At around 6pm on 17 July 2025, senior Trump administration officials entered the White House Situation Room, the secure complex normally reserved for the most sensitive national security matters.
It was the same setting where, in 2011, Barack Obama, Joe Biden, Hillary Clinton and the national security team watched the raid that killed Osama bin Laden.
This time, however, Trump’s senior advisers gathered without the president to contain a different kind of crisis: the Epstein files.
A Memo That Backfired
Ten days earlier, the Department of Justice and the FBI had issued a joint memo stating that their review found no evidence of a “client list” identifying powerful men who were allegedly supplied with underage girls and young women by Jeffrey Epstein.
The memo was meant to end years of speculation and pressure over the release of the massive Epstein-related archive held by the department. Instead, it triggered a furious backlash, particularly among Trump’s MAGA supporters.
The situation was about to worsen. The Wall Street Journal was preparing to publish a report about Trump’s relationship with Epstein, and the president’s attempts to stop it had failed.
Inside the Situation Room, Vice President JD Vance sat at the head of the table and told those present: “This is a big problem.”
Around him were Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, White House Counsel David Warrington, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, Deputy Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich, Communications Director Steven Cheung, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, Assistant Attorney General Stanley Woodward Jr, and Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair. Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel joined by phone.
Vance appeared alarmed by the division the Epstein issue had caused inside the MAGA coalition. Some officials felt he had become convinced of the darkest theories around the case, including the belief that powerful figures inside the ruling class had conspired to suppress the truth.
According to officials, Vance pushed for the release of all Epstein files as quickly as possible, arguing that Congress would eventually force the administration’s hand. He also floated the idea of having Tucker Carlson interview Epstein’s associate Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, hoping she might publicly say Trump had done nothing wrong.
The Strategy: Release or Delay?
Vance believed the administration should publish everything, including unproven allegations involving Trump. If the administration released the material first, he argued, it could claim transparency and reduce the force of conspiracy theories.
Not everyone agreed.
Blair warned the group that their communications strategy had already helped create the crisis. If Justice Department officials wanted to hold a press conference, he said, there would be a lot of preparation needed first.
Blanche, Trump’s former defence lawyer, offered what he saw as the safest options.
The first was to petition federal courts in Florida and New York to unseal grand jury materials from earlier Epstein-related cases. Because such material is normally protected, Blanche expected the courts to reject the request. That would allow the administration to appear transparent while blaming judges for blocking disclosure.
The second option was for Justice Department lawyers to interview Maxwell and publish the transcript. Blanche offered to conduct the interview himself.
When the idea of giving Maxwell something in return was raised, Warrington noted that possible options included a pardon or sentence reduction. Several officials strongly objected.
Cheung warned that pardoning Maxwell, a convicted sex trafficker of underage girls, would create a major crisis. Blair also rejected the idea, arguing that any favour shown to Maxwell would destroy the credibility of anything positive she might say about Trump.
The meeting ended with the group settling on the grand jury option. Wiles said she would raise it with Trump and suggest that he post on Truth Social calling for the release of grand jury materials.
The Wall Street Journal Report Lands
While officials were still in the secure room, the Wall Street Journal report went online. Because mobile phones were banned in the Situation Room, a staffer brought printed copies.
The report said Trump and others had contributed birthday messages collected by Maxwell for Epstein’s 50th birthday in 2003. The card attributed to Trump reportedly included a hand-drawn image of a naked woman and a fictional exchange between Trump and Epstein about a “wonderful secret”, ending with Trump’s signature.
Before publication, Trump had tried to stop the story by calling News Corp chief executive Robert Thomson, owner Rupert Murdoch, and Wall Street Journal editor Emma Tucker. He reportedly accused Tucker of hating America and threatened legal action.
The attempts failed.
As officials read the story in silence, Wiles prepared and posted a statement denying the report. Trump then followed the strategy discussed in the Situation Room, posting that he had asked Attorney General Bondi to produce relevant grand jury testimony, subject to court approval. He called the Epstein matter a Democratic “hoax”.
A Crisis the White House Underestimated
From the outside, Trump appeared politically dominant in early summer 2025. He had ordered strikes on nuclear sites in Iran, issued sweeping immigration orders, pushed his major domestic legislation through Congress, and used government power against opponents.
Behind the scenes, however, the Epstein crisis was paralysing the administration more than the public knew. Advisers publicly projected confidence, but internally the issue weighed on senior officials more than any matter since the Russia investigation during Trump’s first term.
Part of the problem was self-inflicted.
