The MAGA Machine Is Burying the Truth About Jeffrey Epstein

Trump’s DOJ is shielding predators and silencing survivors. Why?

by Julie Roginsky

Let’s be crystal clear: Donald Trump will never willingly do right by the girls — now women — who were trafficked by Jeffrey Epstein. Every time legacy media jumps to write about how the Department of Justice or Trump’s congressional allies are “releasing” troves of documents about Epstein, just remember this, so that you will not be disappointed.

The only way these documents ever see the light of day is if they are leaked or released by someone who is not a MAGA team member. Everything else is just theater.

How do I know this? Let us count the ways.

Trump has repeatedly said that the entire Epstein scandal is a “hoax.” (Hoax is Trump’s favorite term for something that is obviously true, like Russian election interference.) But in the Epstein matter, Trump has gone out of his way to care for the very people who let Epstein’s survivors down over and over. Once you see the pattern, you cannot miss how terrified he must be of the truth coming out.

In 2017, Trump nominated Alexander Acosta to serve as his secretary of labor. A decade earlier, as U.S. attorney in Miami, Acosta had approved the non-prosecution agreement that immunized Epstein and his alleged co-conspirators from federal charges. In February 2019, a federal judge ruled that prosecutors, including Acosta, violated the Crime Victims’ Rights Act (CVRA) by keeping Epstein’s victims in the dark while cutting that deal.

Survivors said the government “broke the law” by excluding them. By elevating Acosta to his cabinet, Trump signaled that the official who engineered that betrayal of Epstein’s survivors was fit for promotion. Acosta ultimately resigned in July 2019 after renewed scrutiny on the Epstein matter, but only after Trump sent a message to the women that he could not care less about them.

When Epstein was arrested in New York in July 2019, many survivors hoped that they would finally be able to confront him in a courtroom. Instead, Epstein died by suicide the next month inside the Metropolitan Correctional Center (MCC), a federal jail run by the Bureau of Prisons (BOP), which is part of the Justice Department. (At the time, the DOJ was run by Attorney General Bill Barr, whose father Donald had hired Epstein as a math and physics teacher at the Dalton School in New York City, despite Epstein not having a college degree. No one has ever found out why it was that Donald Barr, the Dalton headmaster, hired an un-credentialed young man to teach at an elite school full of young girls. As far as I can tell, no one has also ever asked Bill Barr whether he and Epstein knew each other through Donald Barr or through others.)

The DOJ Inspector General’s 2023 report concluded that a “combination of negligence, misconduct, and job performance failures” allowed Epstein to take his life: officers didn’t conduct required rounds, falsified logs, and left him without a cellmate; equipment and staffing were shambolic. The attorney general removed the warden, and the two guards on duty later admitted to falsifying records. But that was it. No one else was ever held accountable.

Even setting aside conspiracy theories, the official record is devastating enough: critical procedures weren’t followed, oversight failed, and the consequences were borne by victims who lost the chance to see Epstein publicly tried and sentenced. That happened on Barr’s watch but no one above a few people at the jail itself answered for it.

Even before Epstein’s death, Trump’s Justice Department was doing everything possible to prevent the survivors who were harmed in the events covered by the Acosta NPA from getting justice. In June 2019, federal prosecutors defended the old NPA against survivors’ efforts to void it, entrenching a deal widely condemned as unjust. Rather than fighting to expand the rights of survivors, the Trump Administration proactively did everything possible to prevent the survivors from having their day in court. All it did was convince these already traumatized women that the institutions of justice were stacked against them.

Then, of course, there is Trump himself, who has gone out of his way to treat Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime accomplice, with kid gloves. Asked in July 2020 about Maxwell, who was then charged with sex-trafficking minors, Trump said, “I just wish her well, frankly.” He repeated the sentiment days later. For survivors, the message was clear: the president of the United States had more empathy for the accused facilitator of their abuse than for them.

The pattern only grew worse since Trump’s re-election. When Trump returned to the White House in January 2025, he did so on promises of transparency. On the campaign trail, he pledged to release the so-called “Epstein files,” dangling the prospect of full accountability for Jeffrey Epstein’s powerful associates. For survivors of Epstein’s abuse, many of whom had been denied justice for decades, this promise offered a glimmer of hope.

But in the months since Trump reclaimed power, his Justice Department has not delivered justice. Instead, it has reinforced the survivors’ worst fears: that institutions protect predators while silencing victims.

