The president’s top advisers gathered in a series of Situation Room meetings as they struggled to contain a scandal engulfing Donald Trump h
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan at NY Times Magazine:
On July 17, 2025, at around 6 o’clock in the evening, President Trump’s top officials filed into the White House Situation Room — the secure bunker where classified and high-stakes national security matters are discussed and decided. This was where President Barack Obama, along with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president’s national security team, watched the raid that ended with the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011.
Now, however, Trump’s most senior advisers had gathered — without him — to figure out how to gain some measure of control over a very different kind of crisis threatening to engulf the presidency: the Epstein files.
Ten days earlier, the Justice Department and the F.B.I. had jointly released a memo that bluntly stated that their review had found no “client list” of powerful men for whom the notorious pedophile Jeffrey Epstein had allegedly procured underage girls and young women. Intended to put to rest years of speculation and end the pressure campaign to release the voluminous material in the department’s possession, the memo instead had the opposite effect, setting off a backlash that was notably loud among the MAGA base.
And it was about to get worse: The Wall Street Journal was preparing a damaging article about Trump’s relationship with Epstein. The president’s desperate attempts to kill the story had failed. His team now had to get everyone onto the same page about how to counter the growing swarm of attention. They needed a gesture of transparency to appease an increasingly angry base, but also a way to convey the message that the president was sympathetic to his supporters’ concerns. Which itself was a problem, because he clearly wasn’t.
Vice President JD Vance took a seat at the head of the table in the John F. Kennedy Conference Room of the Situation Room complex. “This is a huge problem,” he told the group. Arrayed around him were the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles; the White House counsel, David Warrington; the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt; the deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich; the communications director, Steven Cheung; the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche; the associate attorney general, Stanley Woodward Jr.; and the deputy chief of staff James Blair. Attorney General Pam Bondi and the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, joined on speakerphone.
The vice president appeared panicked to others in the room about the way the subject of Epstein was already dividing the MAGA coalition. Some senior officials had the impression that Vance had bought into the darkest theories about Epstein and a cabal of predators hidden within the country’s ruling class. Wiles would tell others that the vice president had proved himself to be a major conspiracy theorist. Another top official said later that Vance had been pounding on the Epstein issue since the release of the memo. He was privately pressing for the administration to release all the Epstein files, everything in the Justice Department’s possession, even encouraging a congressional investigation.
Vance had also floated to colleagues an extraordinary P.R. gambit — that the White House enlist Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison. It might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein.
Vance told the group he believed all the files should be released as soon as possible. He argued that Congress was going to force the release of the files eventually. It was already clear that a bipartisan coalition in favor of such action was forming on Capitol Hill, and the momentum was going in one direction. If the administration got out ahead of this and released everything voluntarily — including whatever material existed about the president — it would at least get credit for transparency. The alternative was to let the story drag on for months as information dripped out, each new revelation renewing the cycle of suspicion and fury. Better to rip the bandage off and move on.
Even the unsubstantiated allegations and anecdotes about Trump should go out, Vance argued. They were going to surface regardless, and if the administration published them first, it would demonstrate good faith and take the oxygen out of the conspiracy theories. His arguments fell on skeptical ears, but some advisers thought it would be a good idea to have Justice Department officials call a news conference to explain their position on the Epstein affair — going beyond the memo that precipitated the crisis.
At this point in the meeting, Blair spoke up. “With all due respect,” he said, “the communications strategy of this group got us here. I don’t know that it’s going to get us out. And if you’re going to go in front of the press, you’ve got a lot of work to do.” He began to ask pointed mock questions, demonstrating how difficult a news conference might be.
As the president’s former defense attorney, Blanche had a unique vantage point in the discussion. He was better equipped than anyone else in the room to weigh the ideas being discussed against Trump’s personal and political interests. Blanche laid out what he saw as their best options.
Option 1 was to petition Federal District Courts in Florida and New York to unseal the grand jury testimonies — the secret transcripts of prosecutors’ presentations of witnesses and evidence in their efforts to obtain indictments in past Epstein-related cases. As those were almost certain to contain no significant new information, everyone agreed that this option was a good idea, and not only because a release was unlikely to damage the president.
Under the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure, the secrecy of grand jury materials is regarded by most federal judges as almost always inviolate, and the bar for any release is exceptionally high. If the courts refused to unseal them — as Blanche predicted — they could shift the blame for withholding the Epstein material away from the Trump administration and onto the judges. And all the better if the judges had been appointed by Democratic presidents. Blanche’s suggestion would make it appear that the White House wanted the materials released, when it was almost certain not to happen.
