This is an adapted excerpt from the Nov. 13 episode of “All In with Chris Hayes.”
The White House is in full-blown panic mode over files related to child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. The Trump administration has spent almost half a year pushing a whole-government effort to suppress — and perhaps even cover up — whatever is in those documents.
On Wednesday, we got one of our first glimpses into what kind of content could possibly be in those files when Congress released a trove of Epstein’s emails, subpoenaed from his estate. In those emails, the disgraced financier talked about his old buddy Donald Trump.
Instead of simply releasing the report, the administration held a widely publicized, Trump-friendly influencer event at the White House.
“I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. [Victim] spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned,” Epstein wrote. In other emails, Epstein said that Trump “knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop” and offered to send a reporter from The New York Times a picture of Trump with “girls in bikinis in my kitchen.”
MSNBC has not verified any claims made in those emails, but they are quite damning and have put the Epstein story at the center of the news. It has gotten so bad that Trump declined to do his favorite thing: talk to the press.
It seems that the more this White House tries to make the story go away, the worse it looks.
Remember, it was just 10 months ago that the Trump administration came in, guns blazing, promising to release everything related to Epstein. It had hundreds of FBI agents and employees working around the clock to review the available files.
Attorney General Pam Bondi went on TV over and over to say that she had the Epstein report on her desk, ready to be reviewed.
But instead of simply releasing the report, the administration held a widely publicized, Trump-friendly influencer event at the White House, where it handed out binders labeled “The Epstein Files.”
However, when folks actually dug into the material, they were pretty disappointed. It turns out the binders were mostly made up of information that was already public.
In hindsight, that should have been a warning sign that Trump was never serious about releasing the Epstein files. His lengthy friendship with Epstein has been a matter of public record for years. Despite Bondi repeatedly saying the disclosures were a directive from Trump himself, he never seemed particularly enthusiastic about the idea.
During an interview with Fox News in 2024, Trump pledged to declassify files on 9/11 and John F. Kennedy’s death. But when he was asked about the Epstein files, the president replied: “I guess I would … less so because you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.”
That attitude — Epstein, “less so” — became the official policy of the White House. After ringing the Epstein bell for months, the administration abruptly turned around and shut the whole thing down.
But the public revelations just kept coming. The Wall Street Journal reported that Trump had written Epstein a crude letter, featuring an illustration of a nude woman and a cryptic message alluding to relationships with young women.
Trump vehemently denied the report and even personally sued Rupert Murdoch, owner of The Wall Street Journal, for $1 billion. That lawsuit is still pending. But, of course, that reported letter eventually came out — and it was somehow worse than folks had imagined. Trump still denies that it is his signature on that letter. We also learned that the FBI agents who were working around the clock on those Epstein files actually did find Trump mentioned in them, and Bondi told the president as much. And now we can see for ourselves that Trump has been mentioned repeatedly in these emails. Trump personally called Boebert to plead with her to take her name off the petition. The reaction from the White House has just been so conspicuous. After months of working behind the scenes to suppress a discharge petition in the House, which would mandate a full floor vote on releasing the Epstein files, the administration appeared desperate to suppress the story. There are four Republicans who signed that discharge petition: Reps. Thomas Massie of Kentucky, who co-sponsored the petition; Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia; Nancy Mace of South Carolina; and Lauren Boebert of Colorado. MSNBC reported that on Tuesday morning, Trump personally called Boebert to plead with her to take her name off the petition. Then, on Wednesday, the administration hauled her into the Situation Room, where she met with the heads of the FBI and the Justice Department, who tried again to browbeat her into taking her name off the petition. Of course, they were unsuccessful and the discharge petition reached its needed signatures, setting up a vote on the House floor next week. So it seems the more Trump and his administration try to stop the public from seeing these files, the more attention they draw to the problem.
Chris Hayes hosts “All In with Chris Hayes” at 8 p.m. ET Tuesday through Friday on MS NOW. He is the editor-at-large at The Nation. A former fellow at Harvard University’s Edmond J. Safra Foundation Center for Ethics, Hayes was a Bernard Schwartz Fellow at the New America Foundation. His latest book is “The Sirens’ Call: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource” (Penguin Press).
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