After repeated statements that the “Epstein files” were sitting on her desk, Attorney General Pam Bondi announced that the Epstein matter was closed and that she would be moving on. When the blowback became too powerful to ignore, Trump’s DOJ tried another tack: to effectively bribe Maxwell, now serving a 20-year prison sentence, into absolving Trump of any connection to Epstein. Last month, the department granted her limited proffer immunity, allowing her to sit for multi-day interviews with federal officials without risking her words being used against her in future prosecutions.

Not long after these interviews, Maxwell was quietly transferred to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas, one of the least restrictive facilities in the federal system. While the administration insisted the move was routine, the timing raised suspicions. To survivors, it looked like a reward, not a routine reassignment.

Meanwhile, Trump’s allies, including Speaker Mike Johnson, have refused to treat the scandal with the oversight it requires. This week, the House Oversight Committee, working with the Justice Department, released what was billed as the first tranche of “Epstein files.”

At face value, the release looked significant: 33,295 pages of records connected to Epstein. But on closer inspection, over 97 percent of these documents were already public, with scant new information. This is less a watershed moment of transparency than a cruel sleight of hand, designed to give the media something to chase with no substance at all.

It is no wonder that Epstein’s survivors have taken matters into their own hands by compiling their own “client list” and analyzing flight logs, emails, and other documents that the government either refused to release or insisted did not exist. Survivors have described the government’s stance as a “cover-up” — and rightly so.

With every shiny object that Trump, Bondi and their MAGA allies throw at the public, it becomes crystal clear that most legacy media outlets are not built for this moment. There are not “two sides” to this story — not when the very people who are supposed to deliver justice for victims of child sex trafficking are the ones doing everything possible to bury it.

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Read an excerpt from the latest for Banter Members:

The Boiling Frog

Americans do not seem to understand how perilous this moment in history really is.

by Ben Cohen

I remember the first time I learnt about the Holocaust in school in the UK. I was 12 years old and my knowledge of history had been confined to the Norman conquest of Britain in 1066, how ancient Britons used to live (no baths, and houses built from wattle and daub) the Tudors, and Henry the VIIIth’s wives (divorced, beheaded, died, divorced, beheaded, survived!).

We had spent some time looking at the Victorian era and World War 1, but my memory of those subjects — at least from back then — is rather hazy. My memory of the rise of Adolf Hitler and the catastrophic events that led to World War II however is not.

This is, I am certain, almost entirely due to the photographs of Jews in death camps who looked exactly like my family, and Anne Frank, who looked very much like my grandmother as a child.

I struggled to come to terms with how anyone could hate another group of people so much that they would gas them to death in industrial warehouses. I was also painfully aware that had I been alive then, I would have been murdered by the Nazis too. I became somewhat obsessed with World War II after that and read everything I could on the topic. I went to the Mass Observation archives to read about everyday British people’s experiences during the war, read indescribably painful accounts of surviving the death camps (Primo Levi’s ‘If This Is a Man’, and Viktor Frankl’s ‘Man’s Search for Meaning’), wrote countless essays on the subject, and tried to understand how something so inexplicably horrific could have happened.

The deeper I went into the causes of World War II and the Holocaust, the more complex it became. The 12 year-old me saw it in extremely simplistic terms — the Germans were the bad guys, and The Allies were the good guys. They fought to stop the Holocaust and the destruction of Europe, and after that the world decided to never do anything that stupid again.

But as I matured and my knowledge deepened, my perspective on the conflict evolved. There were a myriad of reasons why Germany descended in Nazism. From the collapse of their economy to the humiliating reparations imposed primarily by France and Britain — the country was in retrospect, primed for an authoritarian takeover.

For those who have studied the collapse of the Weimar Republic and the rise of Adolf Hitler, the current crisis in the United States looks eerily familiar. It is, I suspect, why Jews overwhelmingly voted for Kamala Harris in 2024, and why hundreds of respected historians and political scientists have been sounding the alarm.

While conservatives have done an excellent job mocking anyone daring to make the connection (it’s Trump Derangement Syndrome!), the parallels are undeniable — and they are escalating at a truly terrifying pace.

I am not arguing that Trump is about to exterminate millions of ethnic minorities in purpose built death camps — but he is in the process of destroying democracy in America and turning it into a one party, fascist state. Outside of the MAGA echo chamber this is no longer controversial, just a matter of our new political reality.

When Adolf Hitler took power in Germany in 1933, most Germans did not believe democracy was about to end. Much of the population certainly distrusted parliamentary democracy, associating it with national humiliation after World War I, the Treaty of Versailles, spiraling inflation, and political instability. But they saw the Nazis as a temporary solution to the ineffectiveness of the Weimar Republic.

Hitler’s rise was not framed as the destruction of democracy. On the contrary, he came to power legally…

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