Trump administration rushes to release everything but the Epstein Files

The Trump administration loudly declassified hundreds of thousands of records over the past week, but not a single one from the government‘s investigation into Jeffrey Epstein’s sex trafficking.

Included in the information dumps are 230,000 pages related to the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., and a 114-page document with details on Russia’s attempts to influence the 2016 election. The releases come amid weeks of unrelenting pressure from the public on Trump to release the Epstein Files, while he has instead aggressively defended the decision to withhold the findings against his former associate.

Despite the clear and deliberate effort to obscure what is known about Epstein, including who his clients were and why only one of Epstein’s business partners has been convicted, the White House has declared itself to be a bastion of transparency.

“He knows what his supporters want. It’s transparency, and he has given them that on all accounts when it comes to everything this administration has done,” said press secretary Karoline Leavitt told reporters. “No question is off limits here at this White House.”

The Trump administration has attempted a number of tactics to hide the government’s investigation of Epstein from the public, including lying about its existence, pretending to release the files, blaming previous administrations, berating voters, and closing the investigation completely. The Department of Justice formally ended the investigation in July, after federal agents spent two weeks flagging every mention of Trump in the approximately 100,000 records relating to Epstein’s sex trafficking ring.

Releasing other previously classified documents appears to be an attempt at misdirection by way of word association, as there was little public interest in the release of the newly declassified documents. The family of MLK objected to the release of files on the Civil Rights leader without their review first, and the 2016 election documents were quickly revealed to be disinformation that the Trump administration is now using to prosecute the president’s political opponents.

“The danger of this, of course, is not that these people will be successfully prosecuted without evidence, but that they can be put through the difficulty of haing to defend themselves, in the hope it will distract the public’s attention,” US Sen. Adam Schiff (D-Calif.) said in a video posted online. “What really is going on here is this is Donald Trump trying to bring about political retribution, retaliation, trying to distract from his Epstein files problem.”

This post first appeared in Below The Beltway, a COURIER Substack by Camaron Stevenson.