Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein converse during a party at Mar-a-Lago in 1992, Palm Beach, Florida. Image via NBC footage screenshot.
President Donald Trump was the "biggest obstacle" in the way of his own administration handling the Epstein files, according to a legthy new report from The New York Times, as insiders were "paralyzed" with fear and paranoia about how to handle the growing "crisis" despite him not wanting them to say anything about it at all.
The report was written by longtime Trump-beat veterans, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, based on material from their forthcoming book about his second administration. According to the pair, the sense that White House officials gave, that Jeffrey Epstein was a minor non-issue for the administration, could not have been further from the truth, and Trump's repeated insistence that the story was "boring" or a "hoax" made it nearly impossible for them to adequately address it.
"People in his orbit found him snapping at them if they even raised the issue of Jeffrey Epstein," Haberman explained in a video accompanying the report.
In July of last year, several top administration officials convened a meeting about the issue in the Situation Room, a place typically reserved for "classified and high-stakes national security matters." At the meeting, Haberman and Swan said it was clear that Vice President JD Vance was the most adamant in pushing for full transparency on Epstein, with some in the administration suspecting that he had bought in fully to past conspiracy theories about the deceased sex trafficker.
While the rest of the officials balked at Vance's suggestion, the meeting resulted in two moves that ultimately did nothing to quell the growing discontent over the Epstein files within the MAGA base: pushing for judges to release grand jury materials related to Epstein to the public, and having then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison. The latter idea was put forward as a way to make the White House seem like it was fighting for disclosure, but in a way that the judges would likely never allow.
In the video, Haberman noted that the idea of releasing the files became a "non-starter" for the administration as soon as it discovered that Trump's name was mentioned many times within them, even if it was often in reports detailing unverified allegations made against him over the years.
Among the new revelations from their reporting, the pair revealed that they were able to view an internal document from "Trump's top pollster," Tony Fabrizio, which revealed that the Epstein files were still the sixth most important issue for GOP voters, based on focus groups conducted in March, well after an act of Congress forced the release of the files. This made it a more pressing issue for them than things like crime, safety, the military and AI data centers.
“There is also a consistent mention of the Epstein files, which came up in every group and is a real negative with some of these voters," Fabrizio wrote in the "key takeaways" section of the report.
Swan said that Trump was growing "more and more fed up" with the story dominating the narrative around his presidency, with Haberman adding that he was not used to losing control over what his MAGA base thought about things. She also stressed that all of the conversations roiling the administration about Epstein had to do with how to contain or "spin" the narrative, not about getting justice for his many victims.
"The Epstein crisis had exposed something that some of Trump’s closest advisers spent months refusing to see," the report concluded. "The president could break institutions, redirect the federal government against his enemies and bring the world’s richest men into the Oval Office bearing tribute. But he could not, it turned out, make Jeffrey Epstein disappear."