The president is in this mess because he has turned his Justice Department into a component of his political operation.
P resident Trump has attempted to quell a MAGA mutiny and infighting between two of his top law enforcement officials, Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, whose politicized hyping of supposedly suppressed investigative files from the Jeffrey Epstein case, coupled with the administration’s inept handling of them, has caught up with them – with all the resulting finger-pointing that implies.
A former cop and Secret Service agent who is not a lawyer, Bongino had never worked at the FBI prior to being appointed by Trump. The president liked his work as a fiery podcaster during the Biden years — work that included Bongino’s suggestion that Epstein did not commit suicide, and that Epstein’s “client list” was being “hidden” because its disclosure would “rock the world.” Bondi, while supporting Trump for reelection in 2024, expressed exasperation on Fox News that release of the government’s Epstein files had been slow-walked, nonsensically claiming that there was “no legal basis” to keep names private unless a person was “a child, a victim, or a cooperating defendant.” (Apparently, as attorney general, she has recently become better informed.)
Bongino took Friday off after being dressed down by Bondi at the White House on Wednesday in the presence of several top administration officials, including White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles and Trump’s FBI Director Kash Patel — a former government lawyer who has a history of claiming that the Biden administration was suppressing the Epstein files to protect the “pedophiles,” and who publicly anticipated that, once back in office, Trump would immediately “roll out” Epstein’s “black book.”
Bondi is said to have accused Bongino of leaking information to media sources — blaming her for the mishandling of the Epstein disclosures, which Bondi initially intimated would be disclosed by the “truckload.” It now turns out that there will be no further disclosure, according to a joint DOJ-FBI memo released in recent days, which formally closed the case.
Bongino angrily denied the leaking allegation.
It was said that the Wednesday confrontation followed one a few days earlier, during which, unidentified “officials” told the New York Times, Bongino had confronted Bondi over what he said was her overhyping of a putative Epstein “client list.” As our Jim Geraghty has pointed out, Bondi appeared, in an interview with Fox News, to claim that such a list was “sitting on my desk right now to review.”
In the aforementioned joint closing memo, the DOJ and FBI represent that their “systematic review” of the Epstein file “revealed no incriminating ‘client list.’” I presume that the word incriminating is doing a lot of work in that sentence. Epstein was a wealthy financial consultant (one of his many businesses, some of them shady), so we know he had had clients of some kind.
In MAGA lore, references to a “client list” imply that Epstein, a monstrous child abuser, had “clients” in his sex-trafficking sideline, including many who traveled to his infamous island resort, sometimes on his private plane. I am skeptical that that kind of client list ever existed. Criminals tend not to write up a road map so investigators can roll up their coconspirators when the eventual arrests come. Plus, as I explained last week, if such a list existed, it would have become public during the extensive investigation, grand jury proceedings, indictments of Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, the lengthy trial and appeals of Maxwell, and the post-trial litigation, during which a trove of theretofore nonpublic information was disclosed, adding to the already mountainous public record of the case.
In a plaintive weekend post, Trump implored MAGA and the FBI to leave poor AG Bondi alone (she’s “doing a FANTASTIC JOB!”) and get back to focusing on the country’s most vital law enforcement mission, which, as we all know, is investigating “The Rigged and Stolen Election of 2020.”
It seemed ominous that, in imploring his supporters to drop their Epstein revolt, Trump did not mention Bongino, even as he lauded Bondi and urged Patel to get the bureau back on message — further fueling last week’s rumors that Bongino was on his way out. By Sunday, however, Trump was saying he had spoken with Bongino, a “good guy” who is in “good shape,” so perhaps everyone has kissed and made up . . . at least for now.
The controversy has MAGA denizens at each other’s throats. Bondi, it seems, would have been voted off the island, except that The Only Guy Who Matters is in her corner.
I’m inclined to believe that the beleaguered AG is telling the truth in now claiming that, when Fox News specifically asked her about a “client list” and she anxiously affirmed that it was “sitting on my desk to review,” she meant to convey that she was in the middle of perusing a sprawl of Epstein-related paperwork, not that she had necessarily stumbled upon an actual “client list.” The way this clown show has played out, it would make sense (a) that there is no “client list”; (b) that Bondi, having previously been vilified by MAGA for hyping a binder of Epstein documents that (unsurprisingly) turned out to be a dud, would have been actively sorting through Epstein files in hope of finding something she could pass off as new, legally disclosable, and titillating; and (c) that Bondi failed to clarify or offer a correction — whether intentionally or inadvertently — when her Fox interviewer mentioned a “client list.”
