Today, Explained - Trump's Epstein problem

Episode Date: July 16, 2025

You probably shouldn't expect to see the Epstein Files anytime soon. That's because the Department of Justice belongs to President Trump. This episode was produced by Hady Mawajdeh and Denise Guerra, edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact checked by Laura Bullard, engineered by Patrick Boyd and Matthew Billy, and hosted by Sean Rameswaram. Listen to Today, Explained ad-free by becoming a Vox Member: vox.com/members. Transcript at vox.com/today-explained-podcast. Attorney General Pam Bondi speaks alongside President Donald Trump. Photo by Joe Raedle/Getty Images. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

It was early this week when Congressman Hank Johnson, Democrat from George's Fourth, dropped a parody version of Dreamsicle by Jason Isbell. ["Dreamsicle"] Awful. The Congressman was adding his voice to an ever-growing chorus. Just a day before him, a rapper named Tyson James dropped a bop called Epstein List. And last night, none other than the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson followed suit, but

not with bars. I mean, the White House and the White House team are privy to facts that I don't know. I mean, this isn't my lane, I haven't been involved in that. But I mean, the White House and the White House team are privy to facts that I don't know. I mean, this isn't my lane. I haven't been involved in that. But I agree with the sentiment that we need to put it out there. Why everyone, except maybe the president himself, hmm, seems to agree that we should see the Epstein files on Today Explained. Support for the program today comes from BetterHelp.

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BetterHelp can provide access to mental health professionals with a diverse variety of expertise. Our listeners get 10% off their first month at BetterHelp.com slash explained. That's betterHELP.com slash explained. Support for this program comes from FM. Established nearly two centuries ago, FM is a leading mutual insurance company whose capital, scientific research capability, and engineering expertise are solely dedicated to property risk management and the resilience of its policyholder owners. These owners, who share the belief that the majority of property loss is preventable, work with FM to better understand the hazards

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I'm Sean Romsfrom, and this is David Weigel, who covers politics for Semaphore, including the latest Epstein drama. I'm hesitating on where to start because it in the minds of people who are really interested in this story it touches on everything. It is as Steve Bannon was telling attendees of Turning Point USA Student Summit last weekend. Epstein is a key that picks the lock on so many things. Not just individuals but also institutions. intelligence institutions, foreign governments, and who is working with them on our intelligence apparatus and in

our government. The hold this has had on the minds of a lot of Americans is long and deep and serious. And it has now kind of cannonballed into our politics as something Republicans are opportunistically trying to down pedal and Democrats are opportunistically trying to hype. But they can do all this because there are many Americans who think it's odd that this sex trafficker, one, got away with he was doing for so long. Two, died in prison, which is quite hard to do without... committing suicide in prison there, famously very hard to do, and he, according to the government, pulled it off.

Um... And that he allegedly had, according to the Trump administration, evidence on a lot of people that no one can see. Before we go any further, I want to get this out of the way. Do we know, David, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that what's in these files would even satisfy all the people who would like to see them? Well, no.

People will not be satisfied by this. And they will not be satisfied by anything less than, I would say, the most lurid fantasies of what is in this information. For example, as soon as the DOJ memo went out over a holiday weekend without an author on it, I was seeing fake videos of Hillary Clinton entering Epstein's jail. Wait, I am hearing breaking news. More! More of the surveillance footage has been released. I knew it.

It's always the pantsuits. She's so stealthy with this. That's how you know it's her. You can get a sort of fabricated satisfaction. Will you get total satisfaction that the people that you thought were behind all this all along? Probably not.

This is a theme with Trump's campaigns. There are people who voted for Trump in 2016 thinking that one, he was going to put Hillary Clinton in jail, two, the crimes he was going to convict her of were just an unbelievable litany of murders and conspiracies and drug trafficking from Arkansas. And the fact that that didn't come out, that it wasn't provable, that didn't happen,

there are people who moved on and didn't talk a lot about it. There are people who will believe until they die that the elites covered this up. Donald Trump makes for a bit of an awkward messenger in this mission to release the Epstein files, considering unlike, I don't know, say like Kamala Harris, he has a long history and established friendship with the late New York financier, Jeffrey Epstein. Yes, you've pinpointed the irony of this entire story. And I talked to some Democrats over the last few days about why they didn't make hay of his connections

to Jeffrey Epstein in 2016, in 2020, and 2024 because Democrats just decided that Trump is inoculated by his connection to his base, generally speaking. They're happy this week to focus on Epstein because the meta-narrative of Trump is that as he's a political outsider who knows all these people backwards and forwards. The elite, the elite. Why are they elite? I have a much better apartment than they do. And the meta-narrative specifically for Trump among his voters was, yeah, Donald Trump's

on the record saying he knows Jeff Epstein. I had a falling out with him a long time ago. I don't think I've spoken to him for 15 years. I wasn't a fan Yeah, he's on these Videos and photos of him. However, the problem that ran into around the Epstein story is that Cash Patel and to me That's the thing. I think President Trump should run on on day one Roll out the black book the Imbangino. Listen, um that Jeffrey Epstein story is a big deal

The Ambangino. Listen, that Jeffrey Epstein story is a big deal. Please do not let that story go. Keep your eye on this. All these people said things during the campaign as people who were not guaranteed by the administration that would be proven and they weren't. And this is the best ammunition that Democrats have had the last week is video of these guys saying they're going to release this Epstein information once they get their hands on it. You can find this already.

