Trump Can’t Stop Blabbing About Jeffrey Epstein
There’s no way for Republicans to tamp down the Epstein-Maxwell scandal if the president keeps telling on himself.
Vice President JD Vance was expected to hold a lovely summer dinner Wednesday night at his Naval Observatory residence with colleagues like White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. Multiple media outlets reported that the group was planning to discuss the Trump administration’s failing strategy to get the Jeffrey Epstein–Ghislaine Maxwell sex-trafficking scandal, and Trump’s long friendship with the pair, out of the news. In an Oval Office meeting about renewing US manufacturing on Wednesday afternoon, Vance denied the reporting, Trump called the entire issue “bullshit,’ and in the end, the Naval Observatory soiree didn’t take place.
Mid-afternoon Thursday, NBC reported that the meeting occurred at the White House instead.
Whatever the administration’s strategy is for pushing aside the Epstein-Maxwell scandal, it isn’t working. The reason is Trump himself. He just keeps giving reporters more to work with and the MAGA base more to worry about. Last week, he said he parted ways with Epstein because the late sex trafficker “stole” employees from Mar-a-Lago. When reporters asked if that included the late Virginia Giuffre—a high schooler whom Maxwell recruited from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago spa and who was reportedly sex trafficked by the pair for years—he rather shockingly told the truth. “I think she worked at the spa,” he told reporters. “He stole her.”
A few days later, asked why Blanche met with Maxwell for nine hours over two days, Trump answered, also truthfully: to make sure that further disclosures don’t damage people who could “be hurt by something that would be very, very unfortunate, very unfair to a lot of people.”
That might well include Trump himself, although we know Bondi already directed underlings (roughly 1,000, according to news reports) to redact all mentions of Trump in the case files. Bondi briefed Trump about his name appearing in the files last May. Conveniently, a White House sources told ABC News that Maxwell informed Blanche in their tête-à-tête last week “that Trump had never done anything in her presence that would have caused concern.” ABC News didn’t attribute the “scoop” to “White House sources”; I did, because who else would leak (or have access to) such Trump-serving news?
Days after talking to Blanche, Maxwell got a transfer to one of the cushiest, least restrictive federal prisons in the country—a so-called “country club” prison camp—in Byron, Texas, near relatives. “I didn’t know about it at all. No, I read about it just like you did,” Trump told reporters Tuesday, adding, “It’s not a very uncommon thing.”
In fact, it’s a very uncommon thing, prohibited by the Bureau of Prisons. Sex offenders like Maxwell must be confined in at least minimum-security prisons, and Maxwell’s transfer required a rules waiver. A former Bureau of Prisons official told The Washington Post the transfer was “enormously preferential treatment.” Who requested it, and who granted it? The White House isn’t leaking that information.
The only good to come out of Trump’s botching the Epstein-Maxwell story is that the pair’s victims are speaking out, and with increasing volume. The family of Virginia Giuffre, spoke out against both Maxwell’s prison transfer and the reported Vance-hosted meeting to plot strategy around the scandal.
“Missing from this group is, of course, any survivor of the vicious crimes of convicted perjurer and sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein,” her siblings wrote in a statement. “Their voices must be heard, above all.” The family offered to come to the meeting to provide that perspective, an offer that doesn’t seem to have been accepted.
Annie Farmer, an Epstein employee who, with her sister Maria, made some of the earliest criminal complaints about sex abuse, has blasted the administration for refusing to release more of the Epstein-Maxwell files, saying the last few months of wrangling have been “an emotional roller coaster” for victims, who by some reports number more than 1,000.
There’s no reason to think the administration came up with a winning strategy to contain the scandal at its White House meeting Wednesday night. Trump can’t stop talking, and he won’t rule out pardoning Maxwell. Such a brazen move might force even Republicans to stand up and demand the truth.
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