[VP JD] Vance had also floated to colleagues an extraordinary P.R. gambit — that the White House enlist Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison. It might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein.
Vance told the group he believed all the files should be released as soon as possible. He argued that Congress was going to force the release of the files eventually. It was already clear that a bipartisan coalition in favor of such action was forming on Capitol Hill, and the momentum was going in one direction. If the administration got out ahead of this and released everything voluntarily — including whatever material existed about the president — it would at least get credit for transparency. The alternative was to let the story drag on for months as information dripped out, each new revelation renewing the cycle of suspicion and fury. Better to rip the bandage off and move on.
...As the president’s former defense attorney, [Deputy AG Todd] Blanche had a unique vantage point in the discussion. He was better equipped than anyone else in the room to weigh the ideas being discussed against Trump’s personal and political interests. Blanche laid out what he saw as their best options.
Option 1 was to petition Federal District Courts in Florida and New York to
unseal the grand jury testimonies — the secret transcripts of prosecutors’ presentations of witnesses and evidence in their efforts to obtain indictments in past Epstein-related cases. As those were almost certain to contain
no significant new information, everyone agreed that this option was a good idea, and not only because a release was unlikely to damage the president....
Option 2 was to have Justice Department lawyers question Maxwell and publicly release the transcript — a twist on the idea proposed earlier by Vance. Blanche offered to interview Maxwell himself.
...Just then, The Wall Street Journal article they had been trying to kill was published online...The birthday card attributed to Trump depicted a nude woman, hand-drawn and inscribed with an imagined dialogue between the two men about a “wonderful secret.” The drawing was signed with what appeared to be Trump’s distinctive jagged Sharpie signature in place of the woman’s pubic hair.
...By
mid-November, the bipartisan coalition the Trump team had worried about since the summer finally had the votes to force the administration’s hand.
The Epstein Files Transparency Act passed the House and the Senate in quick succession, and on Nov. 19, Trump, yielding to the inevitable, signed it into law.
The new law went further than the House subpoena. It sought a broader tranche of files and contained a warning to the administration that
“no record shall be withheld, delayed or redacted on the basis of embarrassment, reputational harm or political sensitivity, including to any government official, public figure or foreign dignitary.” It sought everything that Trump had spent the better part of the year trying to suppress.
The legislators who passed the bill had no idea how many files they had mandated to be released within a month. The pages would end up numbering in the millions, and
the president, his family and places like his Mar-a-Lago estate would be referred to more than 38,000 times, according to
a New York Times analysis.