Dem
47
GOP
53
If the goal is to make the Jeffrey Epstein story go away, the White House is doing about as poor a job of it as is possible. As we noted yesterday, the video footage of Epstein's jail cell on the night he died is missing one minute. Consider how many conspiracy theories have been launched by the 26.6-second Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination, which is not missing ANY frames. That may give a sense of how much room for speculation is afforded by a film that's missing an entire minute.
Beyond that is the now-legendary Epstein "client list." Earlier this week, as we noted, the administration announced that there is no client list. This is not going to be an easy notion for the White House to sell. After all, "Attorney General" Pam Bondi said that she'd seen the list, and even noted, back in April, that it was sitting on her desk. Elon Musk has claimed multiple times that he's seen the list. Yesterday, Alan Dershowitz said that he has also seen the list (which has been rumored to include his name), but that he cannot say more because of attorney-client privilege.
Perhaps worst of all, Donald Trump himself has apparently seen the list. Although the President has not commented directly this week, he did speak to former Fox entertainer Bill O'Reilly about the subject, and O'Reilly has been all over the place recounting that conversation. He claims that Trump is unwilling to release the list because some people on it would be "unfairly destroyed."
We are not remotely inclined toward conspiratorial thinking, but here, even we must join with the conspiracists in rejecting the White House's claim that there is no client list. Exactly what the nature of that list is, and how clearly it is identifiable as specifically a list of clients for sexual trafficking activities (as opposed to, say, just being an address book, or a list of e-mail contacts, or something like that), is open to question. But there is clearly a document that exists, and that has been seen by a lot of people, and that was clearly identifiable as being somewhere in the ballpark of a "client list."
That, then, raises the question of why the administration is trying to bury the document. If it unambiguously implicated one or more Democrats, and ONLY Democrats, then it would be posted to Truth Social so fast it would make your head spin. So, it's clearly not that. That would seem to leave only two possibilities. The first is that it implicates one or more Republicans (including, possibly, Trump himself). The second is that it doesn't really implicate anyone, but that the names of people who appear in the document (including, almost certainly, Trump himself) would be damaged merely by association.
We would guess it's probably the latter (though we do not entirely rule out the former). Again, if the document could be used to harm Democrats, Trump would deploy it with much glee. And if it only harmed other Republicans, Trump would almost certainly release it, regarding those Republicans as collateral damage as he tried to make sure that the MAGA base remained happy. The only thing that really makes sense is that, in some way, Trump is protecting himself, and he thinks that the damage that he'll take from being part of a "cover up" is less bad than the damage he would take by being more tightly linked to Epstein. (Z)