How the Epstein Files blew up in Trump’s face

The Trump administration utterly botched a hyped release of “Jeffrey Epstein files” Thursday, a saga that resulted in disappointment among the MAGA faithful, finger-pointing among Trump aides, and — unsurprisingly — claims of deep state sabotage.

Epstein, the well-connected financier who was indicted for sex trafficking underage girls and died in prison in 2019, has long been the subject of conspiracy theories, and many on the right believe that the US government is hiding information that would implicate powerful people (specifically, Democrats and celebrities, they believe).

In response to these demands, Attorney General Pam Bondi promised in a Fox News appearance Wednesday night that “a lot of information” was set to be released soon.

Then, on Thursday, her team printed out a series of documents, put them in binders, and handed them to right-wing “influencers” like Chaya Raichik (@LibsofTikTok) who were visiting the White House. Said influencers proceeded to wave the binders about this sex trafficking case around in front of photographers while smiling and made social media posts praising the administration’s transparency.

Naturally, the documents were a dud. One (Epstein’s contact book) had been published by Gawker 10 years ago. Another (a list of his masseuses) was entirely redacted. And the others had been previously released during the 2021 trial of Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell. Nothing was new here.

It all was handled so incompetently that widespread bipartisan mockery ensued on social media. Meanwhile, the MAGA faithful, denied their promised revelations, started to feel they’d been taken for a ride, and began to wonder: Was this, in fact, part of the cover-up too?

So Bondi swung into action to do furious damage control. Conservative influencers were given a letter from Bondi to FBI director Kash Patel, in which Bondi claimed she’d asked for all the Epstein documents, but had been belatedly tipped off that the FBI’s New York field office was withholding thousands of pages. Bondi demanded they be handed over, and ordered Patel “to conduct an immediate investigation into why my order to the FBI wasn’t followed.”

It is certainly likely that the FBI has more documents on Epstein than the few that the Trump administration released, but it is unclear whether Bondi’s claims of FBI malfeasance have any validity or whether they are just her attempt to squirm out of responsibility for a PR debacle.

Epstein was a very wealthy financier who had a lot of famous friends whom he often flew on his planes to his private island. He was also repeatedly accused, in criminal and civil proceedings, of sex trafficking and sexually abusing underage girls, including some as young as 14. A brush with the law over this in the mid-2000s ended in what was later derided as a sweetheart plea deal, but in July 2019 Epstein was arrested again — and then found dead in his cell the following month, in what authorities said was a suicide.

The documented story of Epstein is bizarre and damning as it is, but on both the left and the right, many have insisted the conspiracy must go far deeper. Did he have secret sex blackmail on powerful and influential people — politicians, celebrities — who were also involved in abusing underage girls? How did he make his money? Was he working with intelligence services? Was he actually murdered in a shadowy conspiracy to prevent him from telling what he knew?

In particular, the online right has fixated on what they refer to as the “Epstein list” — an imagined document supposedly listing famous people who were co-conspirators in his sex crimes. The online right hopes this will be the promised smoking gun proof that will indisputably reveal that their political enemies are perverted criminals, disgracing them forever and likely leading them to be arrested. (President Donald Trump is not featured in their theories, despite him having been photographed with Epstein and having publicly praised Epstein as a “terrific guy” who “likes beautiful women” who are “on the younger side.”)

As such, it’s the latest variation of the now-old hat “QAnon” theory, which argued that proof of a deep state conspiracy to protect Democratic pedophiles was imminent. (Democrats’ hopes for a Trump “pee tape” could be said to serve a similar role.)

The attention Bondi and Patel are devoting to such matters is just the latest indication of how obsessed Trump’s new administration is with pleasing the extremely online right. And their attempts at damage control afterward show just how worried they are about losing their reputation with the base.

But it also poses the question of how they can get away with stoking conspiracy theories and promising imminent revelations that somehow never end up coming, before the base decides they’re full of it. Bondi’s current strategy is to blame the deep state for a cover-up, but how long can that work?