Harry Litman - The Administration's Long Con with the Epstein Files
The news from the Epstein files continues to arrive in drips and drabs, but the overall picture is no longer cloudy. There is only one tenable explanation for the Department of Justice’s massive and longstanding noncompliance with the Epstein Transparency Act: a sustained effort by the Department and other senior government officials to manage, delay, and ultimately neutralize the fallout from disclosure.
The administration is wagering that the general public will lose interest in sufficient measure to offset the intense outrage of victims and critics, permitting it to move past the Epstein scandal despite having provided scant accountability. It is a long game—one the administration shifted to only after it was forced, over Donald Trump’s earlier frenetic opposition, to support the release of millions of pages of documents that had never been made public. That reversal followed repeated, failed efforts to shake the scandal, which clung to Trump as no other issue has.
On Monday, a small group of members of the House Oversight Committee examined a limited number of unredacted files at DOJ. The conditions of the review only sharpened the point. Lawmakers were given access to just four computers in a satellite office to examine more than three million pages of material. Representative Jamie Raskin described the redactions he saw as “mysterious,” “inscrutable,” and unnecessary, including instances where names of prominent individuals were obscured while victims’ identities remained visible.
Some documents in that small subset appeared to undercut the Department’s public claims. One example was an email forwarded by Jeffrey Epstein suggesting that Donald Trump had not banned Epstein from Mar-a-Lago, but had instead hosted him as a guest—contradicting Trump’s long-standing assertions.
https://harrylitman.substack.com/p/the-administrations-long-con-with
