There were a couple of ways to think about the Trump administration’s about-face on releasing the files on America’s most notorious sex criminal, Jeffrey Epstein.

The most obvious explanation was that the members of President Trump’s administration had been aping him in his method of political warfare: exaggerating the connections between Epstein and America’s business and political elite and those elites’ involvement with procuring and trafficking underage girls. 

This is the cynical answer, which is oftentimes a good one when talking about politicians. And if that’s what happened, then the scandal would be that Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel and others lied about the case and then failed to develop an effective exit strategy for their scheme, wrongly believing that they could manage the disappointment of their supporters when the jig was up.

That wouldn’t have been a crazy miscalculation to make. Trump has pulled off exactly that maneuver many times, whether it was implicating a television host in the death of a congressional intern, that Sen. Ted Cruz’s (R-Texas) father was part of the plot to kill President John F. Kennedy, or that former President Obama was actually born in Kenya.

As Trump said of the Cruz smear, “Of course I don’t believe that. I wouldn’t believe it, but I did say ‘let people read it.’” 

That’s the let-bygones-be-bygones approach. Trump explains this as being a “counterpucher.” It’s not that truth is the first casualty, it is that truth is immaterial. It’s just the games people play, easily forgiven by supporters who don’t mind some rough justice for political foes.

Then there are those untruths that Trump never abandons, most famously his claim that he won the 2020 presidential election. That’s the “widening gyre” approach.

In such matters, Trump’s specific claims often fall apart, but his allies discover evidence of “something” in the same neighborhood. This is the old “seriously, but not literally” dodge, by which supporters can say Trump wasn’t exactly right, but he was pointing at something real — something they wanted to believe, what they might call “fake but accurate.”

Perhaps Bondi and Patel believed they were doing some version of these approaches: fabulism in service of political gains against targets unloved by anyone on the right. But if that’s what it was, they failed to follow Trump’s lead in the general tactic or in this specific case.

Trump had for years been soft-pedaling the Epstein stuff. The two had been friends and cads about town in Palm Beach, Fla., and Manhattan in the 1990s, but Trump had distanced himself during his 2016 presidential run, explaining that when Epstein was charged with sex crimes a decade prior, the future president had barred him from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Florida and cut all ties. 

But Epstein kept coming back to haunt him. When federal prosecutors nailed Epstein in 2019, it was not only the Trump Justice Department doing the busting, but the probe implicated Trump’s then-secretary of Labor, Alexander Acosta, as the author of the earlier sweetheart deal that let Epstein skate on federal charges when Acosta was the U.S. attorney in Miami.

Acosta got the boot from the Trump Cabinet, and the feds threw the book at Epstein, but it was under the Trump administration’s supervision that Epstein was found dead in his cell at a federal jail in New York. All the while, Trump kept the story at arm’s length. 

The next year, when Epstein’s partner in crime, Ghislaine Maxwell, was charged with the crimes for which she is now serving a 20-year sentence, Trump was again offered the chance to expound on the case but again hedged. 

“I don’t know,” Trump said at the time. “I haven’t really been following it too much. I just wish her well, frankly. I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well, whatever it is.”

Oh.

Trump, who wasn’t queasy about intimating that his foes were murderers or secret Kenyans, was given the chance during a losing presidential campaign to exploit the Epstein case by highlighting Epstein’s connections to prominent Democrats, particularly his old friends turned enemies, Bill and Hillary Clinton. But he passed, sending a pretty clear message to his team that this was not a place to swing freely.

Which leads us to the only other explanation available prior to Saturday: Bondi and Patel had been telling the truth before but are now part of a cover-up. 

That one doesn’t work for Democrats or the mainstream press. An inspector general had determined during the Biden administration that Epstein’s death had been the result of negligence, not murder, and the Justice Department seemed to close the book on the case. If one believed that finding, then Patel and Bondi could at most be guilty of unseemly politics, hardly a capital offense in Washington. Just a dose of Harry Reid-ing.

But if you don’t believe what the Biden administration said, then the range of potential misconduct would become much, much wider.

That was the world as we knew it on Friday: Either the Trump Justice Department was caught in a politically motivated lie or it was involved in an ongoing cover-up on behalf of Trump, or the “deep state” or to keep a blackmail scheme going or … anything, really. That’s the thing about cover-ups: If their existence is revealed, but allowed to stay in place, the imagination is the only limit to conjecture about what might be underneath. 

Trump has proved this again and again about Hillary Clinton’s secret email server, former President Biden’s mental decline, and the FBI’s investigation into Russian interference in 2016. 

Then on Saturday, Trump introduced a third possibility: That there was a cover-up, but it was a virtuous cover-up, because what was being concealed was itself fake. 

He announced: “Why are we giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, [Former FBI Director James] Comey, [former CIA Director John] Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden Administration. … They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands.”

This puts a sharper edge on what Trump said in a 2024 interview, expressing reservations about releasing the Epstein files because “you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world.” In the updated spin, it’s not passively “phony stuff,” but “Radical Left inspired Documents.”

This looks like Trump employing the “widening gyre.” In a rhetorical corner but unable to simply shrug it off, Trump raises the stakes. It’s not that they’re covering up the Epstein files, you see, it’s much, much bigger. It also has the benefit of making clear that anyone pushing for the release of the files is working for the bad guys, not against them.

Whether or not that works depends on many things, but chief among them is how willing his underlings are to efface themselves.

Bondi is obviously pretty willing to eat crow here, but Patel may be a different matter. That is certainly true of Patel’s deputy, Dan Bongino.

If those folks weren’t lying before, getting them to do so now is a tall order. Their credibility with the movement that championed them will be shredded if the administration sticks with the current line.

In that way, we have the first Trump scandal that’s really about a post-Trump GOP.