Dylan Scott here. It's Thursday and the summer school break is officially halfway over. It really feels like all anybody wants to talk about these days is Jeffrey Epstein, the "files" on him, and whether the Trump administration will release them. If, like me, you've been a little out of the loop, today's newsletter is for you. Today, Explained podcast host Sean Rameswaram spoke this week to former federal and state prosecutor Elie Honig about who's to blame. You can read an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, below, and listen to the full episode of Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts. |
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You're probably not going to see the Epstein Files |
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| Sean Rameswaram If you're someone out there who's like, "release the Epstein Files," who should they be most mad at right now that they don't have their Epstein Files? |
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| Elie Honig I'm going to answer with a "what" rather than a "who." The first thing they should be mad at is an ancient DOJ policy that says, we DOJ, we federal prosecutors, do not just make public our closed investigative files because people want to know. There is a long-standing DOJ policy and principle that has been observed by both political parties that we don't turn these things over. We don't slag people in public who can't defend themselves, who aren't charged with anything, who don't have the ability to go to trial. Now listen, let me just say that that policy sucks sometimes. It's very unsatisfying at times. As a member of the public and the media now, I hate that policy. But it is a longstanding policy. |
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| Sean Rameswaram Why would Pam Bondi say, "It's sitting on my desk right now to review" if she didn't intend to? |
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| Elie Honig I have no earthly idea. Pam Bondi has handled this whole situation in an utterly inexplicable, inconsistent, and I think often dishonest manner. She blazes into office as attorney general and she basically by her actions makes clear: I don't give a crap about that policy that I just talked about. I'm going to be turning this all over. I'm going to break the cover off this thing and you all are going to know everything. Clearly when she said "the client list is on my desk," it wasn't. Because it appears there is no client list, per se. Now that doesn't mean nobody is implicated, but this notion that there's some list, there's some piece of paper entitled Jeffrey Epstein's client list, one, two, three, seems to be pretty clearly an oversimplification. So I think that's the $64,000 question. Why this very sudden, very stark turnabout? |
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| Sean Rameswaram There's been a lot of writing that Pam Bondi has perhaps brought the Justice Department under Donald Trump in a way that we haven't seen in decades. What do you think is the clearest evidence of that? |
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| Elie Honig I think that's true and I think it's provable. If we think back through the last many AGs, and I'd include Donald Trump's prior AG, Bill Barr, who, by the way, my first book is a criticism of Bill Barr's tenure as Trump's AG called Hatchet Man. But I think Bondi is different and worse— |
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| Sean Rameswaram Because even Bill Barr didn't believe the Big Lie. |
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| Elie Honig Barr had his lines. Bondi has no lines. And I'll give you something that to me was a really telling moment for Pam Bondi. It's been almost forgotten already in the shuffle. The Signal scandal, when Mike Waltz and other officials — JD Vance and Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio — were discussing a military strike over the Signal app, right? We have precedent for this. We've had comparable situations of presidents potentially mishandling, or other high-ranking officials mishandling, classified information. Every time there's at least been an investigation opened, whether it was Hillary Clinton's email, whether it was Joe Biden mishandling documents, whether it was Donald Trump mishandling documents. So at a minimum, any modestly halfway semi-independent AG would at least say, we're going to investigate, we're going to get to the bottom of this, and then who knows, maybe come back in six months and say, all right, we looked at it and while people were reckless, there was nothing quite criminal. Pam Bondi, in contrast, basically announces three days in, we're not going to be investigating, nothing wrong was done here, none of that information was classified, everyone should just be cheering on the fact that this was a successful military strike. And that moment showed us that she is completely at Trump's beck and call and she will never intentionally do anything contrary to Trump's political interests. |
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| Sean Rameswaram Like maybe release the Epstein files? |
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| Elie Honig There you go. That's one of the theories out there, that perhaps there's something in there that's bad for Trump. We know they're old friends. Some magazine, I'm blanking on which one, did a magazine feature on Jeffrey Epstein years ago, before he had been convicted of any crime. And both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump are quoted in the magazine. And Trump's quote is something like, He sure does like beautiful women, even younger than I do. I'm not getting it word for word, but it's very close to that. Would it be shocking if there was something embarrassing for Donald Trump in those files? Or Bill Clinton or whoever? No. |
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| Sean Rameswaram Do you think the anger that's directed at Pam Bondi right now is misdirected and in fact it should be going right to the top and Donald Trump? |
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| Elie Honig Let me put it this way: Both the president and the attorney general have the power, almost without question, to disclose whatever they want to disclose with a snap of the fingers. I mean, yes, look, they should not do that for the reasons I said before. There are policies against this and I think it was Pam Bondi who said at one point, We'd have to do redactions and there are victims. And yes, of course you'd have to protect victims and minors and redact out pornographic materials and all that stuff. However, any one of them does have the ability to disclose whatever they deem fit tonight if they wanted to. |
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⮕ Keep tabs Trump's bogus economic bet: Apparently, the administration's economic plan is to deport a bunch of cheap workers and then replace them with a bunch of native layabouts. Nicola Narea explains why that probably won't work. 🎧 An ancient enemy: Author and philanthropist John Green is trying to draw the world's attention to our collective failure to beat tuberculosis — and to how we could vanquish one of our oldest enemies. Listen to his interview with Unexplainable. The "enshittification" of American power: I could not improve upon this singularly great headline for an important story on how US policymaking is adopting the worst of tech culture. [Wired]
A $5 million rock: Okay, okay, it's a space rock. But when you learn, as I did, that only 400 Martian meteorites have ever been found and this one, at more than 50 pounds, is gargantuan, the outrageous price tag makes more sense. [CNN]
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| You probably shouldn't expect to see the Epstein Files anytime soon. That's because the Department of Justice belongs to President Trump. |
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Covering health care means covering a lot of bad news: sickness and death, ridiculous medical bills, a broken health care system begotten by a broken politics. But thankfully, the bad stuff is sometimes tempered by good news: nurses and doctors who take care of people and new medical breakthroughs that promise more years of health to patients today and in the future. This piece in Science — about how a cancer treatment has put scientists on the trail of a natural HIV cure — lifted my mood. |
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Today's newsletter was produced and edited by me, senior correspondent Dylan Scott, who does want to hear your health care horror stories and your good news, too. Email me at dylan.scott@vox.com. We will see you tomorrow. |
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