The White House and the Epstein files: New York Times rocks D.C. with an inside account of frenzied efforts to keep Trump's ties to pedophile under wraps

(The New York Times)

The talk of the political and journalism worlds is yesterday's release of a New York Times story about the Trump administration's panicked reaction to threats posed by the Epstein files. The headline alone provides a compelling summation of the article's content and import: "Inside the White House freakout over the Epstein files; The president's top advisers gathered in a series of Situation Room meetings as they struggled to contain a scandal engulfing Donald Trump himself."

The Times story is by White House reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, who are authors of the forthcoming Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. Yesterday's article was drawn from reporting for that book, which is scheduled for release on June 23, 2026.

Here is one question The Times report brings immediately to mind: Why were White House staffers in a frantic state if, as Trump claimed in an article at MS NOW, he "had nothing to do" with Epstein, and wasn't "friendly with Jeffrey Epstein."

MS NOW's Steve Benen notes that Trump's claims about the limited nature of his relationship with Epstein were contrary to earlier statements from Trump that he found Epstein to be a "terrific guy" who is "a lot of fun to be with." They also are contrary to video clips that show the two men scoping out young women on a dance floor at Mar-a-Lago, with Trump saying something that caused Epstein to double over in laughter. Benen could only conclude that Trump's claims about a distant relationship with Epstein were "obviously untrue," adding they were "an odd and unnecessary misstep."

I could only reach a similar conclusion about the frenzied nature of White House meetings on the Epstein files. It seems clear that White House staffers knew Trump and Epstein had been close -- with Trump admitting at one point that he had known the financier for 15 years -- and staffers likely knew that such closeness to a convicted sex trafficker could pose an existential threat to the Trump presidency. 

Reporting on The Times' story and forthcoming book will not be going away anytime soon. In fact, several news outlets already have published summaries of what they consider the most fascinating, alarming, consequential or dishy portions of The Times' account. We will be examining those analyses in upcoming posts, but let's start with The Times own "highlight reel," which the paper published under the headline "Six Takeaways From the Story of How the Epstein Files Paralyzed the White House; Senior officials clashed in a series of meetings as they struggled to manage a crisis over the president's refusal to release the documents."

The highlights begin with an introduction from reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan:

Last summer, as pressure mounted on the Trump administration to release material it held on Jeffrey Epstein, the president’s top advisers gathered in a series of meetings, many of them in the White House Situation Room — typically used during national-security crises — as they struggled to contain a scandal engulfing Donald Trump himself. The discussions included the vice president, JD Vance; the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles; the White House counsel, David Warrington; the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche; and the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, among others.

The reporting, which documents many previously undisclosed conversations and conflicts, is drawn from our forthcoming book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. We discovered how the Epstein files consumed and often paralyzed the highest levels of the Trump administration, far more than the public knew.

Here are six takeaways from the article in The Times Magazine:

(1) The government’s national-security bunker became an Epstein war room.

As the calls for disclosure grew louder, Trump’s inner circle spent more and more time in the Situation Room, which became inseparable from the crisis — a guarded space used not to weigh a foreign threat but to steer the president around a political problem concerning a notorious dead pedophile. The officials knew that prominent people, including Trump, were named in the records of F.B.I. agents’ interview notes with witnesses, some of whom were Epstein’s victims. While many of the claims made in the notes were not corroborated evidence, releasing them was, for most of the president’s advisers, a nonstarter.

(2) The president wanted the whole thing buried.

Trump made clear to his aides that he had no interest in releasing anything related to Epstein. He snapped at anyone who raised the issue, and his staff mostly learned to avoid the subject in front of him. They were left to worry and plan among themselves. The president’s refusal to acknowledge that a crisis existed, let alone that it was growing, complicated every path his team wanted to take.

As The Wall Street Journal prepared a damaging article about his relationship with Epstein, the president tried to kill it. He called News Corp.’s chief executive; its owner, Rupert Murdoch; and the paper’s editor in chief, Emma Tucker. The president, practically shouting as he threatened to sue, told Tucker, who is British, that she must “hate America.” When his efforts to stop the article failed and his advisers settled on a limited gesture of transparency, the president went along grudgingly.

(3) Vice President JD Vance wanted to release all the files — even the unsubstantiated material about Trump.

Within the White House itself, no one was more vocal about releasing the Epstein material than the vice president. “This is a huge problem,” Vance told colleagues in the Situation Room. Others thought he appeared panicked about how the issue was splintering the MAGA coalition. Wiles would later describe the vice president to associates as an Epstein conspiracy theorist.

Vance pressed repeatedly for the administration to release everything — even unsubstantiated material about Trump — arguing that Congress would force the issue eventually and that getting ahead of it would earn the White House credit for transparency.

He floated the idea of enlisting Tucker Carlson to interview Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and co-conspirator, in prison, and fretted to colleagues about how the crisis was alienating the young, low-propensity voters who had backed the Trump-Vance ticket in 2024. But the vice president’s suggestions were far from popular with the core Trump team, and most of them went unheeded.

(4) Expletive-laden blowups fractured the top of the Justice Department.

The lingering distrust between Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, and the F.B.I.’s top two officials — Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, then his deputy — exploded over the Epstein controversy. 

The day the Justice Department released a memo intended to put the Epstein matter to rest, Bongino marched into a daily meeting and erupted at Bondi. He and Patel told White House officials that Bondi should resign; at a later meeting, the two said they suspected that she had leaked damaging stories about them. When Wiles accused Bongino of a leak of his own, he stormed out of the Situation Room complex. Bongino privately warned associates that the Epstein crisis would become “President Trump’s Iran-contra.”

(5) Advisers found themselves having a surreal debate over an unverified allegation about Mr. Trump.

At an August meeting in the Situation Room, one of the president’s senior aides raised an uncorroborated and secondhand claim that had been made nearly a decade earlier, about Trump aggressively flicking and sucking a young woman’s nipples until they “looked incredibly painful.”

The claim about Trump had surfaced in 2024 in unsealed court filings from a civil suit unrelated to him, and when the matter was raised by another official, Vance argued for including this and many other accusations on the Justice Department’s website, saying that it would show maximum transparency and that Trump wouldn’t mind, given that he had been accused of worse. Wiles shut that down, saying the president would not, in fact, be fine with releasing it. One official later said it was “surreal” to be debating the nipple accusation in the White House Situation Room.

(6) More than a year later, the files were still damaging the president.

In late March 2026 — a full year into the White House efforts to manage the fiasco — a confidential memo from Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, summarized responses from focus groups conducted with voters earlier that month, in which the Epstein files ranked as the sixth most important political issue -- ahead of crime, the military and being pro-working class. The memo flagged the Epstein issue as "a real negative for some of these voters."