In any event, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has posted on X — because who in today’s Justice Department doesn’t emote for public consumption? — that he worked closely with Bongino and Patel on “the joint FBI and DOJ memo regarding the Epstein Files,” and that they all agreed with its conclusions, to wit: There is no incriminating client list; Epstein really did commit suicide while in federal custody; there is “no credible evidence that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions”; and there is no predicate for a criminal investigation against uncharged third parties.
Now, this is carefully worded. To repeat what I discussed regarding the Biden Justice Department’s dropping of an investigation of former Congressman Matt Gaetz a while back, federal sexual abuse cases are hard to make. (State sexual abuse crimes are far more straightforward, lacking the interstate commerce nexus that federal prosecutors must establish. Note that, as a federal appeals court explained, the federal offenses of which Maxwell was convicted focused at least as much on travel across state lines as on sexual activity.) The fact that there might not be a predicate for a federal criminal investigation does not mean Justice Department prosecutors didn’t learn during their investigation that associates of Epstein’s were involved in suspicious behavior. (The lack of a “client list” would not discount such a possibility, either.)
Alan Dershowitz is a serious person and, for Epstein purposes, an object lesson in how a non-incriminating relationship with a monster (in his case, an attorney-client relationship with Epstein) can lead to guilt by association in the court of public opinion. Professor Dershowitz fought back when he was accused of defamation by one of Epstein’s victims, and she later dropped the suit, admitting that she may have mistakenly identified him. So, in addition to being intimately familiar with litigation and discovery rules, he has been personally entangled in l’affaire Epstein. Consequently, when Dershowitz says that there are other individuals connected to the case whose names have been withheld from the public, but that he cannot speak about it because of nondisclosure terms attendant to his civil settlement, that can’t be dismissed.
Reportedly, Trump has said something along the same lines: He doesn’t want to see people “ruined” by the gratuitous disclosure of information that they had murky ties to Epstein, when there is scant proof implicating them in Epstein’s criminal conduct. It’s a bit much to hear such precious concerns coming from a president who routinely unleashes investigators to pursue his political enemies on flimsy or nonexistent evidence. Yet, when it comes to Epstein, Trump has reasons to be more sensitive to potential smears: Having been friends with Epstein (at least for a time), he does not want people to assume that such an association equates to implication in sordid activities. Of course, Trump’s strangely warm public words for Maxwell right after she was indicted on child sex-trafficking charges may not have been the best way to discourage such assumptions.
It thus becomes obvious that Trump has good reasons to want the Epstein chatter to cease and desist (to demand that we “move on,” as Clinton devotees were fond of saying). Alas, the chatter is not going to cease and desist, because Trump’s underlings incessantly talked up the Epstein scandal when they thought there was political advantage in it (which was remarkably stupid given Trump’s well-known personal tie to Epstein — including in the 33-year-old video of the pair partying together at Mar-a-Lago, which the press is now running nonstop).
The story may also have staying power because Democrats see — to their unexpected good fortune — that, of all Trump’s prior escapades, it is the Epstein misadventure that may be fracturing his political base, heretofore a fortress against the president’s detractors. This weekend, it was impossible not to notice the glee of Trump bête noire Jamie Raskin, a Democratic House member out of Maryland, in urging House Republicans to join him in demanding full disclosure of the government’s Epstein files. (Yes, that would be the same Jamie Raskin last seen fighting hammer and tong against the GOP’s Biden family corruption investigation.)
I will close by repeating myself again. The president is in this mess because he has turned his Justice Department into a component of his political operation. MAGA’s Epstein obsessives are spun up, and Democrats have been gifted cards to play, because the attorney general maintained that “truckloads” of Epstein evidence had been withheld (including, wittingly or not, the vaunted “client” list), and that she was hell-bent on ushering in a new era of transparency — an era that would necessarily violate venerable, well-founded DOJ rules against public commentary on nonpublic information and uncharged evidence.
In his first term, Trump bristled at law enforcement officials who complained about his tweets and adhered to rules against government commentary regarding nonpublic investigative matters. This time around, to lead the DOJ and FBI, he recruited media provocateurs who had loudly framed Epstein’s case and death as a dark conspiracy theory. Now, the president is irked because his base believed them, and his political foes are using their demagogy against him.