According to reporting in the upcoming book, “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, former Attorney General Pam Bondi reportedly infuriated the president’s inner circle during a meeting with high-profile conservative influencers about the Jeffrey Epstein files. On February 27, the White House Communications Office had scheduled a lineup of cabinet officials to brief popular MAGA influencers in the Roosevelt Room. Vice President JD Vance led the session, followed by Secretary of State Marco Rubio, walking the influencers through the administration’s agenda. In attendance was a “who’s who of online Trump world”: Mike Cernovich, Liz Wheeler, Collin Rugg, and DC Draino. According to Swan and Haberman, Trump himself brought them to the Oval Office and presented custom-designed challenge coins as tokens of appreciation. Before the day went sideways, one influencer remarked: “It was the best day of my life.” Then Bondi and her team reportedly waltzed into the Roosevelt Room carrying boxes. The attorney general had prepared binders as handouts; her aides would later claim the FBI had prepared them with revelatory details. One staffer reportedly boasted: “Watch this. This is cool. This is going to be epic.” Instead, the binders led to panic in the room.
As Bondi’s staff distributed the binders, “blood pressure in the room” skyrocketed among other officials because no one in the White House had vetted the material in the binders and the attorney general was distributing materials she was calling “the Epstein files” without approval. According to the report, one official opened a binder and frantically flipped through pages looking for Trump’s name and, “A few pages in, right in the middle of the page, there it was.”
The report notes that the crisis was compounded because British Prime Minister Keir Starmer was at the White House that day. If news broke that the Epstein files had been released before Trump’s scheduled press conference with Starmer, that would dominate every question. Trump himself would be “blindsided.” One of Trump’s aides reportedly moved swiftly into damage control, hastily steering the influencers out of the White House. The official told them the binder content was embargoed until after Trump’s news conference with Starmer, promising the communications office would discuss the files afterward, Haberman and Swan wrote. But the damage was done. As the influencers left, they snapped selfies in front of the White House holding their binders and immediately posted the pictures on social media—creating exactly the shock wave of anticipation about the Epstein files that the White House had been desperately trying to prevent, according to the report.
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