The Democrats’ Latest Anti-Trump Offensive Goes the Way of the Dodo
“Google searches for Epstein down 89 percent versus just three weeks ago. Falling through the floor.”
On July 6, the Department of Justice and the FBI released an unsigned joint memo that stated a “systematic review” of the Jeffrey Epstein materials had uncovered no “client list,” and found no evidence that Epstein had either “blackmailed prominent individuals” or been murdered, contrary to earlier speculation.
The news sparked outrage across the political spectrum. In February, Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News that Epstein’s client list and related files were sitting on her desk and promised they would be released to the public once reviewed.
Yet less than five months later, Bondi flatly declared the client list didn’t exist — and that the DOJ had uncovered no evidence of foul play in Epstein’s death. She claimed there was nothing to report. And that was the end of it.
This conclusion did not sit well with FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino. Several days after the memo’s release, during a meeting with Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Bongino and Bondi reportedly engaged in a heated confrontation over the case’s handling.
CNN reported:
Bongino and Patel were confronted about whether they were behind a story that said the FBI wanted more information released but was ultimately stymied by the Department of Justice, they said.
Bongino denied leaking that notion to NewsNation, which published the story, a source familiar with the matter told CNN, though he did not sign on to a statement defending the review included in that article.
Bongino was reportedly furious. Taking a day off to consider whether to remain at the FBI, he returned to work the following Monday — apparently deciding to stay. It was never made clear how, or even if, he and Bondi reconciled their differences.
Bongino wasn’t the only Republican angered by the abrupt ending of the Epstein case. Many of President Donald Trump’s supporters felt they had been promised transparency, only to be stonewalled. Trump, however, glossed over the episode, minimizing it, and called for his base to move on.
Democrats seized on this, inflating it into a full-blown scandal. What was Trump trying to hide? Was his name mentioned in the Epstein files? Had he engaged in sex with a minor?
Given that the Biden administration had access to these documents for four years — and would not have hesitated to weaponize any link to Trump during the 2024 election cycle — it’s unlikely he was implicated. Still, that didn’t stop Democrats from capitalizing on what was, at the very least, an odd and unexpected move by the Trump administration.
For weeks, the Trump administration’s perceived lack of transparency in the case threatened to erupt into a scandal capable of sinking his presidency. It sucked the wind out of the passage of the Big Beautiful Bill that Trump signed with much fanfare on the Fourth of July.
Democrats insisted ad nauseam that the declassification and release of documents implicating former President Barack Obama as the “ringleader” behind the 2016 Intelligence Community Assessment — issued shortly before Trump’s January 2017 inauguration and concluding that Russian President Vladimir Putin sought to ensure Trump’s victory — was nothing more than an attempt to deflect from the Epstein scandal.
In fact, Democrats cast virtually every move Trump or his administration made in the weeks following the DOJ’s July 6 memo as a “deflection” from that scandal.
Then it appeared to peter out. Following Trump’s announcement on Monday that he plans to place the Metropolitan Police Department under federal control and deploy National Guard troops across Washington, D.C., MSNBC contributor and Princeton professor Eddie Glaude was one of very few pundits to allege it was just a diversion from the Jeffrey Epstein scandal.
If CNN data analyst Harry Enten is correct, that balloon has now deflated. The Epstein saga has now become a “nothing burger.”
“Yes, I would say that this is, from at least a political point of view, quickly turning into a dud of a story,” he said.
His colleague noted it was “wild” that the story had collapsed so quickly.
A visibly energized Enten said, “Google searches for Epstein down 89 percent versus just three weeks ago. Falling through the floor. … It is no longer the top term searched alongside Donald Trump‘s name – that‘s been trading off between tariffs and Vladimir Putin, with obviously the meeting coming up later this week.”
Asked by his colleague if the “scandal” had had any effect on Trump’s approval ratings, Enten replied that it had not. Trump’s approval stood at 44% on Monday compared to 45% one month ago. At this time in Trump’s first term, his approval was at 37%.
Despite the furor among many MAGA supporters when the memo was released, Enten noted that Trump’s approval still remains high at 90%. He “hasn’t lost any of that base,” Enten said.
I’m surprised Enten still has a job at CNN!
The Epstein saga is becoming a political dud & nothingburger.
