Yesterday’s Epstein Files Release Was A Total Disaster

In the summer of 2019, the FBI rang the doorbell of Jeffrey Epstein’s 40-room, eight-story townhouse in Manhattan. It was never exactly clear why they bothered to ring the doorbell, given that they were looking for sensitive evidence that could easily be destroyed, but that’s what they did. Then, when no one answered, agents forced entry. And once they were inside, they found a safe that they cut open with a saw. So they came prepared.

Ultimately, agents discovered several hard drives and CDs in the residence, both inside and outside the safe. Additionally, they found “numerous black binders” with mysterious white labels.

Screen shot: Government Exhibit/https://www.the-independent.com/

Screen shot: Government Exhibit/https://www.the-independent.com/

Photos of the raid have been available for some time. But to this point, we don’t have specific information about what exactly was on many of those CDs and hard drives.

Screen shot: Government Exhibit/https://www.the-independent.com/

According to the FBI, they left the apartment to seek another search warrant for the property, and when they returned several days later, many of these materials had gone missing. That’s the excuse they came up with. They just abandoned the scene of one of their most high-profile investigative targets — and what do you know, the evidence went missing.

But not all of the materials were gone. On cross-examination during Ghislaine Maxwell’s trial, an FBI agent admitted that more than 20,000 images were recovered. But of those images, only a small fraction of these were ever shown to the jury, and the vast majority of them have never been publicly accounted for. We don’t have descriptions. We don’t have explanations. We’re meant to forget all about it. And in particular, we were meant to stop asking which high-profile clients might be implicated by those documents. We were supposed to wipe that whole question from our memories.

But millions of people haven’t forgotten about this. Among the many other questions that have circulated since Epstein’s death, the question of what exactly the FBI recovered from his townhouse (and his private island) has remained a topic of intense interest and speculation. That’s one of the reasons a lot of Americans voted for Donald Trump: They wanted transparency. And on Wednesday night, in an appearance on Fox News that got a lot of attention, the attorney general of the United States, Pam Bondi, promised to deliver transparency. Watch:

Everyone watching this clip understood the implication of what Pam Bondi was saying. We were being prepared for a major document dump on Thursday — one that would demonstrate the extent of Epstein’s depravity, beyond what we already knew. Bondi didn’t make it clear exactly how this document dump would take place, but she was clearly suggesting that it would be significant. There’s no way to interpret this clip in any other way. She had reviewed the information, and she was promising that it would be at least relevant.

Then Thursday morning rolled around, and several prominent conservative social media personalities and journalists entered the White House. When they emerged outside, they were holding binders that supposedly contained “Phase 1” of the Epstein Files:

The binders specifically boasted, on the cover, that the administration’s “transparency” was the reason they were being released. But almost immediately, there was a mixed reaction to this whole scene, as you might imagine. After all, it didn’t seem to make a lot of sense to filter this information through anyone. Why not just post it online, so everyone can access it? That would seem to be the most transparent possible approach. Apparently that was the original plan, but it didn’t happen — at least not right away. 

Instead, for several hours, nobody in the public could see these binders. Only a small subset of hand-selected conservative commentators were allowed to do so. And even those commentators weren’t allowed to post about the binders right away. There was an embargo, for some reason, according to Savannah Hernandez. Supposedly the White House was going to stage a press conference where they released the binder publicly, but that presser never happened.

Why didn’t it happen? Why did it all play out this way? That was never explained. And as the hours went by, people became more and more upset — at both the White House, and their guests with the binders. And it reminded me of something that happened in the early days of the Obama administration, when Charles Krauthammer was invited to attend an event at the White House. He wrote one of his most famous columns about this experience. The event was a ceremony that would mark the end of George Bush’s ban on stem-cell research. The White House thought Krauthammer would want to attend because he’d previously advocated in favor of stem-cell research. But Krauthammer declined the White House’s invitation, because as he put it, “Once you show your face at these things you become a tacit endorser of whatever they spring.” In other words, even though Krauthammer ostensibly agreed with what the White House was doing and with the subject of the event, he still turned them down, because he had no idea what would actually happen.

WATCH: The Matt Walsh Show

And indeed, yesterday, all of these prominent conservative personalities were thrown a curveball. From what I’ve been told, none of them were there to talk about Epstein. There was a previously scheduled meeting between the White House press team and these influencers. At the meeting, the Epstein binders were sprung on them. Now they’re all getting, to my mind, unfairly criticized for participating in a stunt that they didn’t actually sign up for. Now the White House says it didn’t sign up for this either, somehow. It turns out that, according to Pam Bondi, late Wednesday night — just hours before the whole binder event — a source at the FBI’s field office in New York reached out to the Trump administration and explained that, in fact, all of the Epstein files had not been provided to the White House. All Pam Bondi possessed — all she was hyping up on Fox News — were 200 pages of redacted documents. And most, if not all of these documents had already been released in some form, including Epstein’s contact list and some travel logs. 

But the source at the FBI’s New York office allegedly said that “thousands” of additional documents remained in the FBI’s possession, even though Bondi had requested that every single document be turned over to the White House. In response, yesterday, Bondi wrote to the FBI director, Kash Patel:

BREAKING: The FBI NY appears to have GONE ROGUE

AG Letter says FBI NY Is WITHHOLDING Critical Epstein Documents

This after reports that the FBI was secretly destroying Epstein documents

WTF IS HAPPENING pic.twitter.com/XME1fuxYFs

— Tim Pool (@Timcast) February 27, 2025

In her letter, as you can see, Bondi demands that all of these documents are provided to the White House immediately. She also requests an investigation into why these materials weren’t provided in the first place. And that’s a good question. Why would the FBI flagrantly defy an order from their boss at the DOJ? Why would they hide documents that they have in their possession? How did they think they’d get away with that?

