Attorney General Pam Bondi apparently never heard the adage about under-promising and over-delivering.
President Trump’s most vociferous media supporters have been in a full meltdown over the administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, an obsessive focus of MAGA figures over the years. Last week, the DOJ and FBI put out an unsigned two-page statement saying that no additional charges would be filed in the case.
Rather than putting the matter to rest, the memo caused a political uproar and mutual recriminations among top Trump officials.
Who’s to blame? Everyone who has built vast castles of fantasy atop the Epstein case, including FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino prior to assuming their current positions, and especially Pam Bondi (Trump himself talked of releasing the files on Epstein, but voiced reservations about ruining lives with “phony stuff”). She hyped Epstein revelations as AG, by handing out worthless white binders supposedly full of Epstein files to sundry MAGA influencers and by seemingly saying in a TV interview that she had an Epstein client list on her desk.
That was grossly self-interested conduct that, of course, did more to stoke conspiracy theories when shortly afterwards the government took the position that there was really nothing to see here.
It is natural that there are questions around the Epstein case, given his hideous crimes, his lenient treatment by the law 20 years ago, his lavish lifestyle, his association with so many famous and wealthy people, and his death in jail by suicide before he could stand trial.
This doesn’t mean the wild theories about the case are justified. There is no evidence that there was any “client list” of those partaking of Epstein’s crimes. Nor is there serious evidence that Epstein was murdered, which would have required a Mission Impossible–style operation to fake his suicide behind bars, or that he was, say, an agent of Mossad. If the Deep State had to make Epstein go away at the behest of a foreign government, or rich and powerful people who shared in his crimes, presumably it wouldn’t have allowed his close associate Ghislaine Maxwell to go to trial, when she had every incentive to spill her guts about such nefarious high-level dealings. (She is currently serving 20 years in prison for her involvement in Epstein’s crimes.)
It’s also hard to believe — if we entertain the conspiracy theorists further — that Kash Patel and Dan Bongino came into office and were instantly co-opted by the alleged conspiracy they so long warned about.
There are now understandable calls for greater transparency. The rules around grand jury secrecy shouldn’t be broken and care must be taken about revealing the identities of victims and besmirching the reputations of people mentioned incidentally in the vast investigative materials. Bondi should have heeded the DOJ practice of not speaking about cases if charges aren’t going to be brought, and the offense shouldn’t be compounded. Yet, the documents a judge has ordered released in a civil case should be made public expeditiously, and it’s hard to understand why other materials related to the case — including the autopsy report on Epstein — haven’t been released.
President Trump wants the whole thing to go away, and now blames various of his political adversaries for creating the Epstein files in the first place. If there’s one lesson from this episode, though, it’s that we need less conspiracy-theorizing rather than more.