Analysis: Trump's latest bid to end Epstein storm: Weaponizing the federal government
The Justice Department and the head of the US intelligence community are now openly operating as fully weaponized tools to pursue the president's personal political needs in a degradation of a governing system meant to be an antidote to king-like patronage.
This new dynamic underpinned a wild Oval Office press appearance by Trump on Tuesday, his latest attempt to put out the Epstein fire that had only the now-familiar effect of feeding the flames.
The extent of the president's capture of two key agencies that are vital to keeping Americans safe was revealed when a reporter asked a question about his administration's refusal to open all files related to the Epstein case.
The president pivoted to a tirade against Barack Obama, accusing the former president of staging a treasonous coup against him — basing his assault on a convenient and misleading memo about Russia's 2016 election meddling that was released last week by Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard.
The Justice Department has also been activated, yet again, to give Trump cover.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced Tuesday that he will take the highly unusual move of meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell — who was sentenced to 20 years in federal prison for carrying out a yearslong scheme with Epstein to groom and sexually abuse underage girls — to ask what she knows but hasn't so far told. Epstein died in jail while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
'I don't know anything about it,' Trump told reporters in the Oval Office Tuesday.
This seems a stretch, since Blanche is Trump's former personal lawyer and plans to speak with a prisoner who has a clear incentive to offer testimony that could help a president who has the power to let her out of prison.
Other new developments in the deepening Epstein intrigue Tuesday only underscored the president's failed attempts to extinguish it.
House Speaker Mike Johnson has said he does not plan to allow votes on any measures related to the Epstein matter until September, effectively bringing forward a summer recess to postpone consideration of a bipartisan measure demanding transparency and the release of files on the Epstein case.
Meanwhile, the House Oversight Committee is expected to subpoena Maxwell as 'expeditiously as possible,' a committee source told CNN.
And CNN's KFile on Tuesday reported new details about Trump's relationship with Epstein, including photos taken at the future president's 1993 wedding to Marla Maples. The pictures pre-date any of Epstein's known legal issues, and the White House described them as out-of-context frame grabs of videos and pictures to 'disgustingly infer something nefarious.'
Trump's aim in the Oval Office was clear.
He was cooking up a new slate of programing — featuring his favorite targets, including Obama and Hillary Clinton, among others — for the MAGA media machine, hoping to replace days of coverage of his administration's missteps.
But there was also a more sinister aspect to his comments. Even though Gabbard's claims are easily disproved, the president implied that he was serious about training the power of the US government on his political foes.
'It's time to start — after what they did to me and — whether it's right or wrong, it's time to go after people,' Trump said. 'Obama's been caught directly … his orders are on the paper. The papers are signed, the papers came right out of their office.'
Obama has not been 'caught directly.' Gabbard's memo, which included newly declassified documents, claimed that the administration hatched a 'treasonous conspiracy' that Russia interfered in the 2016 election to help Trump.
Gabbard, who has a political incentive to repair her relationship with the president, highlighted intelligence findings that the Russians did not change election results in 2016 through attacks on voting systems. But the Obama administration never said that this happened, focusing instead of cyberattacks on Democratic campaign officials and other online disruption efforts.
Gabbard appears to be arguing that since there was no successful hacking of election machines, there was no election meddling, and that therefore the whole saga was invented by the Obama team to keep Trump out of power.
Obama's office rebutted what it called the White House's latest example of 'nonsense and misinformation,' calling it bizarre, ridiculous and 'a weak attempt at distraction.'
But in Trump's looking-glass world, that statement was taken as evidence of guilt. 'It's the art of deflection coming from former President Obama, as well as his friends who are still in Congress today,' Gabbard said on Fox News in an interview with the president's daughter-in-law Lara Trump.
As he often does, Trump seemed to project offenses of which he was accused, with far more evidence, onto his opponents. 'What they did to this country in 2016 … but going up all the way to 2020 and the election — they tried to rig the election and they got caught,' he said.
The president's furious tirade again revealed his frenetic mindset over a situation he repeatedly tries to fix but keeps worsening.
The episode started because some MAGA fans are angry that Trump and his team have not lived up to vows to release all Epstein files after promising to do so during the campaign. This means they've become, in the eyes of some base activists, the 'deep state' they once decried.
The FBI and Justice Department issued a memo this month saying there was no evidence for a conspiracy theory that Epstein left a list of famous clients or that he was murdered in prison rather than taking his own life in 2019.
Trump is deeply frustrated his supporters won't accept this. 'We had the Greatest Six Months of any President in the History of our Country, and all the Fake News wants to talk about is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax!' he wrote on Truth Social, after news channels spent all afternoon showing footage of his latest diatribe.
It's impossible for outsiders to know whether the Epstein controversy is the result of a true cover-up or is one of the classic political screw-ups that often make Washington scandals worse.
But after blasting supporters who worry about the Epstein case as 'weaklings,' and now going after Obama in his latest attempt at moving the goalposts, it's Trump who is now making it impossible not to ask the question: Why is he so desperate for this to go away?
The second arm of the Trump pincer movement to try to put the Epstein saga in the past came from the Justice Department.
Only two weeks ago, the FBI and the DOJ declared in their memo that 'we did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties.'
Yet on Tuesday morning, Blanche announced that he'd test that proposition by visiting Maxwell.
'Justice demands courage,' Blanche wrote on X, insisting that 'no lead is off limits.' In a statement posted by Attorney General Pam Bondi on social media, Blanche added that if Maxwell 'has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.'
The latest gambit may just be an attempt to create a splash that MAGA activists concerned with the case might accept as transparency. But it is fraught with political and even legal risks for the Justice Department.
And like Trump's previous attempts to douse the scandal, it seems already to have failed in its primary objective.
'Seems like a massive cope,' far-right activist Laura Loomer, said in a text to CNN. 'Why didn't they ask to meet with her before the memo was released on 4th of July weekend when they essentially said the case would be closed? Seems like this should have already taken place,' Loomer said.
The possibility that the approach to Maxwell is motivated by more than a political public relations exercise must also be considered. She has an incentive to offer the White House what it wants — information that could put the focus of the spotlight on somebody else.
'There is every reason to think she would give false testimony,' Ryan Goodman, a New York University law professor, told CNN's Erin Burnett. 'She has no fear of giving false testimony because otherwise she is going to be spending until she's 75 years old in prison. The only other choice is if she maybe gives the kind of testimony she thinks the White House wants to hear, then she maybe can get off.'
The idea that Maxwell is holding something back belies both the recent Justice Department memo and a wide-ranging prosecution against her that started with charges during the first Trump administration and ended in a conviction and a 20-year prison sentence during the Biden administration.
An obvious approach for Maxwell's lawyers would be to seek to secure concessions, perhaps a shortening or a commutation of her sentence, in return for information she might provide. Jeremy Saland, a former Manhattan prosecutor, paraphrased what her counsel might request on 'CNN News Central' on Tuesday: 'Get me my out. Give me an opportunity.'
Still, if Maxwell did have information implicating others in Epstein's alleged crimes, it's unclear why she did not offer it during her own prosecution, when she might have been able to save herself.
Of course, by the time she was found guilty in 2021, Epstein was gone, and the value of testimony she might have been able to provide against him as a cooperating witness was moot.
Six years after his death, however, the political implications of the hideous crimes of which he was accused are growing uncontrollably.
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