Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi in October.Evan Vucci/AP
For months, President Donald Trump begged America to forget about Jeffrey Epstein. But this week a House committee released a trove of the late sex offender’s emails, and Trump’s name was all over them. Now, he’s suddenly once again very interested in figuring out who enabled or even partook in Epstein’s prolific sexual abuse of underage women—as long as the only people being investigated for crimes are Democrats.
“It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out.”
On Friday, Trump directed the Department of Justice, Attorney General Pam Bondi, and the Federal Bureau of Investigation to “investigate Jeffrey Epstein’s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them.” Bondi quickly hopped on the case, announcing on X that she had assigned a prosecutor to “pursue this with urgency and integrity.”
Trump, a friend of Epstein for many years, has strenuously denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes. But his Friday directive reversed the Trump administration’s previous stance that there was nothing left to see in the Epstein case: In July, Bondi’s DOJ and the FBI released a memo claiming it had exhausted all of the evidence in the government’s possession and determined that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” That move was itself a stunning reversal, angering many of Trump’s supporters who believed he would fulfill his campaign promise to release all files from the government’s Epstein investigation. After the July announcement, Trump blasted his supporters who felt betrayed as “stupid” and “foolish” for still believing in the “Jeffrey Epstein hoax.”
A bipartisan coalition of lawmakers emerged to push for the full Epstein files. Following the long-awaited swearing in of Arizona Rep. Adelita Grijalva on Wednesday, a Democrat whose support was needed to advance the release, the House will soon vote on a bill that could compel the DOJ to release what it has.
The emails made public on Wednesday by the House showed that Epstein once referred to Trump as “the dog that hasn’t barked” and alleged that Trump had once spent “hours” at his house with a sex trafficking victim.
But Trump would rather that you not pay attention to any of that. Instead, he ordered the government’s law enforcement apparatus to target former president Bill Clinton and his treasury secretary Larry Summers, who were also mentioned in Wednesday’s document release, along with LinkedIn co-founder Reid Hoffman, a major Democratic donor. It has been widely speculated that his administration could cite the newly-launched investigation in a coming battle with Congress to forestall making any further information public.
Trump’s about-face on releasing the full Epstein files has infuriated Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene, (R-Ga.), once a staunch ally of the president. Their public feud escalated on Friday, with Trump calling Greene a “ranting lunatic” on Truth Social and announcing he would be “withdrawing his support and endorsement,” suggesting he would back a primary challenger to her if the “right person runs.”
Greene issued a lengthy response on X, claiming that it was their split over the Epstein files that “sent [Trump] over the edge.”
“It’s astonishing really how hard he’s fighting to stop the Epstein files from coming out,” she wrote.
