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Washington: The White House Situation Room is home to a labyrinth of highly secure conference rooms where presidents oversee intelligence briefings and high-stakes military operations.
But, as the latest instalment of the Jeffrey Epstein saga played out, the room hosted a different kind of meeting: top Trump administration officials met with Republican congresswoman Lauren Boebert to convince her not to sign a petition that would force a vote on releasing the so-called Epstein Files.
Confirming the meeting, first reported by CNN, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said it showed the government was being transparent with Congress. “I’m not going to detail conversations that took place in the Situation Room,” she told reporters.
The Epstein saga is an albatross around Donald Trump’s neck.
Another way of reading this: the White House is panicking. Not just over the tranche of Epstein-related emails released on Wednesday, Washington time, by the House of Representatives’ oversight committee, but the petition to release all the files – now signed by enough members to force a vote in the House.
In addition to summoning Boebert (and calling her, according to The New York Times), US President Donald Trump made a last-ditch plea, or threat, by posting to his Truth Social page that “only a very bad, or stupid” Republican would help the Democrats by joining the “Epstein hoax” bandwagon.
As it stands, the petition has enough signatures, having been signed by the House’s newest member, Democrat Adelita Grijalva, as her first item of business. But if any Republicans were to withdraw their name, it would fail.
Practically, the petition carries no weight unless it is also supported by the Senate and agreed to by Trump, which won’t happen. But it is evident the White House does not want a House vote to proceed, regardless.
The latest emails released by the committee show us exactly why Trump doesn’t want these files released. Even on a kind reading, they raise awkward questions. What does Epstein mean when he says Trump is the “dog that hasn’t barked”? When he says Trump “knew about the girls”, what is he getting at?
Earlier this year, Trump said he was aware that Epstein was “taking” young women from the spa at Mar-a-Lago in the 2000s. The president never said he knew why Epstein was “taking” the women, only that he told Epstein “we don’t want you taking our people”, and when Epstein did it again, he was banned.
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But it’s not just about Epstein’s alleged sex-trafficking of underage girls. Other emails released on Wednesday suggest Epstein took a dim view of some of Trump’s dealings and had knowledge of his activities.
In a 2018 exchange about the Stormy Daniels hush money case – over which Trump’s former fixer Michael Cohen had just pled guilty – Epstein said: “you see, i know how dirty donald is. my guess is that non lawyers ny business people have no idea. what it means to have your fixer flip.”
Democrats timed this bombshell beautifully, releasing it just as the US government shutdown ends – a good news story for Trump, especially with the Democrats in disarray over their own handling of the shutdown, and whether they achieved anything.
It prompted Republicans to flood the zone with some 20,000 pages of new Epstein material, clearly an attempt to dilute the impact of the Trump-related emails hand-picked by the Dems.
In this, both sides are hypocritical. They clamour for transparency, but the Democrats are drip-feeding selective emails when it’s politically expedient, and the Republicans sat on the files until it suited them. No one seems to have the victims at heart, as they claim.
The bigger picture is that the Epstein saga isn’t going away. There may be more attempts and opportunities to push it aside for a while, but it is an albatross around Trump’s neck.
“This is the beginning of the end,” Democratic congressman Eric Swalwell posted on X.
That’s wishful thinking. Some Republicans in Congress are twitchy, but if Democrats think the MAGA world is going to turn on Trump over this, they might want to note the reactions of Laura Loomer and Nancy Mace.
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Mace, a firebrand Republican representative who signed the petition, spent the day defending Trump, shaming Democrats for their cynical timing and accusing them of making the story about the president, not the victims.
Loomer, the conspiratorial right-wing activist with 1.8 million followers (and the president’s ear), was once a leading voice demanding the Epstein files be released. But on Wednesday, she simply said anyone outraged about the Epstein saga should also be outraged about having Muslims in the US Congress.
There may be signs of panic, but this is a White House that is well practised at denying reality and moving the conversation along – and it has plenty of help.
The danger for Democrats is the more they tighten the screws on Trump, the more Republicans will feel they have to defend him at all costs.
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