Drip, Drip, Drip

How much more don’t we know?

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The Situation Room at the White House is designed to track a crisis. It’s where President Obama watched Navy SEALSs take out Osama bin Laden, where President Johnson strategized Vietnam, and President Kennedy monitored the Cuban Missile Crisis.

On Monday, behind its soundproof walls, it was used to strong-arm a Republican member of Congress into changing her mind about releasing the Epstein files. Rep. Lauren Boebert is one of a growing number of Republicans who want the Department of Justice to release files on convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

Donald Trump is scared. He is scared of what’s in the Epstein files — so scared that keeping them concealed has been a central preoccupation of his second term.

It is one reason the shutdown lasted so long and was likely part of the calculus of the eight Senators who capitulated, allowing the government to reopen. They reasoned that Trump was hyper-motivated to keep the government closed and they had no leverage to move him.

If the government remained shuttered, Speaker Mike Johnson could continue to deny Arizona’s Congresswoman-elect Adelita Grijalva her rightful seat in the House of Representatives, which in turn would keep a discharge petition requiring a vote on releasing the Epstein files from passing.

And it worked — for 42 days. As of Wednesday, the government reopened. Grijalva has finally been sworn in. Her first official act was to sign the discharge petition. A vote on releasing the Epstein files will happen next week. While it looks like it will easily pass the House, passage in the Senate will be an uphill battle.

As a reminder, Jeffrey Epstein was a disgraced financier and convicted sex offender who died by suicide in jail while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges in 2019.

To reinvigorate the story that has maintained back-burner status since the congressional summer recess, yesterday, House Democrats released a trove of 20,000 documents, courtesy of the Epstein estate. The never-before-seen cache includes revelatory emails that will do nothing to help the president’s efforts to squash the story. These documents are separate from the government’s Epstein files.

In one 2011 email from Epstein to his co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump… [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned.”

The Democrats redacted the name of the victim, but the Trump administration outed her because they believe it was to the president’s advantage. Virginia Giuffre was asked in a civil case in 2016 if she had ever seen Trump and Epstein together. She replied that she didn’t remember. Giuffre cannot be interviewed or deposed further because she died by suicide in April.

In a 2015 email from journalist Michael Wolff to Epstein, Wolff wrote, “I think you should let him [Trump] hang himself. If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you valuable PR and political currency.”

Epstein replied to a 2018 text from a redacted sender, “its wild. because i am the one able to take him down… I know how dirty donald is.”

In an email to Wolff in 2019, Epstein wrote, “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked Ghislaine to stop.”

The president has long denied knowledge of Epstein’s exploits. While none of these emails are smoking guns, they read as if Trump had more knowledge about what Epstein was up to than he has admitted.

You may wonder why this story – more than sending marauding ICE agents into American cities, or kicking millions off Medicaid, or withholding food assistance from hungry children, or filling his Cabinet with dangerously unqualified people, or using the presidency to enrich himself by a factor of billions of dollars — is the one angering the MAGA faithfuls and forcing them to question their blind loyalty.

As ironic as it sounds, Trump built his entire political identity on the promise of exposing the dishonest establishment that has repeatedly shafted the little guy. Remember all that bluster about “draining the swamp?”

“It was not some incidental issue or tangential issue. It was his central theme that the American corrupt elite had betrayed forgotten Americans,” Rep. Ro Khanna, Democrat of California, told The Washington Post.

No issue exemplifies Trump’s cause célèbre quite like the Epstein scandal. The president was meant to be the hero of the story. Finally, triumphantly, releasing the files, and in so doing, exposing a cabal of corruption and cover-ups. After all, he and his allies have been talking about it for the better part of a decade.

And MAGA ate it up, hoping that the release would reveal an Epstein client list replete with big-name Democrats. But then the story folded in on itself, and Trump lost control of the narrative. In July, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the vaunted client list did not exist and the files would not be released.

Now, the president is being embroiled and implicated in a political twist of fate of his own making, forcing him to change his tune. He now claims the files are “a hoax,” perpetrated by “Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration,” to smear him.

Which is why those who have believed him, have stood by him through a litany of questionably moral and legal actions, are feeling betrayed. It is why this story, above all the others, has such staying power. And has dogged him since the summer.

His obsession with containing the damage has made matters worse. The Monday meeting with Boebert, one of only four Republicans who signed the discharge petition, included Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche. The meeting was first reported by CNN.

If there is “nothing to see here,” then why the full-court press?

Ultimately, Boebert withstood the pressure, posting on social media, “Together, we remain committed to ensuring transparency for the American people.”

White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, spun the meeting differently, saying, “Doesn’t that show the level of transparency, when we are willing to sit down with members of Congress and address their concerns?” Um, no. Meetings aren’t held in the super secure Situation Room to “address concerns.”

It also didn’t help the president’s cause when Blanche met with the imprisoned Maxwell for two days over the summer, after which the president said, “I wish her well.” Maxwell, Epstein’s convicted accomplice and procurer of girls and young women, was then upgraded to a much cushier minimum security facility.

She will reportedly ask for a commutation of her sentence. When asked if the president was considering a pardon, Leavitt’s response was not unequivocal. “It’s not something he’s talking about or even thinking about at this moment in time.” At this moment? How about never?

All this while the MAGA mediasphere is still calling for releasing the files, if for no other reason than to put the story to bed. Megyn Kelly has called it a “self-inflicted wound.” Republican pollster Mark Mitchell said, “All he had to do was smash the oligarchy. He’s become the oligarchy.”

The fact that the far-right is admitting that Trump has become an oligarch is not nothing. In all fights, Trump tries to stay on the offensive. In this one, he is clearly on his heels, and pressure is mounting by the hour.

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Stay Steady,
Dan