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Last Friday, the Trump administration flagrantly violated the law by failing to release the full and unredacted Epstein files as mandated by an almost unanimous vote of both houses of Congress. But Attorney General Pam Bondi and company are sorely mistaken if they think giving Congress a middle finger is going to make the scandal go away.
The administration’s blatant defiance of statute is yet another ugly exercise in lawlessness by a fascist regime which attacks the Constitution on multiple fronts virtually every day. It makes a mockery of the pain of victims and survivors who Jeffrey Epstein assaulted and tortured when they were children. It’s not a surprise that Trump is disregarding the law, but that doesn’t make his decision to do so any less cruel or any less disgusting.
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The Trump years have shown us again and again that our system of government often fails miserably to hold powerful people accountable. It would be premature to argue that this will be different — and in fact it seems very unlikely that Trump will be impeached or removed for his association with a sexual abuser, just as it’s unlikely he’ll face consequences for his own history of sexual impropriety and violence.
But that does not mean that Trump and his enablers in his party will face no consequences for this egregious, clumsy, and contemptuous coverup.
We already know that Trump’s stonewalling on Epstein has created major riffs in the MAGA coalition and has generated horrifically bad press for Trump even on the right. Those fissures are only going to metastasize as Trump tries to pretend he has fulfilled the law when he obviously has not. No one can know the future. But none of the plausible paths forward looks good for Trump or the Republican Party.
Barely pretending
The Epstein Files Transparency Act — passed, again, almost unanimously by both houses of Congress — is a short, uncomplicated measure.
It gives the attorney general 30 days to “make publicly available in a searchable and downloadable format” all unclassified materials relating to federal investigations of Jeffrey Epstein in the government’s possession. The statute also says, “No record shall be withheld, delayed, or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary.” Personal information related to victims can be redacted, as can CSAM. Any material withheld must be reported to Congress along with the justification for doing it.
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The due date for the release of material was last Friday. Some documents were released, and there was at least one important revelation; they included a record of a complaint from the 1990s filed by Maria Farmer with the FBI accusing Epstein of trafficking in CSAM. The FBI never took action, and Farmer had been accused of lying about having made the complaint. Now it’s clear that if the FBI under Bill Clinton had acted, they could have prevented Epstein from assaulting numerous children.
This evidence is important, and there’s likely much more where that came from in the files. But it is not available, because, as was immediately obvious, the Justice Department violated the law. The government admitted it didn’t release all the material by the due date. Deputy attorney general and Trump stooge Todd Blanche said that more documents would be released “over the next couple of weeks.” He then went on Meet the Press and tied himself in knots in an unpersuasive effort to justify the administration’s lawbreaking.
