‘Bomb went off’: Report reveals moment Epstein files rocked the White House and why Trump is desperate to keep them secret
The moment Pam Bondi’s Justice Department and the FBI quietly dropped a memo on the Fourth of July weekend, attempting to draw a line under the Jeffrey Epstein files saga, it was “like a bomb went off” in the White House, a new report reveals.
For President Donald Trump’s administration, the handling of the Epstein case has been a chaotic summer of “disorganization,” high-stakes strategy meetings in the Situation Room, “finger-pointing,” and a series of “unforced errors,” the Wall Street Journal reports.
Tensions in the Trump administration on how best to handle the Epstein scandal — “a crisis of the president’s own making” — and appease his MAGA base had been simmering since February, when the Attorney General claimed the files were “sitting on her desk” and haphazardly arranged an ill-fated PR stunt with right-wing influencers.
This was the beginning of a series of “mistakes” by “multiple mouthpieces” and Trump advisers who deeply underestimated the issue that continues to dog the administration today, according to the WSJ.
Trump socialized with Epstein in the 1990s and early 2000s before cutting off contact following the pedophile’s first arrest in 2006.
Now, the president is desperate to rid himself of the case, the outlet reports.
White House officials reportedly believed the issue would blow over and the president “couldn’t understand why people were so obsessed” with the late sex offender.
But the WSJ also reports that the president was “worried some of his friends might be mentioned in the files,” and they “might have been doctored to hurt him,” according to people familiar with Trump’s comments.
“This may be the worst managed PR event in history,” lawyer Ty Cobb, who led the first Trump White House’s response to a 2017 special counsel probe into the campaign’s ties to Russia, told the WSJ.
When approached by The Independent for comment, White House spokesperson Abigail Jackson said the issue was a “dead story.”
“This is a lazy rewrite of a dead story,” Jackson said of the report. “It’s not news that Epstein knew Donald Trump, because Donald Trump kicked Epstein out of his club for being a creep.”
“Democrats and the media knew about Epstein and his victims for years and did nothing to help them while President Trump was calling for transparency, and is now delivering on it with thousands of pages of documents,” Jackson added.
In a statement to the WSJ, Bondi said she is working “tirelessly” alongside FBI Director Kash Patel to make America safer.
“Our only priority is to continue working together with the FBI to make America safer by ensuring murderers and violent criminals face the most severe justice,” Bondi said.