Conservatives and let's say other anti-politics, anti-establishment voters who voted for Trump, they want to be faithful in Trump and believe that he's going to do the right thing. These other guys are dispensable. You could see that the story was turning from people being disappointed in Donald Trump to being disappointed in the people he hired. In 2016, we trusted the plan with Trump. But now Trump has become the deep state. The exact thing he... we voted him in.

It's not my place, but I do think the way that I'm seeing it played out is that Bongino will be here and Pam Bondi will be the for guy. I feel like we should ring a bell every time the Democrats and the Republicans are calling for the same thing. How is it so many of them came to agree on this one? Obvious play for the Dems? The downside for them in talking about this is nil. They are not worried about any of them being connected to Jeffrey Epstein's behavior because

they know themselves. They were not part of this. If every theory of what Epstein was doing was proven to be true, the current leadership of the Democratic Party and the rank-and-file electeds would not suffer at all. None of them were connected with it. So it's gotten... It was pretty easy for them to talk about. They just thought the upside was not very big. Now it's very easy for them to talk about. Do they have any upside was not very big. Now it's very easy for them to talk about. Do they have any power to actually expedite the release of these files or is it all in

the DOJ? No, it's in the DOJ. What Democrats have done in the past few days is use opportunities in the Congress to attach an Epstein Declassification Amendment or language to bills. If you're not hiding anything, prove that to the American people. And if you are trying to hide something, as many of Donald Trump's MAGA supporters apparently believe,

then the Congress should actually work hard to try to uncover the truth for the American people. It's convenient that they have video of JD Vance telling Theo von. Seriously, we need to release the F scene list. That is an important thing. Yeah, they have that video. They could run that.

Is this going to be a top voting issue in 2028? Who knows? But it's helpful to them. They have a video of the likely next Republican nominee making this promise that he couldn't keep. And the worst case scenario for them is the administration reverses, it is released, and they have a bunch of information that's damaging to Republicans and not themselves. It's a very low risk bet for them, which is the kind of bet Democrats like to make.

Trump doesn't seem to have satisfying answers for his base for the people who are very loud and very online saying this is a betrayal. Does he just hope this is gonna go away? Lots of stuff has gone away. Trump has had a lot of problems that were going to take him out and they didn't. If I were Donald Trump, I'd be very confident that I can beat this out the way that I did

the Access Hollywood tape, the way that I did indictments that I'll get lucky and that people will move on. But the moment of maximum disappointment in Trump from the voters we're talking about was this cabinet meeting after the DOJ memo where a reporter is asking Pam Bondi at the table, Pam Bondi, not Trump, asking Pam Bondi to clarify some of what the memo says and why the files that she said were on her desk have not been released and Trump intervenes and gets annoyed that the media is still asking about it. Yeah sure. Can I just interrupt for a second?

Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years. You're asking we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things. And are people still talking about this guy, this creep? Now, the only thing I'd say is that there is always a search in the press for is this going to be the moment when Trump loses his base, where the MAGA movement gets disappointed.

That hasn't really happened for anything. hasn't really happened for anything. And there is an enormous capacity for forgiveness. But electorally, we're looking at the midterms, we're looking at 2028. And if there are millions of voters who came into the coalition, let's say, with RFK Jr. and Tulsi Gabbard, because they thought he was going to turn everything upside down. Well, what is he's done some things that the president did, but he's also he was going to end the war in Ukraine day one, and he's selling arms to NATO so that they can give them to Ukraine. He was going to end the war in Gaza. It's not over.

There were ceasefires and officers getting out, but he's not done that. And he didn't do this. And so there is a it's not showing up in donations to Republicans, but when Republicans go back to the Trump electorate and say, Hey, we noticed that you didn't usually vote, but you vote in 2024, you're excited again. A lot of them are going to say, Nope, I don't trust anybody now. Um, but you are seeing people who were not normal Republicans, didn't usually vote in midterms.

