jacksonlamb
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5h ·www.nytimes.com/2026/06/10/magazine/trump-epstein-files-white-house-vance-doj.html
Trump’s senior team, including JD Vance, Susie Wiles, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, Dan Bongino, Todd Blanche, and others, convened multiple emergency meetings in the White House Situation Room specifically to manage the Epstein fallout. The same room where Obama’s national security team watched the bin Laden raid was being used by Trump’s people to strategize around their boss’s connections to a convicted child sex trafficker.
Vance, according to the Times, was alarmed, and even floated the idea of getting Tucker Carlson to interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, worried that the cover-up strategy would cost Trump young voters. Wiles and Blair, by contrast, initially dismissed the crisis as fringe noise. Bongino, who left his podcast gig to join the FBI, warned them repeatedly that they were miscalculating.
Bondi made things worse at nearly every turn, like going on Fox News to suggest a client list was “sitting on her desk,” then distributing unvetted binders full of largely already-public documents to MAGA influencers in the Roosevelt Room. The White House scrambled to pull the influencers out before they could discuss what was in the binders during Trump’s press conference with British Prime Minister Starmer.
Bongino ultimately exploded at Bondi in a DOJ meeting, and later stormed out of a Situation Room confrontation with Susie Wiles. He privately called the whole situation “Trump’s Iran-Contra.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act eventually passed with bipartisan support and was signed into law in November, once it became clear that it had a veto proof majority. The resulting document release referenced Trump more than 38,000 times. Flight records showed he flew on Epstein’s private jet at least eight times between 1993 and 1996, despite Trump’s January 2024 claim that he’d never been on the plane.
Trump’s own pollster, Tony Fabrizio, circulated an internal memo in March 2026 noting that “Epstein files” ranked as the sixth most important issue in focus groups, coming up in every single group and registering as “a real negative” with key voters.
The president spent the better part of a year trying to make this disappear. It hasn’t.
We will never let it.