Of course, this letter from Bondi raises several questions. To put it mildly, there are reasons to doubt we’re getting the full story here.

First of all, if Bondi had only 200 pages in her possession on Wednesday night, why did she go on Fox News and hype up this document dump? Did the White House not realize that all of these materials were already available in the public domain? In fact, some of these materials are somehow *less redacted* on the internet, than they were in the binders that Bondi handed out to those conservative influencers. In at least one instance, the binder actually redacts Jeffrey Epstein’s email address, even though he’s obviously dead and doesn’t use it anymore. But online, you can find the same email address, no problem. Websites like Gawker leaked Epstein’s phone contacts a long time ago, and anyone with an internet connection can discover them. Was the White House somehow not aware of this? Did Pam Bondi think she was releasing new information? If so, that would not be an encouraging sign. 

It’s not an exaggeration to say that there isn’t a single new revelation in this 200-page binder. Even the fact that Epstein was an FBI informant isn’t new. We already knew that he provided information to the feds during his prosecution, and that a senior FBI official at the time was under the impression that Epstein, “belonged to intelligence.” So what exactly happened here? If Bondi knew that there was no new information, and the FBI was stonewalling her, why hand out binders with “Epstein Files Phase 1” emblazoned on the front? 

We’ve known for a long time now that the odds of learning any significant new information about Epstein and his clients are very low. But there are obviously legitimate reasons to want this information. People are interested in knowing whether — and to what extent — their government was compromised by Epstein. They want to know whether anyone in power is still compromised. They want to know which rich and powerful people were raping minors and engaging other acts of evil debauchery. They want to understand the extent of the damage that Jeffrey Epstein has done to his victims and to this country. And what happened yesterday amounted to a mockery of that interest. It was in effect a giant middle-finger to Americans. The only question that remains is who exactly was giving us that middle finger, and why.

Right now, Pam Bondi claims she’s doing what she can to fix the problem. She’s saying heads will roll at the FBI. But as some observers have pointed out, she shouldn’t limit her focus to the FBI. After all, it was the Department of Justice that approved Epstein’s sweetheart plea agreement, which allowed him to avoid a significant prison sentence and also granted immunity to his co-conspirators. It was the DOJ that messed up the search warrant of Epstein’s property, and delayed the creation of a grand jury. Why did that happen, exactly? What internal documents does the DOJ possess from that period that might shed light on the decision-making that was going on? 

The information we already have from the grand jury is about as disturbing as it could possibly be. Last year, a law in Florida allowed for the release of some of these records. And it turns out that, throughout the proceedings, the prosecutors attacked the victims repeatedly. They also minimized what Jeffrey Epstein was doing. It got so bad that, at one point, a juror had to step in to defend the victims. Watch:

You can watch a million grand jury proceedings, and you won’t see anything like this. It should go without saying, but prosecutors are not defense attorneys. Their job is not to grill their own witnesses. That’s especially true when you’re at the grand jury stage, when the prosecution’s only responsibility is to get an indictment. Usually they go in, present the evidence that will lead to an indictment, and then they move onto the trial. But in this case, they clearly didn’t want to do that. They wanted to tank their own case. And you have to wonder whether anyone at the DOJ instructed them to do that.

At the moment we don’t know whether Pam Bondi will be able to answer that question. But the truth is, especially after what happened yesterday, it looks pretty likely that we’ll never get an answer. We’ll also never know how Jeffrey Epstein managed to become a global pimp with no identifiable clients. That’s maybe the single biggest gaping hole in the entire narrative we’ve been sold. They haven’t arrested or even seriously investigated a single one of his clients. At every stage, the government made sure that Epstein’s clients would be completely protected. To that end, as we learned yesterday, the FBI has apparently concealed and perhaps destroyed the actual incriminating information — and not just in Epstein’s townhouse. This is the sad reality that I think we all need to prepare for. 

We might find out some more specifics in the coming hours and days, assuming the FBI complies with Pam Bondi’s request. But of course there’s no reason to think they’ll do so, after a cover-up that’s lasted as long as this one has. At this point, it’s very possible there are no “Epstein Files” — not because they never existed, but because some of the most powerful people in this country made sure they’d never be discovered. After all, if there are files out there — documents, video, etc — showing the most powerful people in the world engaged in horrific criminal activity, what are the chances that the evidence still exists six years later? Why would it still exist? If it wasn’t released to begin with, it’s because powerful people decided to cover it up. And if they covered it up, they covered it up. That means burning the evidence, not storing it in some safe somewhere for someone to release later. 

Going forward, if the administration takes anything from this debacle, it should be that “retroactive transparency” is very difficult, if not impossible. That’s why transparency is necessary at all times, in all contexts. For one thing, the classification system needs an overhaul. The vast majority of documents that the government hides from the public should not in fact be hidden. Additionally, all of the agents at FBI New York who failed to respond to Pam Bondi’s request need to be fired immediately. And while we’re at it, we need a full accounting for what exactly Pam Bondi was looking at when she discussed that binder on Fox News on Wednesday night. This is a question that, no matter what you think of Pam Bondi, needs to be addressed. We may never know the full extent of Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes. But these are the kinds of changes that are necessary to ensure that the next serial pedophile like Jeffrey Epstein, and his associates, actually suffer some consequences for what they’ve done.