OUR DAILY THREAD: There Is A Cancer On The Presidency

It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up.

THE SET-UP: Trump cannot shake the Epstein Files.

He can distract the public’s gaze for a day or two, but airstrikes and insults have failed to keep the story from stalking him like a brain-starved zombie. No matter how much distance he tries to put between himself and Epstein, it just keeps on coming.

The most audacious attempt to kill the zombie came on Valentine’s Day when his personal law firm of Bondi & Blanche used an overdue reporting requirement in the Epstein Files Transparency Act (EFTA) to claim the Department of Justice was in full compliance with the EFTA. According to their assessment, the DOJ has “met the requirements of the Act” and “released all ‘records, documents, communications and investigative in the possession of the Department’."

If true, that means an estimated 3 million documents will either remain heavily redacted or never be released. And that might be an undercount. The UK’s Channel 4 News analyzed internal emails among investigators and found references to 50 terabytes of material in 2020 and 14.6 terabytes of material in 2025. So far, the public has seen about 300 gigabytes of material … which translates to about 2% of the grand total mentioned by investigators last year.

That gap underscores the main problem with the Valentine’s Day letter—nobody trusts her. And some of the people she needs to convince the most—disaffected and disillusioned MAGA voters—trust her the least. Bondi, who once bragged about having Epstein’s client list on her desk, has no credibility left after denying the client list ever existed. That only reinforced the disdain she invited when she touted a big release of files to MAGA influencers that turned out to be binders full of nothing.

She made it worse by slow-walking the files through the DOJ. That, along with the faulty, uneven but Trump-friendly application of redactions allowed by the EFTA, helped fueled the belief that she’s been running a cover-up for her boss.

If so, it would explain a lot.

Why else would Bondi, Dan Bongino and Kash Patel ride into town with guns-blazing, ready to round up a pedo ring they (and Qanon) helped make infamous … but then, once they began rooting around in the files, suddenly jump off their high horses to tell us their posse had come up dry?

Could it be the “more than a million” mentions Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-MD) said he got when he searched for their boss in the unredacted files?

Imagine their position. They open the files. His name is everywhere. And then came the choice. The truth? Or Trump?

We saw Patel’s choice play out on Joe Rogan’s show. We just saw Bondi use a series of scripted insults and economic bulletpoints to proclaim her choice in a Congressional hearing room. And then there’s Bongino slinking back to the microphone that helped propel the Epstein story in the first place.

The one character who seems to have kept his cool throughout the cover-up is the guy who worked as Trump’s personal lawyer before landing in the DOJ. He’s Trump’s insurance policy. Blanche is functioning as a criminal defense attorney and the President is his client. Trump’s dream has come true—he’s got a loyal, unscrupulous lawyer working on his behalf at the top of the DOJ. No doubt, Blanche made sure his client’s name is redacted everywhere it needs to be.

But that’s not enough. Just claiming “that’s all folks” and moving on isn’t going to cut it.

Blanche’s sophomoric sophistry and Bondi’s scripted outrage might’ve held the line if House of Representatives hadn’t come together in almost complete bipartisan agreement to pass the EFTA. That vote came in spite of Trump’s arm-twisting, too. He couldn’t even convince Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) to side with him. When it zoomed through the Senate and went straight to his desk, the task before Bondi & Blanche was clear—the files could never be fully released as outlined in the EFTA. So, it appears they opted for an old intelligence trick … the “limited hangout.”

A well-worn tactic of psychological warfare, The Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential defines it thusly:

A limited hangout or partial hangout is a tactic used in media relations, perception management, politics and information management. A limited hangout gives a taste of the truth that is stage-managed and controlled. It misdirects away from the depth of the scandal, withholding key information that could damage the powerful.

The entry includes a quote from Victor Marchetti, a former special assistant to the Deputy Director of the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA):

A limited hangout is "spy jargon for a favorite and frequently used gimmick of the clandestine professionals. When their veil of secrecy is shredded and they can no longer rely on a phony cover story to misinform the public, they resort to admitting—sometimes even volunteering—some of the truth while still managing to withhold the key and damaging facts in the case. The public, however, is usually so intrigued by the new information that it never thinks to pursue the matter further."

The problem is that the public is so intrigued by the redactions, omissions and official obfuscations it can’t stop thinking about pursuing the matter further. In fact, the public has been primed by Trump himself to be suspicious and think the worst of people who work in government.

After all, it’s a rigged system.

