On Epstein, Even MAGA World Can Smell That Trump Is Hiding Something

It’s exactly four weeks ago today that the Jeffrey Epstein story broke, or re-broke in its current form. On Friday, July 11, the world learned of the tense meeting that took place at the White House that previous Wednesday, in which FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino clashed with Attorney General Pam Bondi over the handling of the Epstein files. Bongino was so incensed that he didn’t go to work that Friday and threatened to resign. He has, at least for now, backed off that threat, but the episode revealed the deep intra-MAGA divide on the matter, and it’s been in the news every day since.

What have we learned in the past month? Consider the following five developments, and ponder what common sense tells us they probably add up to.

1. Bondi, after telling Fox News in February that the Epstein file and seemingly the alleged client list were sitting on her desk, flip-flopped and said there was no client list and nothing would be released.

2. On July 23, The New York Times reported that back in May, Bondi had told Donald Trump that his name appeared in the Epstein files “multiple times.” In June, an ABC journalist had asked Trump if Bondi had told him his name was in the files, and of course, he lied and said no.

3. Meanwhile, Trump sent his former defense attorney, now number two in the Justice Department, to go interview Ghislaine Maxwell. I wrote last week about how fishy it was that Todd Blanche conducted those interviews. It’s also crazy that we still don’t know the substance of those two sessions.

4. Then, suddenly, Maxwell was transferred to a country club prison where, sources have told reporters, sex offenders aren’t supposed to be eligible to go. Trump has also repeatedly refused to rule out a pardon for Maxwell—a convicted sex trafficker who, according to the testimony of four victims, participated in the sexual abuse.

5. Finally, Representative James Comer, who can always be relied on to choose the stupidest and most obvious course of action, subpoenaed a lot of people to get to the bottom of the Epstein matter, but he did not subpoena the one person who likely knows more of the truth of the matter than anyone: Alex Acosta, the Florida prosecutor who cut that shameful deal with Epstein’s lawyers back in 2008—13 months in a work-release program that enabled him to go out and rape more children.

What do these five developments tell us? Let’s answer that by imagining a counterfactual. Let’s imagine that Bondi had released the files, that Trump’s name did not appear in them multiple times, that Maxwell was given no special treatment, and that Comer had subpoenaed Acosta—the one person who obviously had to be subpoenaed.

Those moves would have shown us an administration, and a president, that didn’t have anything to hide.

Instead, we got the opposite of all those things. You don’t need to be Hercule Poirot to suspect that somebody is hiding something.

Acosta’s involvement in the matter is particularly intriguing here. If the Trump administration and congressional Republicans’ allies like Comer really wanted to get to the bottom of the Epstein matter, they’d all be demanding that Acosta come forward and tell us everything he knows. He was the prosecutor! (A very bad one, but he was.) Think about it: If Trump genuinely knew he was innocent of any wrongdoing, why wouldn’t he personally demand that Acosta step forth and spill? What cleaner exoneration could there be than the personal word of the man who presumably has read every Epstein-related document the government has?

Acosta has been a hot topic ever since Comer announced his subpoena targets and Acosta’s name didn’t appear on that list. So where is he, right now? Good question. He hasn’t surfaced anywhere that I’ve seen. Interestingly, though, he did do one thing worth noting this year: He joined the board of directors of Newsmax (and chairs the propaganda network’s audit committee).

Justin Baragona of The Independent flagged on July 22 that this has created an embarrassing situation for the network because one of its hosts, Greg Kelly, keeps talking about how great Acosta is without revealing that he’s on the board.

Beyond that, we might well wonder why, of all the people Newsmax could have chosen for its board, it landed on Acosta. That was in March, though his appointment wasn’t officially announced until June. Then, in July, Newsmax announced a deal with—get this—the Trump Media and Technology Group to be partners in a new global streaming platform called Truth+. In other words, a network that covers the president is now in business with the president. And the one person in the world who knows more about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes than anyone else is on the network’s board, and thus could quasi-plausibly claim, if pressed, that he is “ethically” barred from making public utterances that would hurt Newsmax’s position. Convenient, eh?

I hear a lot of people on cable news talk about how poorly the Trump people have handled this situation. Of course that’s true, but it seems to me reasonable for us to conclude that they’re handling it the way they’re handling it because it’s probably the only choice they have: to stonewall and lie and try to put things off.

Even a lot of MAGA people smell it. Candace Owens said recently: “I feel like Trump thinks his base is stupid, or, again … the people around him certainly think that Trump is stupid.… Trump is surrounded by people who hate him and have infiltrated his base, and they think … that Trump was too stupid to be president, that his base is too stupid to see through the lies that they’re telling now.” She added that the Epstein scandal “is definitely terminal cancer to Trump’s MAGA movement.”

Owens reminded her listeners of the core fact we all need to keep in mind: This is about the rape of children. Hundreds or maybe thousands of them. Apparently, enough of MAGA world is repulsed enough by that fact that this is one time in the last decade when Trump’s attempts to wave it all away as a Democrat hoax aren’t cutting it. It looks like we’ve finally found the matter on which plain, old-fashioned morality is more important than trolling the libs. That’s one thing Trump wasn’t counting on.