Those people have drifted away and they have a very low level of faith right now. I don't think they're gonna walk away completely from Trump over this, but they're not gonna be Trump hype men the way they were in October, 2284. ["Summer of the Year"] Semaphore.com, that's where you can read David Weigel. The Epstein files live at the Department of Justice, so we are going to head there. Support for the show comes from Bombus and today they want to talk to you about socks because it's summer and maybe it's a time when you

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That's B-O-M-B-A-S dot com slash explained, code EXPLAINED at checkout. Bombas dot com slash explained and use code explained. Support for Today Explained comes from NPR's Fresh Air. Hosts Terry Gross and Tanya Mosley, two of the greatest of all time, with some of the greatest bookings of all time. Selena Gomez, Supreme Court Justice Katanji Brown Jackson. What do those two women have in common? Well, they both in on Fresh Air. Jeremy Strong, Nikki Glaser, Billie Eilish, so much more. Recently, Sean and I saw sinners. Not together, but we were talking afterwards and there was one part that we really disagreed

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Keep climbing with Delta. Book your next adventure at delta.com. I'm talking about Jeff Epstein, the New York financier. My name is Eli Honig. I am a former federal and state prosecutor and I am the author of the upcoming book, When You Come at the King, Inside DOJ's Pursuit of the President from Nixon to Trump. And when you say you're a inside DOJ's pursuit of the president from Nixon to Trump. And when you say you're a former prosecutor, remind us where? I was a Fed at the Southern District of New York, which will become relevant to this conversation as that is the office that prosecuted both Jeffrey Epstein and Jelaine Maxwell, and then

I was a state prosecutor later as well. So before we get to all the questions, let me just ask you a simple one. If you're someone out there who's like, release the Epstein files. All of us as Americans, not as Democrats, not as liberals, not as Republicans, are actually lining together and saying we all want the Epstein files.

Who should they be most mad at right now that they don't have their Epstein files? I'm gonna answer with a what rather than a who. The first thing they should be mad at is an ancient DOJ policy that says, we DOJ, we federal prosecutors, do not just turn over, make public, our closed investigative files because people want to know. People want to know a lot of things. People want to see all the closed files on the Trump cases.

People want to see every piece of paper from Robert Herr's investigation of Joe Biden. People want to see everything from the Hunter Biden cases. But there is a longstanding DOJ policy and principle that has been observed by both political parties that we don't turn these things over. We don't slag people in public who can't defend themselves, who aren't charged with anything, who don't have the ability to go to trial.

But what's confusing people, I think, about that policy, at least right now, is one very specific moment. Not all the moments where other people said these things should be released, but the moment where the person in charge of the department that doesn't typically release this kind of information said that she would. Why would Pam Bondi say, It's sitting on my desk right now to review. That's been a directive by President Trump. If she didn't intend to look into that, did something happen? The answer is I have no earthly idea.

But yeah, Pam Bondi has just handled this whole situation in an utterly inexplicable, inconsistent, and I think often dishonest manner. I mean, look, she blazes into office as attorney general, and she basically, by her actions, makes clear, I don't give a crap about that policy that I just talked about I'm gonna be turning this all over I'm gonna break the cover off this thing and you all are gonna know everything I think tomorrow Jesse breaking news right now you're gonna see some Epstein

information being released by my office by the way it goes back if you remember months ago Pam Bondi had her much-balle-hood phase one disclosure, right? She called all these conservative influencers to the White House and gave them these white thick binders labeled the Epstein files phase one. And you've seen the photo of

people triumphantly holding up these files. Well, what happened when they opened those binders? Absolutely nothing was in them. It came out later from those influencers, among others, who I think were also disappointed. Not a single new thing was printed or offered.

And this whole thing had been some sort of a rope-a-dope. And maybe at that point, Pam Bondi was hoping, all right, let's just hope this kind of fades away. Clearly, when she said... It's sitting on my desk right now to review. It wasn't because it appears there is no client list per se. Now that doesn't mean nobody is implicated, but this notion that there's some list,

there's some piece of paper entitled Jeffrey Epstein's client list, one, two, three, seems to be pretty clearly an oversimplification. So I think that's the $64,000 question. Why this very sudden, very stark turnabout? Well, since we can't necessarily answer that question yet, can we maybe answer the question of like how Pam Bondi came to be sitting at the top of the United States Department of

Justice? So Pam Bondi on paper looked like she was quite qualified to be the Attorney General of the United States. She had been a prosecutor for 20 years. She was the Attorney General of Florida, the state attorney general for two terms for eight years. And so if you just take that resume, I'd say, yeah, that's actually quite comparable to several other AGs and more prosecutorial experience.

Perhaps more qualified than say like, I don't know, Matt Gaetz. Speaking of government bureaucrats. Yeah, Matt Gaetz had zero qualifications. The objections that were lodged to her related to her independence and her credibility. Primarily two things. One is she has a long history with Trump.

She has represented him briefly during one of his impeachments. They've had political support for one another. That's not that big a deal. The bigger problem, though, is she was and in part remains a 2020 election denier. Pam, did you just say fake ballots? There could be. That's the problem. If they're letting... We don't know, Steve.

