Trump over-promises and under-delivers with heavily redacted Epstein cache | Jeffrey Epstein
The disappointment was palpable. In February, a group of 15 right-wing figures visited the White House and gated connectors It was labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1”, but they discovered that they contained little that was new.
Ten months later, it was the world’s turn. Amid much global anticipation on Friday, the US justice department released hundreds of thousands of pages of documents related to the late financier and convicted sex offender. jeffrey epstein.
White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said, “The Trump administration is the most transparent administration in history” and emphasized that it “did more for the victims.” [of Epstein] More than the Democrats ever had.”
But it soon became clear that Donald Trump overpromised and underdelivered. Many of the documents in the data dump had been heavily redacted, with text blacked out and therefore impossible to read. Norm Eisen, executive chairman of the Democracy Defenders Fund, said: “What they published appears to be clearly incomplete and over-edited.”
The documents included extensive photographs of former president Bill Clinton, a Democrat, and appeared to contain few photographs of Trump or documents mentioning him, despite Trump and Epstein’s well-publicized friendship in the 1990s and early 2000s.
Moreover, Friday’s broadcast was far from complete. deputy US attorney general Todd Blanche said “Several hundred thousand” documents were due to be made public on Friday, but the need to protect victims meant thousands more would be made public over the next few weeks. In its initial release, Blanche appeared to contain much less than it promised.
It reeked of confinement. And Trump’s rare silence has done little to dispel that idea. At a White House event on Friday where drug companies agreed to drop some of their prices, the president, usually very chatty about everything under the sun, refused to answer reporters’ off-topic questions.
Trump said: “I’m choosing not to speak and not to ask questions just because this is such a big announcement. I don’t want to pollute the situation by asking questions, which are actually pretty fair questions that I would love to answer. So I think we should stop there.”
The president had spent much of this year resisting disclosure and denouncing the dossiers as a “Democratic hoax.” But a rare bipartisan uprising in Congress forced him to cave in and sign legislation last month mandating the release of all declassified Epstein records in a searchable and downloadable format by the end of December 19. His administration exceeded that deadline, and Democrats rebelled.
Senate minority leader Chuck Schumer said: “The heavily redacted documents released today by the Department of Justice are only a fraction of the total evidence.
“To release a mountain of blacked out pages violates the spirit of transparency and the letter of the law. For example, all 119 pages of one document were completely blacked out. We need answers as to why.”
Jeff Merkley, lead Senate sponsor Epstein Files Transparency ActHe added that administration officials “chose to unlawfully ignore legislation that I led the fight in the Senate to pass. By failing to comply, the administration is blatantly denying ‘equal justice under the law’ to all of Jeffrey Epstein’s victims.”
None of this will surprise critics who saw Trump eviscerate Congress with authoritarian fervor last year. He signed 221 executive orders, more than in his entire first term, and bypassed the legislature on everything from the TikTok ban to repealing USAID to adding his name to the John F Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
Shortly after the partial release of the Epstein files, it was announced that the US military had conducted airstrikes on dozens of Islamic State targets in Syria in retaliation for the attack on US personnel. There were echoes of another Clinton December day in 1998. Air strike order given to Iraq and was accused by members of Congress of trying to distract from impeachment proceedings against him.
But Trump will struggle to distance himself from the Epstein affair; Just 44% of Republicans say they approve of how he’s handled the issue so far. There was some expectation that Friday would bring matters to a head, for better or for worse, as the politically advantageous timing of the Christmas holidays approaches.
Instead, the “most transparent” administration decided to walk slowly and build a wall again. This will only feed the conspiracy theories that Trump once loved but now threaten to consume him.