Option 2 was to have Justice Department lawyers question Maxwell and publicly release the transcript — a twist on the idea proposed earlier by Vance. Blanche offered to interview Maxwell himself.
[...]
Just then, The Wall Street Journal article they had been trying to kill was published online. Cellphones are forbidden in the Situation Room, so a staff member brought in printed copies of the explosive report, which detailed how Trump, and many others, had created birthday cards and letters to be assembled by Maxwell into a special birthday book for Epstein in 2003. The birthday card attributed to Trump depicted a nude woman, hand-drawn and inscribed with an imagined dialogue between the two men about a “wonderful secret.” The drawing was signed with what appeared to be Trump’s distinctive jagged Sharpie signature in place of the woman’s pubic hair.
In the days before publication, Trump, in the effort to quash the story, had called News Corp.’s chief executive, Robert Thomson; News Corp.’s owner, Rupert Murdoch; and The Journal’s editor in chief, Emma Tucker. Practically shouting, the president told Tucker, who is British, that she must “hate America.” He told her he would file a lawsuit.
But none of his bullying had worked, and now, as the group sat quietly reading the full story in the Situation Room, Wiles readied a public denial for the president, which he soon posted on social media.
Shortly after this, the president posted again. He was going along with the plan his advisers had hashed out in the Situation Room, though it was clear he didn’t like having to do it: “Based on the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein, I have asked Attorney General Pam Bondi to produce any and all pertinent Grand Jury testimony, subject to Court approval. This SCAM, perpetuated by the Democrats, should end, right now!”
In response to a request for comment, a White House spokeswoman, Abigail Jackson, repeated Trump’s claims that he was innocent in all Epstein-related matters, adding that “by releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act and calling for more investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.”
[...]
At the start of last summer, as far as outside observers could see, Trump appeared to be at the pinnacle of his power. He had just bombed nuclear sites in Iran; completed a blitz of executive orders to reshape the immigration system; and rammed through Congress his signature piece of domestic legislation, the Big Beautiful Bill. He was using the levers of the government to go after his enemies, and out of fear and desperation, America’s corporate titans were falling over themselves to genuflect.
But behind the scenes, the Epstein crisis was paralyzing the Trump administration to a far greater extent than the public knew. In their public statements, Trump’s advisers were full of bravado, dismissing the crisis. In reality, it was consuming the highest ranks of the administration as no issue had for the president’s team since the Russia investigation in his first term. His aides were determined to keep their rising sense of panic out of public view.
The Justice Department had struggled with just how to dispose of the Epstein matter since the beginning of Trump’s second term. The issue was all-consuming for the president’s political base, but also potentially compromising for the president himself in ways that officials in the new administration didn’t fully understand. Any path forward would be fraught.
Some of that complexity was self-inflicted. In the engine room of the MAGA movement, the Epstein files were potent fuel. Elon Musk had used his social media platform to repeatedly question why a client list had not been released. Donald Trump Jr. and JD Vance had invoked the Epstein files as a broader campaign message to argue that “powerful people” were hiding the truth from Americans. Tucker Carlson and the young conservative leader Charlie Kirk had each insisted that the government should release the documents and each floated the idea that there was an expansive cover-up in progress.
Trump himself had been cagey. On the “Lex Fridman Podcast” in September 2024, when asked about releasing the client list, Trump responded, “I’d certainly take a look at it,” adding, “I’d have no problem with it.” The list “probably will be” made public, he said, but he sounded less than enthusiastic. In private, Trump later told Representative Marjorie Taylor Greene that a release of Epstein material could hurt some of his friends. He repeatedly insisted that he had done nothing wrong and that the whole saga was “fake news” designed to harm him politically.
But his posture was overtaken by the growing frenzy among his supporters. Throughout 2024, Greene had made it her mission to force the release of the files. And there were so many others. The far-right influencer Laura Loomer, the conservative activist Scott Presler, Chaya Raichik from Libs of TikTok. But when it came to propagating the Epstein files as evidence of a “deep state” capable of evil, two podcasters were not to be outdone: Kash Patel and Dan Bongino.
[...]
But as Bondi’s staff started distributing the binders, the blood pressure of other officials in the room skyrocketed. They had no idea what was in the handouts. The attorney general was distributing something she was calling “the Epstein files” that had not been vetted by anyone in the White House. One official, opening the binder, began flipping through pages to see if Trump’s name was mentioned anywhere. A few pages in, right in the middle of the page, there it was.
Keir Starmer, the British prime minister, was at the White House that day. If news broke that the Epstein files had been released before the president was to meet the press with the prime minister, that would be all the journalists would want to talk about. And Trump would be blindsided.
