\n<\/p>\n
A bill in<\/span> Congress demanding the release of the Epstein files now has the official, albeit reluctant, endorsement of the president himself. And so the question naturally arises: If Donald Trump supports the bill calling on the president (i.e., him) to release the files, why not simply \u2026 release them?<\/p>\n Trump reportedly hasn\u2019t given his advisers or allies a rationale for why he won\u2019t do so, leaving them to invent reasons of their own. The answer they\u2019ve come up with is that Trump is innocent and is acting guilty for no reason whatsoever. \u201cHe looks like he has something to hide even if he doesn\u2019t,\u201d asserts the Wall Street Journal editorial page. \u201cThis is a self-inflicted wound,\u201d complains Megyn Kelly.<\/p>\n But why has Trump chosen to inflict this wound upon himself? A Trump ally suggests to Politico that the president, like many young children, is expressing what some might call oppositional defiant disorder: \u201cPOTUS doesn\u2019t like to be told what to do or give Dems a win, so he\u2019s been fighting it.\u201d This theory might make more sense if releasing the Epstein files hadn\u2019t been Trump\u2019s own idea before he abruptly reversed course earlier this year.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s own responses to this very question are even less reassuring.<\/p>\n Asked on Air Force One last Friday why he won\u2019t just release the files, Trump snapped at a female reporter, \u201cQuiet, piggy.\u201d As a longtime married man, I have seen enough rom-coms to recognize the trope where Mr. Wrong, after having maintained a thin veneer of suitability for 90 percent of the movie while misbehaving just enough to make the audience root against him, suddenly rips off the mask and delivers a crass or entitled speech that makes the heroine snap out of her infatuation. A set piece in which the bad guy, under suspicion of misogynistic conduct and consorting with a trafficker of teenage girls, launches a sexist attack on an inquisitive female journalist would be too ham-handed even for the writers at the Hallmark Channel.<\/p>\n Trump apparently concluded that this scenery-chewing performance was too subtle and conciliatory. So when an ABC reporter asked the same question at the White House yesterday, he promptly assailed the reporter\u2019s \u201cattitude,\u201d called the question \u201cinsubordinate and just a terrible question,\u201d accused the journalist of being \u201ca terrible person and a terrible reporter,\u201d threatened to take away ABC\u2019s broadcast license, and again did not answer the question.<\/p>\n Trump\u2019s bellicose replies are so substantively vacant that it is difficult to discern the administration\u2019s actual position. Having helped whip up paranoia that the \u201cdeep state\u201d was burying the Jeffrey Epstein case to protect the elite, Trump pledged to release these files as president. But Trump seems to have forgotten these promises, and the Justice Department and the FBI announced over the summer that, after an \u201cexhaustive review\u201d of these files, \u201cwe did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.\u201d<\/p>\n Perhaps the DOJ didn\u2019t share its findings with Trump, given that he wrote on Truth Social last week, \u201cI will be asking A.G. Pam Bondi, and the Department of Justice, together with our great patriots at the FBI, to investigate Jeffrey Epstein\u2019s involvement and relationship with Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman, J.P. Morgan, Chase, and many other people and institutions, to determine what was going on with them, and him.\u201d<\/p>\n So maybe there is evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties? Apparently so, because Bondi immediately accepted the assignment, explaining this morning that new information had driven her decision, which only coincidentally came after Trump ordered her to look into various political enemies.<\/p>\n In place of any explanation as to why Trump is withholding the files, his staff has taken to threatening retribution. \u201cThe Democrats are going to come to regret this,\u201d a White House official told Politico. \u201cLet\u2019s start with Stacey Plaskett. You think we\u2019re not going to make a scene of this?\u201d<\/p>\n Plaskett is a nonvoting Democratic delegate from the Virgin Islands who exchanged texts with Epstein during a 2019 congressional hearing. If the revenge campaign is going to start with her, one wonders where it will end: A state legislative aide? An assistant sewage commissioner in Omaha?<\/p>\n I suspect that the threat of making Plaskett\u2019s career collateral damage will not deter Democrats from continuing to demand the release of the files.<\/p>\n Trump is now left simultaneously insisting that Epstein is too tedious to merit discussion\u2014\u201cpretty boring stuff\u201d\u2014and is also the nuclear bomb that will destroy the entire Democratic Party, or at least an obscure elected official or two. In this way, the Epstein investigation exists in a state of uncertainty, both alive and dead, like Schr\u00f6dinger\u2019s cat\u2014trapped in a box that, like the ones holding the Epstein files, cannot be opened.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" A bill in Congress demanding the release of the Epstein files now has the official, albeit reluctant, endorsement of the president himself. And so the question naturally arises: If Donald Trump supports the bill calling on the president (i.e., him) to release the files, why not simply \u2026 release them? Trump reportedly hasn\u2019t given his<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":34454,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[3703,1927,431,71,1714],"class_list":{"0":"post-34453","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-social-issues","8":"tag-epstein","9":"tag-hours","10":"tag-saga","11":"tag-trumps","12":"tag-wild"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34453","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=34453"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34453\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/34454"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=34453"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=34453"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=34453"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}