Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files
The president’s top advisers gathered in a series of Situation Room meetings as they struggled to contain a scandal engulfing Donald Trump himself.
Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, White House reporters for The Times, are the authors of the forthcoming “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.” This article is drawn from reporting done for that book.
On July 17, 2025, at around 6 o’clock in the evening, President Trump’s top officials filed into the White House Situation Room — the secure bunker where classified and high-stakes national security matters are discussed and decided. This was where President Barack Obama, along with Vice President Joe Biden, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and the president’s national security team, watched the raid that ended with the death of Osama bin Laden in 2011.
Now, however, Trump’s most senior advisers had gathered — without him — to figure out how to gain some measure of control over a very different kind of crisis threatening to engulf the presidency: the Epstein files.
Summary
Background and the Broken Promise
The MAGA base had been primed for years to expect explosive revelations. Patel, Bongino, Vance, and Donald Trump Jr. had all used the Epstein files as a campaign message — promising that a second Trump term would expose the “powerful people” hiding the truth. Trump himself said on the Lex Fridman podcast in 2024 that releasing a client list would probably happen and he’d “have no problem with it.” Privately, however, he told Marjorie Taylor Greene that releasing Epstein material could hurt some of his friends. That tension — between public bravado and private alarm — defined the entire crisis.
What the Files Actually Contained About Trump
This is where it gets damaging. When Blanche briefed Trump on the review, he told him there were “some mentions of you, but nothing substantive” — a characterization that proved to be a significant understatement once the files were eventually released. The numbers tell the story: Trump, his family, and Mar-a-Lago were referenced more than 38,000 times across the millions of pages. Flight records showed Trump flew on Epstein’s private jet at least eight times between 1993 and 1996, sometimes with his then-wife Marla Maples and sometimes with his children — directly contradicting his January 2024 public claim that he had never been on the plane.
The Birthday Book
One of the most vivid and damaging specific details came from the Wall Street Journal story Trump desperately tried to kill — personally calling Rupert Murdoch, News Corp CEO Robert Thomson, and the Journal’s editor in chief, threatening a lawsuit and telling her she must “hate America.” The story revealed that Trump had contributed to a special birthday book assembled by Ghislaine Maxwell for Epstein in 2003. The card attributed to Trump depicted a hand-drawn nude woman with an imagined dialogue between the two men about a “wonderful secret,” signed with what appeared to be Trump’s distinctive Sharpie signature in place of the woman’s pubic hair.
The Unverified But Damaging Allegations
Senior officials in the Situation Room were blindsided when a staffer pulled up the planned DOJ transparency website in test mode and one of the first things to surface was a secondhand sexual allegation against Trump from the unsealed 2015 Giuffre v. Maxwell defamation case. Another Epstein victim, Sarah Ransome, had written emails claiming a girl in Epstein’s trafficking ring named “Jen” told her she had sex with Trump. The officials debated whether to include this on the public website, with Vance surprisingly arguing they should — reasoning Trump had been accused of worse and that releasing it would demonstrate good faith. Wiles shut that down, saying Trump would never agree to it.
The Giuffre Connection
Virginia Giuffre — one of Epstein’s most prominent victims — had actually met Epstein as a teenage spa attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago club in Palm Beach. She had stated in 2016 that Trump had done nothing improper to her knowledge. She died by suicide in April 2025, shortly after Trump returned to power. Her death added another layer of tragedy and public scrutiny to the Mar-a-Lago connection.
Maxwell and the Quid Pro Quo Question
The administration quietly interviewed Maxwell over two days. She told Blanche she had witnessed no troubling behavior by Trump and didn’t recall him sending the birthday card. Shortly after the interview, she was transferred to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Texas — with no explanation offered, which the public immediately read as a reward for her cooperation. Officials discussed whether to offer her a pardon or sentence reduction in exchange for favorable statements, before shooting it down as an obvious PR catastrophe.
Why Trump Couldn’t Kill It
Even after signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act under duress in November 2025, Trump continued insisting “there’s nothing on me.” His internal polling told a different story — by March 2026, focus groups were still spontaneously raising the Epstein files, ranking it sixth among voter concerns, ahead of topics like crime, military issues, and data centers. His own pollster characterized it as “a real negative with some of these voters.”
The core problem was structural: millions of pages of raw FBI interview notes, civil case filings, and criminal records — never designed for public consumption — now existed in a searchable public database, and Trump’s name ran through all of it. Every denial created a new news cycle, and every new document release contradicted a previous claim.
