Epstein files: A judge confirms the Trump team’s smokescreen

For weeks, the Trump administration has made a sequence of fairly curious strikes associated to the Jeffrey Epstein information.

It has gone back on its promises of intensive disclosure. It has misled about the situation. It has strained to keep away from acknowledging President Donald Trump’s ties to Epstein. It has handled Ghislaine Maxwell suspiciously well in still-unexplained methods. And it has taken actions geared towards supposed transparency that didn’t appear all that transparent.

The complete factor has a number of of Epstein’s victims and their allies suggesting a cover-up is afoot. (Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing in reference to the accused intercourse trafficker.)

And on Monday, a key second arrived: Confirmation that the administration’s large preliminary transfer towards supposed transparency was, in truth, a smokescreen.

Trump’s first effort to quell the constructing backlash was to push for the unsealing of grand jury testimony in the Epstein and Maxwell instances. But even at the time, consultants cautioned how restricted a step this gave the impression to be.

A judge has now rejected that push in the Maxwell case. But what’s key right here is his reasoning. It’s not that the data is just too delicate, as some wagered it is likely to be; it’s that it merely isn’t new.

In different phrases, the White House’s first large transfer towards shedding mild was … attempting to launch paperwork that don’t try this in any respect.

And the thrust of Judge Paul Engelmayer’s ruling is that this certainly seems to be, for all intents and functions, like that smokescreen.

“(The administration’s) entire premise — that the Maxwell grand jury materials would bring to light meaningful new information about Epstein’s and Maxwell’s crimes, or the Government’s investigation into them — is demonstrably false,” Engelmayer wrote.

He stated he requested the administration to establish what data could be new, but it surely highlighted “only scattered words, clauses, and occasional sentences.” (The judge additionally stated in a footnote that even a few of that restricted highlighted data was already coated by public testimony at Maxwell’s trial.)

Engelmayer stated these conversant in the case “would thus learn next to nothing new,” and that the data incorporates no particulars about:

In different phrases, the supplies include principally nothing of curiosity on the key factors that animate those that wish to know extra about the Epstein information. They’re a nothingburger.

What’s significantly notable about that’s that the content material of those paperwork wouldn’t have been some form of thriller to the administration. It has had entry to them. And it nonetheless constructed them up as a key effort at transparency.

All of which leads Engelmayer to recommend the administration knew higher all alongside and may need meant to create a “diversion.”

“A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at ‘transparency’ but at diversion — aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such,” he wrote.

Indeed, the judge suggests there’s principally one good motive to probably launch the paperwork: to indicate the public simply what a smokescreen this was.

“The one colorable argument under that doctrine for unsealing in this case, in fact, is that doing so would expose as disingenuous the Government’s public explanations for moving to unseal,” he wrote.

It’s a surprising rebuke of the administration that comes at an inauspicious time.

The administration has already resisted disclosing something associated to its different transfer to quell the Epstein backlash. More than two weeks after the Justice Department’s interview with Maxwell, we nonetheless know subsequent to nothing about it. About all we’ve discovered is that she’s been moved to a lower-security jail camp, and the administration nonetheless hasn’t defined why.

Now we study that certainly one of the administration’s different efforts at supposed transparency gained’t produce something – and predictably so. (Another judge overseeing the request for grand jury transcripts in Epstein’s case has but to rule.)

So why does the administration hold stepping in it and ready for others to drive its hand on disclosure?

Was this simply Trump deciding this was the play and the Justice Department attempting to make the most of it? Or was this an effort to make a judge reject them after which blame the judge?

Either manner, it’s not about to fulfill those that really care about the Epstein information.

The growing query for them – and particularly these in the MAGA motion who actually pressed this concern for years – is whether or not they start to see via this effort and see it as the cover-up that Epstein’s victims and their allies have steered.