For years, influential figures in the MAGA ecosystem had pushed the Epstein files as proof of a hidden elite conspiracy. Elon Musk questioned why the client list had not been released. Donald Trump Jr and JD Vance used the issue politically. Tucker Carlson and Charlie Kirk demanded disclosure. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino repeatedly claimed the government was hiding Epstein’s “black book” or client list.
Trump himself was more cautious. Asked in September 2024 whether he would release the Epstein client list, he said he would “certainly look at it” and had “no problem” with it, but he sounded reluctant. He later told Marjorie Taylor Greene that releasing the files could hurt some of his friends.
When Trump returned to power in 2025, his advisers were trapped by expectations they had helped create.
Pam Bondi’s Misstep
The crisis intensified on 21 February 2025, when Attorney General Pam Bondi appeared on Fox News and seemed to confirm that Epstein’s client list existed. Asked whether the Justice Department would release names, she replied: “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.”
Six days later, the White House communications team arranged for right-wing influencers to attend a briefing in the Roosevelt Room.
Bondi and her team arrived with binders labelled as Epstein files and distributed them to the influencers. Some officials in the room panicked because the White House had not reviewed the material. One official quickly searched for Trump’s name and found it within a few pages.
The timing was disastrous. British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was visiting the White House that day, and officials feared the Epstein release would dominate Trump’s press conference.
Influencers were told not to publish the contents until after the press conference, but they quickly posted photos of themselves holding the files outside the White House.
The backlash came fast. The documents contained flight logs, contact lists and other Epstein-related material, but much of it had already been public. Influencers felt they had been misled.
Bondi had promised more releases, but the story soon changed.
Millions of Pages and No Easy Exit
Justice Department officials were reviewing the Epstein archive, but it took months before they grasped its scale: more than three million pages, and possibly as many as six million.
Officials first focused on FBI interview summaries, known as 302 forms. Some involved Epstein victims. These records were preliminary and often unverified. Trump’s name appeared in them many times, along with the names of other prominent figures.
In June, Bondi and Blanche briefed Trump. Blanche reportedly told him that the files contained no major new information, but did include child sexual abuse material that could not be released and some references to Trump that were not significant.
Trump’s advisers rejected full transparency, especially anything that could harm the president.
A small group then prepared the July memo explaining why no more information would be released. But even this process was troubled. No one wanted their name on it, and FBI leadership was deeply uneasy.
Bongino, now FBI deputy director, strongly objected. He argued that the memo contradicted earlier promises of transparency. Patel privately shared some of his concerns, but in an internal email he supported the memo as the best path forward.
The Memo Becomes a Political Earthquake
On 7 July, the Justice Department and FBI released the unsigned memo. It said officials had searched databases, hard drives, network drives, task force areas, safes and offices, and reviewed more than 300 gigabytes of evidence.
The conclusion: there was no Epstein client list.
The memo also affirmed the official finding that Epstein died by suicide in 2019 and said the Trump administration would not release more information or pursue further investigations into unnamed third parties.
The administration expected closure. Instead, the memo became a political earthquake.
Many Trump supporters saw it as a betrayal. The surveillance video released to support the suicide finding made things worse because it appeared to contain a missing minute. Bondi initially attributed the gap to a nightly system reset. Although the full video was later recovered and released, the damage was done.
Anger turned not only against Bondi, but also against Patel and Bongino, two figures who had built credibility by promising disclosure.
On the day the memo was released, Bongino erupted at Bondi during a Justice Department meeting, accusing her of mishandling the issue from the beginning.
Two days later, he and Patel met Wiles, Bondi and other officials in the Situation Room. Wiles confronted Bongino over claims that he had leaked a sensitive Epstein-related story. Bongino denied it angrily, offered $100,000 if she could prove it, and said he had warned them all along.
When Wiles told him they were all now part of the response, Bongino said he was out and stormed out of the room.
Some of his allies wanted him to resign and become a MAGA martyr. White House advisers urged him to stay, fearing his resignation over Epstein would badly damage Trump.
Trump Turns on His Own Base
On 12 July, Trump defended Bondi on Truth Social and urged his supporters to stop wasting time on Epstein, “somebody that nobody cares about”.
He was frustrated with prominent allies including Charlie Kirk, Tucker Carlson and Megyn Kelly, who continued demanding answers. Trump even called Kirk after a Turning Point USA event became dominated by complaints about Epstein.
Kirk, Donald Trump Jr and Vance understood the danger better than many senior officials. The younger, more online segment of Trump’s base was not letting the issue go.
Vance warned that some low-propensity younger voters who had supported the Trump-Vance ticket in 2024 could be lost if the administration appeared to be covering up Epstein files.
