The Administration’s Long Con with the Epstein Files
Ignoring the victims and betting on public fatigue.
The news from the Epstein files continues to arrive in drips and drabs, but the overall picture is no longer cloudy. There is only one tenable explanation for the Department of Justice’s massive and longstanding noncompliance with the Epstein Transparency Act: a sustained effort by the Department and other senior government officials to manage, delay, and ultimately neutralize the fallout from disclosure.
The administration is wagering that the general public will lose interest in sufficient measure to offset the intense outrage of victims and critics, permitting it to move past the Epstein scandal despite having provided scant accountability. It is a long game—one the administration shifted to only after it was forced, over Donald Trump’s earlier frenetic opposition, to support the release of millions of pages of documents that had never been made public. That reversal followed repeated, failed efforts to shake the scandal, which clung to Trump as no other issue has.
On Monday, a small group of members of the House Oversight Committee examined a limited number of unredacted files at DOJ. The conditions of the review only sharpened the point. Lawmakers were given access to just four computers in a satellite office to examine more than three million pages of material. Representative Jamie Raskin described the redactions he saw as “mysterious,” “inscrutable,” and unnecessary, including instances where names of prominent individuals were obscured while victims’ identities remained visible.
Some documents in that small subset appeared to undercut the Department’s public claims. One example was an email forwarded by Jeffrey Epstein suggesting that Donald Trump had not banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago, but had instead hosted him as a guest—contradicting Trump’s long-standing assertions.
The production is still not complete, and there is no clear accounting of how incomplete it remains. Representative Ro Khanna, a co-sponsor of the Epstein Transparency Act, estimates that approximately 2.5 million documents have yet to be produced.
Trump signed the act into law only because he was painted into a corner. He had mounted an all-out assault to prevent release of the files altogether—browbeating allies, attacking reformers, and portraying disclosure as partisan warfare. Only when a bipartisan wave became unavoidable did he reverse course, profess support, and sign the act. The administration’s continued resistance and foot-dragging have left an abiding mystery as to what, precisely, Trump so feared and loathed in the materials.
The act required the administration to produce all Epstein files—permitting redactions only to protect the personally identifiable information of victims, and requiring explanations for each redaction—by December 19, 2025. It has not come close. Instead, DOJ has cavalierly disregarded the law while assuring Congress and the courts that it was doing everything humanly possible to comply.
The initial release consisted of a narrow sheaf of documents overwhelmingly focused on Bill Clinton. If files were being released neutrally or sequentially, that distribution would have been statistically implausible. It was a plain maneuver to redirect attention.
Then came delay. For more than a month, the Department of Justice remained in violation of statutory obligations, treating deadlines as suggestions and transparency as optional.
Then, suddenly, the Justice Department released roughly three million pages all at once, on a Friday, stripped of context and effectively inaccessible to victims, journalists, and the public. It could easily have released the material in rolling tranches before the deadline. Instead, it opted for a massive data dump that shifted the burden of ferreting out damaging documents to others.
And notwithstanding having taken weeks longer than the law required, the Department still managed to expose the names of dozens of victims, subjecting them to renewed public scrutiny and traumatization. There was no explanation—much less an apology—for that failure.
More brazen still, the Department made no serious effort to explain its redactions, as the law requires, so that Congress and others can evaluate whether they are legitimate. Rather than provide document-specific justifications, DOJ supplied only a handful of generalized statements, coupled with vague assurances of future compliance.
That failure is not a technicality. Understanding and testing the Justice Department’s asserted grounds for redaction is essential to determining whether it is improperly shielding powerful figures or concealing evidence. These explanations are how Congress evaluates compliance, how courts assess privilege claims, and how the public distinguishes legitimate confidentiality from cover-up. By refusing to do that work, the Department ensured that no one—not lawmakers, not judges, not victims—could meaningfully test its claims.
Another backward step from accountability occurred Monday when Ghislaine Maxwell invoked the Fifth Amendment before the House Oversight Committee. The move was predictable. But it stood in stark contrast to the supposed openness she offered in a bizarre interview personally conducted by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
In that interview, Maxwell supplied Blanche with a conspicuously sanitized account of Trump’s involvement with Epstein, asserting that she had “never witnessed the President in any inappropriate setting in any way.” The episode appeared to be a naked ploy for clemency—along with a more comfortable place of confinement, typically unavailable to someone convicted of her crimes, which she promptly secured.
Before Congress, by contrast, Maxwell invoked the Fifth Amendment while offering to testify only if Trump were to grant her clemency. She knows where her leverage lies. More importantly, Blanche knows who his client is—and it is not the Constitution.
The whitewash effort is administration-wide. Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick was exposed in a flagrant lie about his relationship with Epstein, whom he had previously—indeed indignantly—claimed to have cut off after a single encounter in 2005. The newly released files tell a starkly different story: years of continued interactions, drinks as late as 2011, a business partnership, and donations from Epstein honoring Lutnick.
In response, lawmakers across the political spectrum—including the Republican co-sponsor of the Epstein Transparency Act, Representative Thomas Massie—called for Lutnick’s resignation. Senator Adam Schiff put it plainly: Lutnick “lied to the country.” The White House response was dismissive, if not blithe, issuing a brief statement standing by Lutnick and praising Trump’s cabinet as “the best and most transformative … in modern history.”
Even as the administration has treated the Epstein scandal as a public-relations problem to be weathered, it has roiled governments across the United Kingdom and Europe. There, Epstein disclosures have ended careers and triggered investigations based on officials’ associations with Epstein after he became a convicted sex offender. A former British ambassador was fired and is now under criminal investigation, and UK Prime Minister Keir Starmer, who appointed him, is now facing public pressure to resign. Senior diplomats in Norway, Sweden, and Slovakia resigned. Prince Andrew was stripped of all military titles and royal patronages.
In the United States, the Epstein documents have been ruinous for several prominent private figures, some of whom have issued mortified apologies. But the administration has offered no expression of institutional regret at all. It has not meaningfully addressed the victims—no apology, no explanation directed to those whose abuse made these files necessary in the first place, and no indication that their interests in truth, acknowledgment, and accountability are being treated as anything other than obstacles to be managed.
Congress enacted the Epstein Transparency Act to compel disclosure. If the Department can ignore the act’s deadlines and requirements without consequence, the statute will be reduced to a suggestion—and the administration will be emboldened in its lawlessness and its shamelessness. Trump and the DOJ are betting not only that the public will grow tired, but that the acquiescent silence of the congressional majority will, over time, muffle the louder protests of victims and of the members who have insisted on full compliance with the law.
Talk to you later.
No public fatigue here. When you have a fascist, pedophile and deranged criminal running the country, there is no rest!
“The LONG CON” game is led by the biggest con artist in Don backed up by his creepy, weird regime and his own felonious “connerie!”