maybe due to competition over some choice Palm Beach real estate, maybe because Epstein got handsy with the young daughter of a Mar-a-Lago resort member, maybe because the walls were closing in on Epstein, maybe . . . maybe . . .
That was always going to be a problem for Trump from the moment he decided to enter politics. After all, if you’ve had a gander at the Epstein and Maxwell indictments, you know that the conduct of interest to prosecutors occurred in the decade starting in 1994.
To be clear, there has never been a formal allegation by prosecutors tying Trump to Epstein’s sex trafficking activities. I’m very confident, moreover, that if there had been any basis to indict Trump, whoever was running the Biden administration would have done it. Remember, Biden’s DOJ sicced special counsel Jack Smith on Trump. Smith strained to find criminal offenses — any criminal offenses — to charge. Not content with two indictments out of that endeavor, Biden’s DOJ assisted progressive Democratic prosecutors at the state level (e.g., Manhattan District Attorney Alvin Bragg), who brought truly outlandish cases against Trump. If there had been even a borderline-credible case that connected Trump to Epstein’s crimes, the Democrats’ lawfare battalions would have tripped over themselves to bring it.
On the other hand, to deduce from a lack of criminal charges that Trump had no inkling of what Epstein was up to — the same Trump who publicly observed that Epstein liked “beautiful women, much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side” — is to believe that rogues can hide who they really are from their friends. Friends with whom, for years on end, the rogues spend lots of time. Friends who know them well.
It’s not necessarily true that Trump — whose default position is that he is the world’s most perceptive man — knew what kind of guy Epstein was. Still, factoring in about 4.5 billion years of human experience . . . well, you get the point. In the criminal law, there is no guilt by association. In other aspects of life — such as character and judgment — our associations say a great deal about us. That is exactly why Trump stresses, not the years of camaraderie with Epstein, but the fact that they became estranged. He wants to be judged by the divorce, not the relationship.
It’s tough, then, to fathom how Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino figured that hyping Epstein and the missing “client list” was somehow going to redound to Trump’s benefit. The only explanation I can think of is the “all id, all the time” ethos of Trump’s MAGA legions, especially in the euphoria of campaign mode.
Trump beat every rap. He turned aside every Democratic scheme to destroy him financially and politically. Where Republicans before him were afraid of their own shadows when those shadows were generated by media spotlights, Trump took on “the Fake News” and not only lived to tell the tale but thrived. He even survived assassination attempts, not once but twice — the first by a centimeter or two. Can you really blame his posse if they convinced themselves that he was invulnerable — that in any given moment, they could say anything at all that seemed advantageous, even if in any other situation, with any other politician, the danger signs would have been blinking?
It’s not the campaign anymore, though. Times have changed.
The Epstein story is not going away. Trump’s disapproval rating has ticked back up. The Times reports that the AG warned the president that his name is in the files. (Again, that doesn’t mean Trump is guilty of crimes — Bondi has said that nothing in the files warrants further investigation. But Democrats hope voters will wonder.) Speaker Mike Johnson shut the House down early for summer vacation to avoid votes on disclosure of the Epstein files that would make Bondi, Trump, and House Republicans look like they’re hiding something. Johnson had no choice because the Epstein debacle has emboldened some Republicans to peel off and join Democrats in demanding disclosure. (Democrats don’t actually want disclosure; they want to see the president squirm.)
Trump is flailing. His go-to “hoax” epithet fell flat when invoked as to Epstein. This time, it’s not an imaginary Russia “collusion” sham; it’s a real, horrific case: victimized children, a lead defendant who killed himself, and a living defendant who is scheduled to sit in a federal penitentiary until she’s nearly 80. When even sympathizers — such as Speaker Johnson — recoiled at his invocation of “hoax,” the president pivoted to calling for a criminal investigation of former President Obama over Russiagate. That’s after spending a year calling for the Supreme Court to rule that former presidents have immunity from criminal prosecution for their official acts — a proposition the justices largely endorsed. About to hop aboard U.S. One for a transatlantic flight Friday, the president admitted to a scrum of reporters that the Supreme Court’s ruling gives Obama immunity from prosecution . . . a memo the president’s Senate pom-pom squad apparently didn’t get since they were simultaneously (and absurdly) calling for a special counsel (to probe what a Trump DOJ-appointed prosecutor already spent four years probing).
And now, as if there hadn’t been enough careening, the Justice Department is interviewing Maxwell.
As our Jim Geraghty notes, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche risibly beat his chest on X, declaring, “Justice demands courage. For the first time, the Department of Justice is reaching out to Ghislaine Maxwell to ask: what do you know?”
Gee, I guess all the other prosecutors forgot to do that.
Or maybe, just maybe, Maxwell is like, well, every other defendant in history who decided it wasn’t such a hot idea to talk to the prosecutors and incriminate herself while she was trying to get acquitted. Maybe she supposes — now that she’s been convicted, sentenced, and has no chance of getting that reversed on appeal — that talking to prosecutors is the only conceivable way of getting her sentence reduced.
Maybe the Justice Department knows that Congress is planning to interrogate Maxwell later this summer. Hard as this may be to believe, Maxwell is not the first criminal in history who, suddenly finding herself in the center of a public drama, has decided she could benefit from leveraging curious Congress critters against federal prosecutors. Thanks to the president’s top DOJ and FBI officials, Maxwell knows there is intense interest in what she knows. Maybe Blanche, Bondi, and Trump figured they’d better find out what she’s going to say before congressional Democrats push to have her say it in a nationally televised Capitol Hill hearing.
Here are a couple of things, though.
First, most defendants who sense that they have information the prosecutors want don’t provide it out of the goodness of their dark hearts. They provide it at a price. Perhaps Maxwell is one of those rare altruists who has decided confession is good for the soul. Call me crazy, but I suspect she had a price. What she wants above all is to be sprung from prison. Have her lawyers and the Trump DOJ talked about that? Defendants looking at lots of time generally get sentence reductions only by cooperating in the investigation of other, more culpable offenders. But Epstein is dead. What does Maxwell have to trade that convinced her and DOJ that an interview would be in their mutual interests? And did DOJ need to promise anything to get the interview?
Second, no one on the planet knows more about Epstein’s activities during the pertinent time frame than Maxwell. The Epstein file is already immense. Yet if, as Blanche intimates, the government will now, for the first time, investigate by pursuing leads generated from interviewing the accomplice witness with the most informed account of Epstein’s sex trafficking, what do you suppose that file will look like? If it’s done competently, I’d conservatively anticipate a doubling of the current file’s breadth. More suspects, more questions, more feeding frenzy.
Right now, there is a raging controversy because the president’s subordinates first promised radical transparency; then, on further review, the president decided he’d rather not have transparency. When his subordinates predictably fell into line, there was mutiny in the Trump base they had spun up. Trump doesn’t like warring with his base, but he’s decided that giving them the disclosure they crave would be worse. That’s a conundrum, but how does making Maxwell a star witness, rather than a forgotten convict, help? What she tells prosecutors could multiply exponentially the information the government decides it has to withhold.
That’s a strange way to try to make the Epstein case disappear.