Conservative Bill Kristol writes in The Bulwark that President Donald Trump cares very much about the scandal surrounding him and late convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, but that his recent change of tune is a temporary reaction to Trump recognizing his defeat.
Trump, Kristol says, "has attacked those who called for the files’ release" and tried to pressure Republicans to rescind their offers to sign the discharge petition to force a floor vote mandating their release.
"This culminated in the remarkable spectacle of Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert being summoned to the White House Situation Room last Wednesday to meet with [Attorney General] Pam Bondi and [FBI Director] Kash Patel to get her arm twisted. But the four Republican holdouts — Thomas Massie of Kentucky, Boebert, Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, and Nancy Mace of South Carolina — held firm," Kristol explains.
Kristol also notes how "Trump's lapdog" Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) "kept the House out of session during the government shutdown, in part to avoid having to swear in the newly-elected Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva of Arizona, who would be the decisive 218th signatory of the discharge petition."
Now that the government has reopened and Grijalva was finally sworn in after 50 days, Trump is starting to get nervous, Kristol says, especially in light of explosive information of his involvement with Epstein that has recently emerged,
Among the salacious revelations include a lewd birthday drawing and message Trump made for Epstein that was reported by the Wall Street Journal, and, most recently a lurid 2019 email from Epstein to his convicted co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell in which he wrote, that “of course [Trump] knew about the girls.”
Kristol says this is all very suspicious.
"What’s striking is that none of these revelations led Trump to make the judgment: 'Well, the worst is already out there, so I might as well order the files’ release.' So one has to suspect that Trump thought or knew that there would be even worse to come from the release of the Justice Department files. And one has to suspect that’s why he fought it," he writes.
However, as "House Republicans prepared to desert en masse" and vote to release the files, on Sunday night "Trump acknowledged defeat," Kristol says.
But there are some caveats, he says.
"Of course, were he to sign it, Trump, along with Bondi and Patel, would no doubt work on minimizing the scale of the defeat. The Justice Department could withhold materials and limit the scope of the release of the files. And it will be hard to know what isn’t being released," Kristol says.
The fight, he writes, "is by no means over," and Democrats and "truth-seeking Republicans" will have to keep the pressure on by meticulously cross-checking files and corroborating evidence.
"And this is to say nothing of the fact that various documents and records might have conveniently gone missing in the course of Bondi and Patel’s exhaustive review," Kristol notes.
This is just ramping up, he writes, saying, "given how hard Trump has fought the release, it would be very foolish to assume that all will go smoothly now. There is material in there that Trump did not want us to see and still does not want us to see. So this is nowhere close to the end. It is merely the end of the beginning of the fight for full release of the Epstein files."
Calling this an "incomplete and uncertain victory," Kristol says that the fight to release these files made it " easier in this case to fracture the MAGA coalition than to get 'responsible' Republicans to defect from Trump." And Republicans like Greene and Boebert have "showed far more courage or at least stubbornness than all their more mainstream counterparts who have proved to be weaklings under pressure," Kristol adds.
Kristol also says that while the four Republicans who stood firm in demanding the files' release deserve a lot of credit, they couldn't do it without the entire Democratic conference signing on thanks to Rep. Ro Khanna (D-CA) "seizing the issue."
He also says that the fight to release the files "offers a remarkable window into the bipartisan decadence and depravity of many of our elites. Democrats should run against not just Trump and the GOP, but against elites in general in 2026, and I dare say in 2028."
"The chances of an intensification of the Trump administration’s authoritarianism at home and abroad may have increased because of Trump’s forced retreat on the Epstein files," Kristol says. But, "ten months into Trump’s second term, we are nowhere near turning the corner in the fight against Trump and Trumpism. But that turning point may, just may, be coming into sight."