One of Trump’s aides hastily steered the influencers out of the White House, telling them that the content of the binders was embargoed until after the president’s news conference with Starmer but that the communications office would be more than happy to talk about the files afterward. As the influencers left, they snapped selfies in front of the White House holding their binders, quickly posting the pictures on social media. They had now created a new shock wave of anticipation for what might be in them.
Like some others in the White House, Bondi had either grossly underestimated or simply been blind to the voracious appetite of the MAGA base for information about Epstein. Her binders contained information about him and his activities — flight logs, contact lists, summaries of items taken from his residences after his 2019 arrest and other material — but nearly all of it had been previously released. Bondi had somehow simultaneously oversold and trivialized the Epstein files, and now the influencers were made to feel like dupes.
[...]
On July 7, the Department of Justice and the F.B.I. released the memo. It was brief, an unsigned one-and-a-half-page statement explaining that after an exhaustive search of “its databases, hard drives, and network drives as well as physical searches of squad areas, locked cabinets, desks, closets, and other areas where responsive material may have been stored” and a corresponding review of more than 300 gigabytes of evidence, the department concluded that there was no evidence Epstein had maintained a client list.
The memo also reaffirmed the official finding that Epstein’s death in 2019 had been a suicide. The memo was accompanied by the release of video footage from the federal jail in Manhattan where Epstein died, footage that officials said supported the conclusion of suicide. And with that, the memo indicated, the Trump administration would not be releasing further information regarding the Epstein case and no further investigation of uncharged third parties was warranted.
Less than five months after Bondi had referred to a secret client list of high-profile predators, the case was closed. Or so it seemed.
[...]
On July 12, the president took to Truth Social to defend Bondi against criticism and to urge his “boys” and “gals” to stop wasting “Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.” Trump told aides he was very unhappy with some of his most influential supporters, including Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, all of whom were publicly urging the administration to come clean. Kirk had held a Turning Point USA event the previous day that turned into an Epstein grievance fest, with one speaker after another bashing Bondi over her handling of the situation. Trump had called Kirk and scolded him.
Nobody in Trump’s orbit had a better feel for the younger part of the MAGA base than Kirk, who saw that the Epstein cover-up, as it was now viewed, was capturing attention to an alarming extent. Donald Trump Jr. and JD Vance — both of whom spent considerable time on X and were tapped into the same younger and hyper-online portion of the base — were also worried. They urged the White House to change course and force the Justice Department to release more of the files.
Vance made clear to colleagues that he feared losing some of the so-called low-propensity voters, the young men who were not traditional Republicans but who had voted for the Trump-Vance ticket in 2024. This was an audience tuned in to the “manosphere” podcasters like Joe Rogan, and it was worrisome that the podcast hosts themselves were now rebelling.
But there was one major obstacle in the path of a solution: The president himself still had no interest in transparency. He wanted the whole Epstein issue buried, and he was snapping at anyone who mentioned it. His staff largely avoided the subject in their conversations with him, forced to worry among themselves.
Finally, on July 16, in an exasperated Truth Social post, seemingly desperate to make his case in language that might resonate with his base, Trump somewhat nonsensically called the Epstein case a “hoax” by Democrats and then proceeded to heap abuse on members of his party and his base, disavowing their support, calling them “PAST supporters” and “weaklings” who had “bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker.”
[...]
Trump had declared Epstein a dead issue during the summer, but as he began the second year of his presidency, his own team could see that voter concerns about Epstein were still breaking through to an alarming extent.
In an internal memo circulated to roughly a dozen Trump advisers in late March 2026, the president’s pollster, Fabrizio, summarized findings from two nights of focus groups conducted that month.
Fabrizio’s memo listed the “Epstein files” as the sixth most important issue raised in the focus groups, behind inflation, the economy, foreign policy, immigration and health care — but ahead of data centers, military issues, crime and safety, and being “pro-working class.” In the section on “key takeaways” of the focus groups, Fabrizio’s memo stated: “There is also a consistent mention of the Epstein files, which came up in every group and is a real negative with some of these voters.”
The Epstein crisis had exposed something that some of Trump’s closest advisers spent months refusing to see. The president could break institutions, redirect the federal government against his enemies and bring the world’s richest men into the Oval Office bearing tribute. But he could not, it turned out, make Jeffrey Epstein disappear.
The New York Times Magazine’s article on how the Epstein Files release caused a Grade A panic in the Trump White House and helped fan the furor among parts of his MAGA base.
Read the full report from The New York Times Magazine.
See Also:
LGBTQ Nation: Bombshell report details White House’s “freakout” to hide Epstein files & protect Trump from them
Thunderstorms are currently forecasted for Trump’s birthday in Washington, DC this Sunday when the UFC fight is set to take place on the White House lawn.
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