U.S. President Donald Trump reacts as he speaks to members of the media on board Air Force One en route from Scotland, Britain, to Joint Base Andrews, Maryland, U.S., July 29, 2025. REUTERS/Evelyn Hockstein
Bloomberg journalist Jason Leopold reported this morning that the president’s name has been redacted from more than 100,000 documents the FBI has on child-sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
Leopold said that after 1,000 FBI personnel pored over more than 300 gigabytes of data and evidence in the government’s investigation of Epstein, the files were sent to US Attorney General Pam Bondi.
According to the Wall Street Journal, Bondi met with Donald Trump in May to say his name appears “multiple times” in the files. On the basis of that finding, she decided not to release them to the public, despite the president’s campaign promise to do so. Trump apparently agreed.
On July 8, Pam Bondi issued a memo, saying that “no further disclosure” of the Epstein files “would be appropriate or warranted.”
“While we have labored to provide the public with maximum information regarding Epstein,” the memo said, “it is the determination of the Department of Justice and the Federal Bureau of Investigation that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.”
If so, why did the FBI spend so much time and manpower redacting Trump’s name? And why did they redact his name on the flimsy basis of protecting his privacy, as if the president were a private citizen – as if the public did not have an overwhelming interest in knowing about his relationship with the country’s most notorious child-sex offender?
The answer?
The deep state is real and it works for Donald Trump.
A real conspiracy and a theory of one
Some conspiracies are real. Most conspiracy theories are not. But the phony ones can be used to cover up for the real ones. And that’s what I think has happened in the case of Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein.
They were friends. They clearly shared an interest in sex with underage girls (or in statutory rape, if you prefer). But Trump has avoided serious public exposure in part by deliberately obscuring his past and in part by exploiting a conspiracy theory about his friend.
That conspiracy theory is sometimes known as QAnon. More generally, it’s known as “the deep state.” It tells the story of a shadowy cabal of powerful (Jewish) elites embedded in the government, in businesses and the media. They conspire with enemies foreign and domestic to hijack democracy out from under the noses of the American people.
Among Trump’s most loyal supporters, Jeffrey Epstein was the great (Jewish) representative of “the deep state,” and Trump was the hero who was supposed to defeat it. Whenever a story came up about sex offenses in Trump’s past, as when a judged said that he had raped a famous magazine columnist, his followers chalked it up to another attempt by the deep state to bring him. The conspiracy theory became cover for the actual conspiracy to obscure Trump’s sexual crimes.
Too much to hide
That conspiracy continues with this latest report showing the FBI chose to black out Trump’s name, because he was a private citizen at the time of the Epstein investigation in 2006. Here’s Jason Leopold:
“In particular, the reviewers applied two FOIA exemptions to justify their redactions. The first, Exemption 6, protects individuals against ‘a clearly unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.’ The Supreme Court has said the exemption protects ‘individuals from the injury and embarrassment’ that would result from the disclosure of personal information in possession of the government. … The second, Exemption 7(C), protects personal information contained in law enforcement records, the disclosure of which ‘could reasonably be expected to constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy.’”
You and me and everyone we know are entitled to privacy protections, because without them, we are more or less powerless. The president is not powerless, nor is entitled to such protections. He is the president.
The public has a right to know whether Trump was part of Epstein’s pedophile ring; whether he covered up his involvement; and whether he has induced government agents to pervert privacy laws in the furtherance of an ongoing conspiracy to hide his sexual crimes.
Trump could waive his rights to privacy and order the release of the Epstein files, with his name appearing through them “multiple times.” He could let the chips fall where they may, but he’s never done that. There’s too much at stake and, evidently, there’s too much to hide.
“Smacks of a coverup”
In addition to the government scrubbing Trump’s name from the Epstein files, it moved Epstein’s accomplice from a maximum-security prison to a cushy one in Texas. Ghislaine Maxwell was transferred after being interviewed by the second in command at the Department of Justice. Journalist Michael Wolff has said that was an effort to ascertain whether she has more incriminating evidence on Trump.
The family of Maxwell’s best-known victim, Virginia Giuffre, said the news is an offense to her memory (she killed herself in April) and “smacks of a coverup.” In a statement, the family said: “Without any notification to the Maxwell victims, the government overnight has moved Maxwell to a minimum-security luxury prison in Texas. This is the justice system failing victims right before our eyes.
“The American public should be enraged by the preferential treatment being given to a pedophile and a criminally charged child sex offender. The Trump administration should not credit a word Maxwell says, as the government itself sought charges against Maxwell for being a serial liar. This move smacks of a cover up. The victims deserve better.”
Indeed, the deep state is real and it works for Donald Trump.
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