Donald is not having a good Thursday. No, Sir, he is not. Just for openers, South Park has impugned his masculinity by depicting him as a cartoon character with a miniscule male member and if that wasn’t bad enough, they depicted his lover as none other than Satan himself. Trump could actually use an audience with the Prince Of Darkness right now, because of his own volition he’s only digging his own hole deeper and deeper. He had (another) Oval Office meltdown. Susie, where’s the Valium?
— How Trump sees it: Trump has ruminated about the Epstein fallout for weeks. “They’re going to accuse me of some funny business,” he said recently in the Oval Office, according to a Republican close to the White House who personally heard the president make these comments. Trump again maintained his distance from Epstein’s criminal behavior, but lamented: “They’re going to fuck me anyways.”
— How Trump world sees it: Two people close to the White House downplayed the news to Playbook’s Dasha Burns last night. “Everyone has already seen pictures of [Trump and Epstein] together,” said the first. “None of this reporting is new information.” “The government has long had these files,” they continued. “If there was really a ‘there’ there, it would have come out. The idea that Democrats wouldn’t have used this against Trump if there was really something to it is crazy.” Added the second person: Trump “knows this is nonsense and he didn’t do anything wrong. He was actually in a good mood this afternoon.”
And yet: If that’s true, the White House’s handling of the Epstein ordeal so far is mystifying. Why not just let this news come out after Bondi briefed Trump, with his name among hundreds of others? Why tell the WSJ, as comms director Steven Cheung did, that its reporting was “fake news” if, in fact, it was information known to the White House and is true? Why did Trump deny in an interview weeks ago that Bondi had briefed him on the matter?
— How MAGA sees it: We’re picking up on another talking point in our conversations with people in the broader MAGA universe: What does Trump’s name being “mentioned” really mean? (To our minds, it’s a fair question — and one where seeing the underlying files could be helpful.) “What is the definition of a ‘file’?” far-right activist and MAGA influencer Laura Loomer questioned Playbook last night when we asked for her reaction to the WSJ story. “If they’re making these claims against President Trump, they need to define what a ‘file’ is. Are they trying to say that a file is somebody’s name in an address book? I have over 7,000 contacts in my address book. Some of those people in my address book have committed crimes. Does that mean I’m implicated in their crimes? President Trump is not a pedophile. And I look forward to seeing him sue every journalist and publication that is trying to imply that he is one.”
To be clear: At this point, the publicly available information does not point to a crime on Trump’s part. But it does suggest a cover-up. Which leads us to one big question:
WHAT DID THEY KNOW AND WHEN DID THEY KNOW IT?: (Apologies to the late Sen. Howard Baker.) A tantalizing line 16 paragraphs into the WSJ story notes that “FBI Director Kash Patel has privately told other government officials that Trump’s name appeared in the files, according to people close to the administration.” Just how widely this was disseminated is a question that major news organizations are going to be running down in the hours and days ahead.
“Right now, everyone should be asking whether the highest levels of the federal government — including but not limited to the president, the VP, the AG, the FBI director and possibly even some Republican leaders in Congress, depending on what they knew and when — have been misleading the American public for weeks, if not months,” our POLITICO colleague Ankush Khardori (himself a former federal prosecutor) tells Playbook.
To that end, we put out a few lines of inquiry:
The VP: We checked in with a spokesperson for Vice President JD Vance about when he learned that Trump’s name was in the documents. We did not hear back.
The speaker: A spokesperson for House Speaker Mike Johnson did not respond to Playbook’s request for comment last night about when Johnson learned Bondi briefed Trump.
The AG: Asked about the reporting in the WSJ and NYT, DOJ spokesperson Gates McGavick said this to our colleague Josh Gerstein: “This is a collection of falsehoods and innuendo designed to push a bullshit narrative and drive clicks.”
No, it is not that. This is a deadly serious situation. Deadly for Donald that is. The Department of Justice will have somebody speak with Ghislaine Maxwell as soon as today, most probably Todd Blanche, Trump’s former personal attorney. The prediction on this is that in exchange for Maxwell exonerating Trump, she will receive a reduced sentence. But if I were her, I would not expect to actually see the daylight outside prison for another three and a half years. Trump does not want Maxwell on the street while he’s still in office. Watch and see.
The way this will go is that it will be ballyhooed that the DOJ offered no concessions or inducements to Maxwell — when in fact that’s the first thing they’re going to do. The gag is that by late 2028, all this will have been forgotten. And then some edict allowing Maxwell to leave prison early will register. Again, mark your calendars. All the smart people in politics are predicting this, I merely recite.
I think you are spot-on Ursula. Like you say, all we can do is watch and see. It sounds exactly like tRump something would do.
Sorry, something tRump. dyslexic typing.
He’ll take his best shot and get what he wants and then Maxwell will get the benefit of her bargain in late 2028 or even January of 2029. Or maybe past that, if Trump post dates some kind of an executive order giving her a commuted sentence. The idea is that we’ll all have forgotten by then.
Channeling your inner Yoda you are. 🙂
I hope that G-Max has her lawyers present. I would also like to have an impartial witness, possibly a Democratic member of congress in the room.
He’s finding out it’s not the cover-up – or indeed the cover-up of the cover-up.
It’s the perception, the belief, that there is a cover-up of a cover-up that does the damage.
Who would have thought that fanning the flames of innuendo and suggestion could cause a fire that consumes you?
Karma’s back baby.
Hey fat man…NO ONE literally wants to phuck you…that’s why you raped girls under age, and your ‘wife’ doesn’t want you to touch her. You not only smell like shit and hairspray, you are as empty as an upside-down glass of piss. Oh…you meant it figuratively, if you are capable of that mental feat. Listen orangebob shitpants…the American people could wrap you in chicken wire,(so your bloated ass wouldn’t float back up to the surface), take you out to sea and dump you overboard, and nothing can repair all the evil you have loosed upon us. Do us a favor, fall down the stairs, and get on to YOUR JUDGEMENT FROM GOD. What a phucking whining baby.