An infuriated White House has taken control of the Department of Justice’s X profile in an effort to offset its clumsy Epstein files drop, according to Axios.
The DOJ, presided over by Attorney General Pam Bondi, has been working through a reported trove of over 1.45 million records to meet a law that requires their release. The Epstein Transparency Act, personally signed by President Trump, has proved an issue for the department, though.
So much so that White House officials have taken over the DOJ’s X account to sharpen its messaging in an attempt to steer the ship away from the negative PR that is battering Trump.
As part of its ham-fisted dump, the DOJ reclaimed 13 files from its site a day after releasing them. They were pulled without explanation, giving rise to theories that it was done to protect President Trump. “What else is being covered up?” Democrats on the House Oversight Committee asked Bondi on X. Bondi, meanwhile, is facing impeachment and contempt of Congress calls over her handling of the Epstein files.
One file featured a photograph of Trump, 79, in a drawer at an Epstein property. The DOJ said it was yanked over concern for victims before being reinstated after review.
One unnamed official told Axios the second batch of files—which Trump features in more prominently—were released before prosecutors were ready, owing to an error behind the scenes.
Those in the Trump administration dealing with the fallout are not pleased: “It’s a combination of extreme frustration at everything: at what Congress did, at our response to it, and a concern that it won’t go away,” one official said.
Bondi’s department was already under fire for not releasing all of the files by the Friday deadline, as required by law. And perhaps the pressure of the backlog got to the 200 minions who were whittling through the files in the background. Puzzling redactions that fly in the face of the pledge for full transparency have irritated many people.
In one such eyebrow-raiser, the publicly available addresses of the United States Attorney’s Office and the New Mexico Department of Justice were scrubbed from a 2020 letter about the seizure of an Epstein property.
The document had been needlessly redacted as it had been publicly available for years. “These redactions are so arbitrary, it destroys the credibility of the entire exercise,” journalist Michael Tracey wrote on X. “They’re redacting completely banal documents that have already been in the public domain for years!”
Another journalist, from the Miami Herald, noticed that another document, from 2008, had redactions unjustifiable under the Transparency Act.
The department has also taken heat for the quality of documents it has released. The veracity of some were questionable but the DOJ chose to release them anyway, meaning Trump took a battering PR-wise, even though the files suggest no wrongdoing.
In one such instance, after 30,000 new investigative records were released on Tuesday, an alleged letter from Epstein to convicted sex offender Larry Nassar implicated Trump. The document from 2019 claimed that “our president” likes “nubile” girls.
But the letter was postmarked after Epstein’s death and was determined to be a fake. It was also processed by a mail room in Virginia that didn’t handle letters from Epstein’s New York jail. The DOJ released it anyway, in the interests of transparency.
“The FBI has confirmed this alleged letter from Jeffrey Epstein to Larry Nassar is FAKE,” the department later posted on X, leading to concerns about it releasing disinformation.
On Tuesday, another questionable post managed to make it through the vetting process. The department warned that some of the records could be “untrue and sensationalist,” but it was committed to releasing them anyway, because of “transparency.”
Despite the absence of any “smoking gun,” or anything linking the president to any crime, he is known to be rattled by the mere mention of his name in the files. “The minute he thinks it’s unfair to him and it’s a personal attack, he just goes into fight mode,” one insider told Axios in November. “No one wants to ask him what’s going on here [with Epstein] because he just gets angry.”
One official, meanwhile, told the same title this week that 700,000 files remain to be pored over, prolonging the pain for the Trump admin. “This will end soon,” another official said. “The conspiracy theories won’t.”
The White House and the DOJ have been contacted for comment.
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