Editorial: With Epstein files, Trump looks like a loser

Sun Sentinel Editorial Board, South Florida Sun Sentinel on Nov 18, 2025

Published in Op Eds

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President Donald Trump cannot accept defeat.

His psychologist niece explains it in her book, “Too Much and Never Enough: How My Family Created the World’s Most Dangerous Man.”

He showed it to the world on Jan. 6 by trying to persuade his vice president to overturn the election he had lost.

The same character flaw explains why he told House Republicans to vote to require him to keep his reneged-upon promise to release the Jeffrey Epstein files.

He was going to lose that vote Tuesday after failing to keep MAGA loyalists in line. But the public shouldn’t expect to see what is in those files any time soon — if ever.

Pam Bondi’s role

Trump could have simply ordered the files released now.

He appears to be counting on never having to release them. The Senate might defeat the bill or not take it up. If that happens, he would all of a sudden love the filibuster, and if it passed, he could still veto it.

He’s already established the pretext for Attorney General Pam Bondi to ask him to do that.

That’s the likely intent behind his order to her — which she eagerly accepted — to investigate former President Bill Clinton, former Treasury Secretary Lawrence Summers and other Democrats whose Epstein connections were prominent in the documents from Epstein’s estate that a House subcommittee released last week.

An active criminal investigation is the boilerplate excuse for refusing to release a file.

An abuse of power

The investigation itself is another incandescent abuse of power by Trump and Bondi. The Department of Justice said unequivocally in July that there is nothing in its Epstein files to suggest a criminal investigation of anyone who hadn’t already been charged.

That referred to the deceased Epstein and his procurer of young women, Ghislaine Maxwell.

There was explicit language in a joint statement by the Justice Department and the FBI, both under Bondi’s control, and notably, no one’s name was on it.

A “systematic review,” the statement said, “revealed no incriminating ‘client list.’

“We did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties,” it said.

Was that a lie? If not, why has Bondi now ordered criminal investigations of people whom her department declared in effect to be innocent?

What’s Trump afraid of?

Trump’s improper order to open new investigations is a smokescreen and a convenient excuse to keep the files buried in the bowels of the DOJ.

Why does Trump seem so afraid of what might be in them? What might others fear? Who figured in sparing Epstein the decades he should have spent in prison?

Trump’s former friendship with Epstein was widely known and the emails released last week suggest only that he knew more about the financier’s abuses of young women than he ever acknowledged. That would not be a crime.

That also was before Epstein went to jail in 2008 under the kid-glove deal that U.S. Attorney Alex Acosta in Miami worked out for him. It sabotaged an FBI investigation of Epstein’s serial pedophilia by allowing him to plead guilty to state misdemeanor charges resulting in only 13 months of bedtime in jail and work release during the day.

The Epstein estate papers have whetted the appetites of people who relish prurient scandal. But they do not answer, as the government’s file might, other questions that are far more significant as matters of public policy.

Epstein’s sweetheart deal with the Justice Department and the Palm Beach County state attorney’s office went down during the second George W. Bush administration, in which Trump played no known role.