Do you have... Have you heard stories of, you know, ballots that are fake? And if so, just tell us what you know. Well, we know that ballots have been dumped. There were ballots that were found early on. We've heard that people were receiving ballots that were dead. And when she was confronted about this at her confirmation hearing in 2025 about her election denial. Who won the 2020 presidential election? She fell back on the old cop-out line of... Joe Biden is the president of the United States. She wouldn't disavow her prior election denialism.

And meanwhile, there's been a lot of writing that Pam Bondi has perhaps brought the Justice Department under Donald Trump in a way that we haven't seen in decades. What do you think is the clearest evidence of that? Oh, I think that's true. And I think it's provable. I mean, if we think back through the last many AGs, and by the way, I'd include Donald Trump's prior AGs, Bill Barr, who by the way, my first book is a criticism of Bill Barr's tenure as Trump's AG called Hatchet Man.

But I think Bondi is different and worse. Because even Bill Barr didn't believe the big lie. There's been no discrepancy reported anywhere that's looked at that. I'm still not aware of any discrepancy. Barr had his lines. Bondi has no lines. And I'll give you something that to me was a really telling moment for Pam Bondi.

It's kind of been almost forgotten already in the shuffle of it all. The Signal scandal. Hours before the US launched these surprise attacks on the Houthi militant group in Yemen, the Atlantic's editor-in-chief, Jeffrey Goldberg, had all the details right in front of him. In addition to Goldberg, the chat included National Security Advisor Michael Waltz, Vice President JD Vance, Secretary of State Marco Rubio, Director of National Intelligence

Tulsi Gamber... What does Pam Bondi do? At a minimum, any modestly halfway semi-independent AG would at least say, we're going to investigate, we're gonna get to the bottom of this, and then who knows, maybe come back in six months and say, all right, we looked at it, and while people were reckless,

there was nothing quite criminal. Pam Bondi, in contrast, basically announces three days in. It was sensitive information, not classified, and inadvertently released. And what we should be talking about is it was a very successful mission. And that moment to me showed us that she is completely at Trump's beck and call, and she will never intentionally do anything contrary to Trump's political interests. Like maybe release the Epstein files. Well, there you go. I mean, that's one of the theories that's out there that perhaps there's something in there that's bad for Trump.

So now by coming in and being part of the cover-up, the Trump administration has become part of it. I mean, it's just you cannot see it any other way. By the way, who knows? But it's already been disclosed that Trump is in the address book, the black book. There's all sorts of phone numbers for Donald Trump and Mar-a-Lago in there. We know they're old friends.

I mean, this is a sort of forgotten moment, but Donald Trump, some magazine did a magazine feature on Jeffrey Epstein years ago before he had been convicted of any crime. And both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump are quoted in the magazine. And Trump's quote that he gave is something like, he sure does like beautiful women even younger than I do or something. I'm not getting it word for word, but it's very close to that.

So would it be shocking if there was something embarrassing for Donald Trump in those files? Or Bill Clinton or whoever? No. Do you think the anger that's directed at Pam Bondi right now is misdirected and in fact it should be going right to the top when Donald Trump is out there clearly stating he has no desire to see these files released? Not to mention has previously made no secret of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.

Yeah. Let me put it this way. Either one of the president or the attorney general has the power, almost without question, to disclose whatever they want to disclose like that with a snap of the fingers. You know, at one point, I think it was Pam Bondi said, well, we'd have to do redactions and there's victims and yes. So of course you'd have to protect victims and miners and redact out pornographic materials and all that stuff. However, any one of them does have the ability to disclose whatever they deem fit tonight if they wanted to.

You think they'll do it? There's two ways I see this going. tonight if they wanted to. You think they'll do it? There's two ways I see this going. I don't think they'll ever open the files and just say, here you go, everybody. I think either they will try to appease the public and the media by making some sort of partial,

halfway disclosure, but that's not gonna satisfy anybody. And Pam Bondi just now reiterated she is sticking to that DOJ FBI memo. She said that memo that says basically nothing more to see here. No cases to be brought and case closed. Basically, Pam Bondi just doubled down on that. She said that's our position and I'm not answering any other questions. So if people are wondering, are we ever She said, that's our position and I'm not answering any other questions. So if people are wondering, are we ever going to just see a complete dump and complete satisfaction?

No, I don't think that's ever going to happen. Eli Honig, you heard about his book and his other book, but he also writes for New York Magazine. Subscribe at nymag.com. Our show was produced by Denise Guerra and Hadi Mawagdi edited by Miranda Kennedy, fact checked by Laura Bullard and mixed by Patrick Boyd and Matthew Billy. This is Music Most of us know what it feels like to think you've found the one, only to be let down. I'm not talking about your love life. I'm talking about deodorant.

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