Donald Trump, late Wednesday, signed legislation mandating the release of the Epstein files within 30 days.
It’s Friday; we haven’t heard a word about the next step.
“Whether in fact they will be released, stay tuned,” said U.S. Sen. Tim Kaine, D-Va., on a call with reporters, after the votes in Congress, and the news that Trump had signed the bill into law.
It’s a fair point Kaine makes there.
ICYMI
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The strategy from the Trump side, for months, was to “delay, defer and default,” in the words of our senior U.S. senator, Mark Warner, in a separate call with reporters.
The wounds are self-inflicted. Trump raised the issue with the Epstein files on the campaign trail last year, pledging to release the entirety of what the Justice Department had on the disgraced billionaire, who died in federal custody in 2019 after being charged with running an extensive child sex-trafficking ring.
The implication from Trump, each time he brought the Epstein issue up publicly, was that the files would somehow implicate scores of Democrats who were friends with Epstein.
To that end, Trump’s Attorney General, Pam Bondi, said on TV in February that she had an Epstein “client list” on her desk, and she staged an event in which her office handed out binders of Epstein-related information to MAGA influencers.
The document release was a dud – there was nothing new in the binders – and the influencers pushed back, reigniting the issue of Trump’s own decades-long close friendship with Epstein, and how much the president knew about his friend’s crimes, and whether the POTUS might be himself implicated.
The DOJ released a memo in the summer saying that it considered the Epstein matter closed, leading to charges from across the political spectrum that it felt like we were witnessing a coverup in real time.
House Speaker Mike Johnson got involved in September, using the government shutdown as cover to keep the House on a rolling vacation for more than two months to prevent a vote on legislation to force the release of the Epstein files.
We’re now in the second half of November, so, almost an entire year into what was a slow walk, and morphed into outright stonewalling.
“Why is the Trump administration so paranoid?” asked Warner, rhetorically, because we all know – or are pretty sure we know.
The delay tactic is now likely to focus around the pressure that Trump put on Bondi to launch a fresh investigation into possible Democrat ties to Epstein, which many observers, including Warner, feel is going to be “used as an excuse why some of the files can’t be released.”
“The big question is, why has Donald Trump tried so mightily to have these files kept secret when the American people deserve and need to know?” Warner said, adding:
“We will figure out one way or the other to make sure, even if the Justice Department puts some smokescreens out there, that these files need to be released, the sooner the better.”
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Chris Graham