But the main obstacle remained Trump himself. He wanted the issue buried and attacked those who raised it.
On 16 July, in an angry Truth Social post, Trump called the Epstein controversy a Democratic hoax and insulted members of his own base as “former supporters” and “weaklings” who had fallen for nonsense.
Congress Forces the Issue
As Trump tried to move on, pressure in Congress grew. Democrats began treating Epstein as a central political weapon against him, while some Republicans joined the push for disclosure.
Republican Thomas Massie and Democrat Ro Khanna introduced the Epstein Files Transparency Act in the House. Although they initially lacked the votes, the bill became the next major battlefield.
By late July, the White House learned that the House Oversight Committee, chaired by Republican James Comer, was preparing a subpoena requiring the Justice Department to turn over Epstein files.
Another crisis meeting followed. Officials discussed building a searchable website containing Epstein-related material, hoping to flood MAGA media circles with a large database of authentic documents. Blanche could then promote the administration’s transparency approach on Joe Rogan’s podcast.
The idea sounded simple. It was not.
The website never launched as first imagined.
Maxwell Interview and New Complications
In late July, Blanche interviewed Ghislaine Maxwell over two days. She reportedly said she had never seen suspicious conduct by Trump and did not recall him sending the birthday card described by the Wall Street Journal.
Soon after, Maxwell was quietly transferred to a lower-security federal prison in Texas, a move that initially went unexplained and fuelled public anger. Months later, Blanche said Maxwell had faced multiple threats to her life.
By August, senior officials were spending more time in the Situation Room as they tried to manage the fallout. The secure complex became part of the crisis itself: the place where Trump’s inner circle attempted to steer him through a scandal that threatened careers across politics, business and science.
At another meeting on 13 August, Vance again pushed for releasing as much material as possible. He suggested he appear on Joe Rogan’s podcast, saying Rogan would interview him but not Blanche.
Officials also debated the risk of publishing unverified allegations involving Trump. One allegation from older civil case material involving Virginia Giuffre and another Epstein victim, Sarah Ransome, raised particular concern. Some advisers had barely heard of it. Others dismissed it as baseless. But if such material appeared on a Justice Department-backed public database, it could gain new legitimacy regardless of credibility problems.
Vance argued that releasing even difficult material would show the administration was going further than required. Wiles replied that Trump would never accept that. The matter was dropped.
One official later described the discussion as “surreal”.
The Law Trump Could Not Stop
For weeks, officials believed they had a way out. The House subpoena focused on Justice Department documents, not civil case material. The administration could comply narrowly and withhold certain records if it explained why.
That strategy collapsed as more lawmakers, including Republicans such as Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, demanded broader disclosure.
By mid-November, the bipartisan coalition the White House had feared since summer had enough votes to force Trump’s hand. The House and Senate passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and on 19 November Trump signed it into law.
The law went further than the subpoena. It required broad disclosure and warned that no record could be withheld, delayed or redacted based on embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity, including material related to any government official, public figure or foreign dignitary.
In other words, it demanded the kind of release Trump had spent most of the year trying to avoid.
Lawmakers had not grasped the scale of what they had ordered. The files ran into the millions of pages. According to a New York Times analysis, Trump, his family and locations such as Mar-a-Lago were mentioned more than 38,000 times.
The Trump Justice Department maintained there was no client list. But the episode became another warning sign in an era when trust in the American justice system was already collapsing.
The Scandal That Would Not Disappear
Among the files was a January 2020 email in which a federal prosecutor told a colleague that Trump had flown on Epstein’s private plane far more often than previously known.
Flight records showed at least eight trips between 1993 and 1996, sometimes with his second wife, Marla Maples, and sometimes with his children. Trump had said in January 2024 that he had never been on the plane.
By February 2026, after more than 3.5 million documents had been released, the Justice Department said no further release was necessary.
Trump insisted there was nothing incriminating, telling reporters at the White House: “There are a lot of questions about it, but nothing that implicates me.”
But the political damage had not faded.
In March 2026, Trump’s pollster Tony Fabrizio circulated an internal memo summarising focus groups. The Epstein files were listed as the sixth most important issue raised, after inflation, the economy, foreign policy, immigration and healthcare, but ahead of data centres, military matters, crime and working-class support.
The memo said there was “persistent mention” of the Epstein files in every group, calling it a real negative point among some voters.
The crisis exposed a truth that some of Trump’s closest advisers had spent months refusing to see.
Trump could pressure institutions, turn federal power against opponents and bring the world’s wealthiest men into the Oval Office. But in the end, he could not bury Jeffrey Epstein.
