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Once again, I’m apologizing at the top of a longer-than-I’d-like-it-to-be Saturday night column. Nonetheless, whether you’re just getting in from a holiday party or waking up early for a busy day (or perhaps late, given ongoing festivities), I hope you’ll take a moment to work your way through all of it.
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Don’t mistake two of this week’s attention-getter stories, Trump renaming the Kennedy Center in his own honor and the unveiling of unpresidential plaques at the White House deriding Presidents Obama and Biden, for anything other than what they are. They are clickbait, designed to foment outrage. An effort to distract us from the main event, the Justice Department’s failure to release the Epstein files, which Congress required it to do by last Friday in the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
There are no surprises here. Republicans were willing to let the government shutdown linger to avoid reopening and the inevitable passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act. Even after the shutdown ended, House Speaker Mike Johnson delayed swearing in newly elected Arizona Democratic Representative Adelita Grijalva for 50 days after her September 2025 special election because she was the vote that would put the discharge petition for the Act in motion. They may have voted for the bill, but that was only after public pressure had made its passage, and the consequences for members who didn’t vote for it, all but inevitable.
So while there are lots of pictures of President Clinton, there are very few of Trump, and reporting that one that was initially released was clawed back. By the end of the day, the AP was reporting 16 items had been removed from the released documents. There is page after page of redaction, and also redactions on documents that look interesting but have all possible meaning and context removed. It’s not exactly full-throated compliance with a law called the “Transparency Act.”
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None of this is surprising. Not DOJ’s failure to comply with the law—Friday was the deadline Congress set for turning over the files, not a start date, which was how DOJ treated it. Not DOJ’s failure to release material that would give the survivors more insight into the crimes committed against them and who was responsible. That’s important for survivors, not just so that they can understand and heal, but because they’ve had to fight to be believed, and they have been so easily cast aside.
There was one instance in the release that illustrates this. Maria Farmer had reported in 1996 that Epstein stole nude photos of her sisters Annie, then 16, and a younger sister who was 12 at the time. Among the documents released Friday is one that confirms she was telling the truth. She came forward despite Epstein’s threats of harm to her. She was broadly disbelieved.
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Also lacking in the release was anything that clarified Donald Trump’s relationship with Jeffrey Epstein. There were plenty of salacious photos of Bill Clinton—interesting in light of Trump Chief of Staff Susie Wiles’ admission to Vanity Fair that Trump wrongly claimed the files implicated the former president in visits to Epstein Island. But there is nothing that helps us better understand Trump’s involvement. Wiles acknowledged that Trump “was on [Epstein’s] plane ... he’s on the manifest. They were, you know, sort of young, single, whatever — I know it’s a passé word but sort of young, single playboys together.” Trump has denied any wrongdoing but is apparently unwilling to release materials that would bear that out if it’s the case.
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