-Google searches for Epstein are down 89% from just 3 weeks ago.
-Trump's approval rating is holding steady & much higher than term 1 at this point in his presidency
-Less than 1% say it's the nation's top issue pic.twitter.com/rnp2M8qzdf— (((Harry Enten))) (@ForecasterEnten) August 11, 2025
Democrats hoping to tie the Epstein scandal around Trump’s neck were handed more bad news on Monday. Judge Paul Engelmayer of the Southern District of New York denied the DOJ’s request to unseal Ghislaine Maxwell’s grand jury documents.
Elizabeth writes commentary for Legal Insurrection and The Washington Examiner. She is an academy fellow at The Heritage Foundation. Please follow Elizabeth on X or LinkedIn.
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Every cabinet member, even Trump himself, ran on the promise of uncovering the truth of the people who made Epstein powerful and partook in his sex trafficking. That can’t be denied. We still know nothing. Actually, that’s not true. We know Ghislane was tapped to say Trump wasn’t implicated and she was rewarded with a cozier cell and work leave.
You’ll accept liars as your political champions as long as they lie for Mossad. Consequences and victimized children be damned.
Breath, breath, you will be ok.
No cabinet member ran for anything. And Trump did not run on such a promise. He ran on lots of things, but not that. He certainly didn’t promise anything about “the people who made Epstein powerful and partook in his sex trafficking”, because he had no way of knowing whether there were any such people.
Trump did run on releasing all the Epstein documents and said so on multiple occasions but didn’t mention it unless asked as it wasn’t one of his top issues
Trump ran on and promised “transparancy”.
I think we’re getting that
This never will feel like transparency, and we shouldn’t be celebrating it, whether or not Trump considers it a win.
Pace yourself, it’s going to be a long 1,256 days for you.
Show us on the doll where the Mossad touched you, Seymour.
The fbi seized everything from pedo island. Computers, flash drives, security camera footage, cd-roms, hard drives, etc.. All of that was buried. Just like Seth Rich’s computer, it will never see the light of day. And if it does it will be shown that the information was deleted. Someone will have it, just not the fbi.
But, was there a Johns list?
I find it difficult to believe that there’s not one, even if only by inference, within all the investigative materials reviewed and collected by different LEO agencies. That’s why, IMO, the DoJ should gather the info and release names but in categories. The categories would range from this dude met Epstein or Maxwell at a big party in NYC on one occasion and that’s the only thing tying that dude to either of them all the way to the other extreme. This puts out all the info transparently filling the info void, mitigating rumors/innuendo and helping the dude with casual/infrequent contact remove doubt. For everyone else? Meh guilt by association is a thing in society and just b/c we won’t use it in criminal prosecution doesn’t mean they should escape mere social consequences of shunning and shame.
We’re being told that there wasn’t, and there’s no real reason to suppose there was. There’s very little evidence that there even were any johns, but supposing they did exist there’s no evidence at all that he ever kept a list of them.
Mealnwhile Ghislaine Maxwell remains in prison, convicted of child sex trafficking. Yet the alleged madam apparently had no johns – at least none the Feds are willing to identify – and her supposed accomplice conveniently died under weird circumstances.
There were many disastrous consequences from the stolen 2020 presidential election. One of them was the Biden* junta was very likely able to dispose of any incriminating evidence. Unless you are willing to believe that every single visitor to Epstein Island was 100% squeaky clean, and that Maxwell and Epstein ran a terrible risk in bringing underage girls there for no reason whatsoever.
I’m going to take a real unpopular opinion here: Not every visitor to Epstein Island was 100% squeaky clean *BUT* some were. Epstein was a social media influencer. He had hundreds of people over to his various estates for various reasons, a certain percentage of which were rather unprintable here, but some, possibly the vast majority, were… Oh, I can’t use the word innocent. Let’s say movie promotions, meet-and-greets for celebrities, legal socializing events with lawyers and prospective clients, public media campaigns to promote/discourage products and such. Releasing the whole collection of names would murder the non-guilty in the court of public opinion, and that breaks the cornerstone of our justice system: Presumed innocent until *proven* guilty.
Now that being said, I sincerely hope the actual guilty parties in the mountain of evidence are properly dug up, sent to prison, and left to rot. The DOJ is either using a terribly small shovel to dig, or they’re being (as is proper) extremely quiet. We’ll see.