And there’s no clearer example of a rigged justice system than the over one thousand female survivors pleading to the DOJ and the President in vain while, at the same, a lot of wealthy, well-connected men continue to walk free. That’s technically true … because Ghislaine Maxwell somehow found her way out of prison and into a minimum security camp. Funny how it followed an interview with Blanche.

And therein lies the rub.

By doing stupid shit like moving Maxwell without a viable cover story or yelling about “THE DOW!” when asked about prosecuting co-conspirators … only heightens MAGA’s suspicions and the general public’s interest. Take a look at Harry Enten’s quick hit on CNN:

The best part is the fact that Americans were primed to grab hold of the Epstein story by the MAGA media scrum that emerged during Biden’s term … by self-serving sycophants like Patel and Bongino … and by Trump himself.

Perhaps it’s fitting that Trump’s fate is now increasingly intertwined with “The Epstein Files” in much the same way “Hillary’s Emails” entangled his opponent during the final weeks of the 2016 campaign. The auspiciously (or suspiciously) timed releases helped rescue Trump from the abyss almost immediately after the public heard him brag about grabbing women’s genitals whenever he pleased.

Whether the appearance of the emails was a coincidence or collusion, Trump knew exactly what to do. He repeated “Hillary’s Emails” over and over and over again until the phrase itself became a brand with a message: “you can’t trust her.” It fit well with the branding campaign he was running in lieu of a traditional political campaign. “Hillary’s Emails” and “I love Wikileaks” didn’t quite become earworms like “build the wall” or “drain the swamp” or “the system is rigged,” but the emails reinforced Americans’ uneasy feeling that elites like Hillary dance through the raindrops while the God-fearing people in Sarah Palin’s “Real America” get hosed.

And that’s where The Epstein Files differs from Hillary’s Emails.

There was no actual evidence of a pedo-trafficking ring in a pizza parlor basement. And her emails were NOT redacted by a team of Hillary’s sycophants. Imagine if her emails first went to Perkins Coie and attorney Marc Elias for vetting and scrubbing instead to Wikileaks under Assange?

That’s exactly what Trump got when the DOJ refused to fully and immediately comply with a law he signed. Instead they used used each illicit day that passed as an opportunity to hide the names and accusations Trump wanted hidden.

And it’s not just the heavily-redacted Trump in there, but also Treasury Secretary Howard Lutnick, Health and Human Services Secretary RFK Jr., Deputy Defense Secretary Stephen Feinberg, Navy Secretary John Phelan, Fed Chair nominee Kevin Warsh, Elon Musk and Steve Bannon. Add to that former Labor Secretary Alex Acosta … who appears to have been rewarded for keeping his mouth shut, which he continued to do long after Epstein met his inevitable death in Federal jail cell.

That death happened in 2019 while Trump was in office. “Jeffrey Epstein committed suicide” was a punchline … a laugh and a nod and a wink at the same time. It was also an admission that we live in an America where you cannot trust the people in power to tell the truth.

Trump went far by conflating authenticity with honesty.

But that Teflon is wearing thinner with each passing week the Epstein Files remain a mystery to be answered. That’s a problem he can only solve by coming clean and releasing the files. If history is a guide, he’d rather be consumed by the cover-up. - jp

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Putin, women, favours: DOJ files reveal Jeffrey Epstein’s efforts to build Russian ties
https://www.france24.com/en/americas/20260217-putin-women-doj-files-reveal-jeffrey-epstein-build-russian-ties

White House Shrugs Off Lutnick’s Epstein Ties
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/02/17/us/politics/trump-howard-lutnick-epstein.html

Epstein files list growing, wreaking havoc on highly powerful executives
https://www.newsnationnow.com/vargasreports/epstein-files-list-growing-wreaking-havoc-on-highly-powerful-executives/

The Epstein files have brought a wave of resignations and investigations
https://www.washingtonpost.com/politics/2026/02/17/epstein-files-resignations-investigations/

New Mexico lawmakers pass measure aimed at investigating Epstein’s Zorro Ranch
https://www.cnn.com/2026/02/17/politics/epstein-ranch-new-mexico-house-committee

Essex Police assessing Stansted Airport private flights tied to Epstein files
https://www.the-independent.com/news/uk/home-news/epstein-files-stansted-airport-private-flights-b2922284.html

Epstein Files Linked to Global Crimes Against Humanity: UN Experts
https://www.devdiscourse.com/article/law-order/3808757-epstein-files-linked-to-global-crimes-against-humanity-un-experts

The Epstein Files Were Always Going to Break the Internet
https://ddia.org/en/the-epstein-files-were-always-going-to-break-the-internet