Donald Trump’s panicked aides met without him in the Situation Room during an emergency meeting in which they desperately sought to quell the MAGA civil war that had erupted over the administration’s failure to release the Epstein files, according to an explosive new report.
Ten days after the Justice Department and FBI released a memo last July declaring there was no Jeffrey Epstein client list and that the disgraced financier had killed himself in jail, Vice President JD Vance presided over a heated debate about how to appease the president’s outraged supporters, New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan write in their new book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.
Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Communications Director Steven Cheung, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel all joined either in person or on speakerphone, according to an adaptation of the book’s account published Wednesday in The New York Times.
There, the group hatched a plan to offer an empty gesture of transparency that would calm Trump’s base and convince them the president was sympathetic to their concerns—even though he clearly wasn’t.
Publicly, the administration was projecting confidence, but privately, the Epstein crisis was paralyzing the White House, the Times reported.
The Wall Street Journal was on the verge of publishing its bombshell report on a graphic birthday letter to Epstein allegedly signed by Trump, despite the president trying to bully the publication into killing the story.
The two men were close friends for more than a decade, though Trump has denied knowing anything about the late sex offender’s crimes and maintains he was never involved in any wrongdoing.
Epstein died in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges, and members of Trump’s own administration—including Patel—have long pushed conspiracy theories that he was murdered by his powerful associates.
Vance also seemed to believe the conspiracy theories, sources told the Times.
He was alarmed by the wedge that the Epstein scandal had driven in the MAGA coalition, and thought the administration should rip the Band-Aid off and release the DOJ’s millions of investigative files.
He also floated a wild idea to ask Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell in prison, where she is serving a 20-year sentence, in the hopes she would say that Trump had not been involved in Epstein’s crimes.
Other people in the room were skeptical of Vance’s maximum transparency idea, though Blanche proposed a variation on the Maxwell interview and suggested that he or another DOJ lawyer could be the one to speak to her.
Blanche also had the bright idea of petitioning the federal courts in Florida and New York to unseal the grand jury testimony in their Epstein-related cases, knowing full well that grand jury materials are generally considered sacrosanct and the request would almost certainly be denied.
In that case, though, the Trump administration could pin the lack of disclosure on the judges and make it seem as though the White House wanted the materials released, even though it knew all along it wouldn’t happen, according to the Times.
While the president’s aides were debating the details of their strategy, they received word that the Wall Street Journal story had been published.
Trump ended up posting two Truth Social posts—one denying the story and one calling for the grand jury transcripts to be released—but it did little to calm the Epstein maelstrom.
Throughout the summer, the Situation Room—a secure bunker in the West Wing typically used to respond to national security emergencies—became inseparable from the Epstein crisis, according to the Times.
Trump wanted the scandal buried and snapped at anyone who mentioned it, so his aides repeatedly convened in the Situation Room without him.
A bipartisan group of members of Congress had begun pushing for the files’ release, and Trump’s team spent hours in the bunker trying to craft a response, the Times reported.
In the meantime, his officials were fighting among themselves about who was to blame. Patel and then-deputy director Dan Bongino—a former podcaster who had also pushed Epstein-related conspiracy theories—blamed Bondi.
The former attorney general had implied in February that there was a client list sitting on her desk, and had organized a high-profile stunt in which MAGA influencers were given binders of “new” Epstein materials that turned out to be mostly recycled material.
Bongino thought it was a mistake to put out the “no client list” memo, and that it wouldn’t really kill the controversy the way other administration members hoped, according to the Times.
The day it was released, he erupted at Bondi during a daily Justice Department meeting with the FBI staff and the attorney general, according to the Times.
“You f---ed this thing up from the start,” Bongino yelled. “The way you’ve been talking about this — that dumb f---ing charade with the Epstein files, the ‘They’re on my desk’ nonsense, all the promises to the folks out there.”
In another July meeting at the Situation Room complex, he unloaded on Wiles, much to the shock of the other people in the room.
“No, no, no, no, no. We didn’t get ourselves into anything. I warned you guys about this the whole time, and you ignored me,” he said. “And exactly what I said was going to happen happened. And now you’re pretending I was in on this. I was never in on this.”
He eventually resigned in December.
A month earlier, Congress defied Trump and passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, forcing the files’ release, though millions of documents have been held back by the DOJ.
Reached for comment by the Times, White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson repeated Trump’s claims that he is innocent in all Epstein-related matters.
“By releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act and calling for more investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him,” she said.
The Daily Beast has also reached out to the White House for comment.