Yes, Epstein was a schmoozer. But if you’re running a covert blackmail operation based on being able to suck certain high-value people into being compromised, you must schmooze with a lot of potential targets, because, let’s be real, not everyone in D.C. or Hollywood is a pedo. And you can’t just walk up to people and ask if they are. It must be teased out, inferred, or otherwise surmised over a period of time of multiple contacts with the same people. Indeed, if you were doing this you wouldn’t want to just meet the pedos, you’d want a lot of chaff (in the form of non-pedos) around who would serve as cover for your operation. And having a lot of A-listers around you would help draw in more of them, so the more the merrier, knowing that within that group of people in your sphere, there are those you can leverage in your particular way for your particular purposes.
Epstein was known to have a weird transhumanist fetish for “improving” humanity’s genetics by using his own as source material. He regularly groomed scientists who could assist him with this project, plus other weird science projects that were dear to him. There wouldn’t seem to be much point in involving these folks in a pedo honeypot; they were business consultants, not power players.
But there’s no evidence that he was even doing that. It’s all speculation.
I keep hearing this so-called argument, but it makes no sense. “Sex trafficking” doesn’t require any johns.
From WP:
So, the existence of johns has nothing to do with it.
Well, good.
I was tired of seeing every single blessed news post here the even obliquely mentions the Trump administration have the comments buried in a sea of (possibly paid for) comment posts of “Trump is protecting (or is a) pedo ‘. comments.
Trump has had sorta control of the DOJ and FBI for months.
During that time several (D) judges have overruled his orders to release the stuff from the Grand juries
Biden’s Autopen had full control for 4 years.
During that time not only did they never even attempt to release that but also the DOJ/FBI removed files that should have been kept – put them into burn bags and hid them. The only reason on I suspect they did not ACTUALLY burn them was it requires someone to sign for that to be done.
If “not releasing The List” is proof you’re a pedo or a. pedo-protector why is the guy who enjoyed long warm showers with his naked teen daughter innocent? Just asking.
It’s hardly a fair trade for the squashing of the Obama birth story.
I’m sure I’ll hear screams of outrage, but Pedophiles and Ephebophiles are not the same, and as far as I understand, it was only teenagers who were (visibly) present at the Epstein properties.
Both acts are illegal but are radically different, IMO.
I don’t think it’s helpful to conflate someone having sex with a 17-year old with someone who rapes a 4 year old.
Squirrel!
Okay, everyone who is hung up on sex-something, lissen up.
Decloaking:
Epstein was a pervert and he may have fancied himself some kind of Hugh Hefner, BUT:
Epstein gathered young girls to his networking parties because you can’t have memorable parties that attract a bunch of fat ugly rich guys from the Middle East and other foreign countries, with only them and a handful of already taken wives or dates.
The blackmail thing was a hypothesis thrown out to figure out how Epstein made all that money. It’s taken on a ridiculous life of its own.
Epstein’s “business” was holding, hiding, laundering, stashing, moving money for “projects” such as arms deals, or parking the profits of an undercover business, of various governments and private entities that just wouldn’t be of the sort that would want to be tracked through ordinary financial channels. Yes, including but not limited to various IC agencies. “Sources and methods”…
It’s time to drop the fantasies. Yes some of the women in his pyramid-type solicitation scheme were underage (older teenagers). And yes he was pervy with them, but they also came back again and again to work for him in multiple capacities, e.g. secretarial. And got paid really well. And yeshe got nabbed in 2004 when the Palm Beach police got a complaint from a 14-year-old’s parents.
But there is no evidence of sexual blackmailing, or even tapes identifying men engaged in anything that now would evidence a crime. Epstein’s clients were “financial”. (There have been less than a handful of “claims” by some of the now 40-ish women who have had access to a multi-million-dollar compensation fund. Some of these women were unindicted perps themselves after attaining the magical age of 18, and a number of them also told some tall tales way back when.)
That is all.
Re-cloaking.
Jeffrey Epstein battle set to reignite in Congress
A bipartisan pair of lawmakers have vowed to force a vote on their resolution requiring the administration to release the federal files it’s withholding and plan to bring survivors of Epstein’s abuse to Capitol Hill in the first days of Congress’s return.