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First thing this morning, Attorney General Pam Bondi posted on X a statement from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche saying that under Bondi’s direction, he had talked to the lawyers for Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of grooming victims for convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Blanche wrote that he anticipated meeting with Maxwell in the coming days.

“President Trump has told us to release all credible evidence,” he wrote. “If Ghislane [sic] Maxwell has information about anyone who has committed crimes against victims, the FBI and the DOJ will hear what she has to say.” This offering appeared designed to show that the White House wants to release information that might be in the Epstein files, but as observers note, the president could just release the files themselves if he wanted to.

In fact, yesterday, the administration did just that. Over the objections of his family, the Trump administration released records compiled by the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) about the Reverend Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. The files contain more than 240,000 pages of records and have been sealed since 1977, when the FBI turned them over to the National Archives and Records Administration (NARA).

The acting archivist of the United States is Marco Rubio (who is also secretary of state, interim national security advisor, and acting administrator of what’s left of the U.S. Agency for International Development).

While this document dump appears to have been announced in order to distract from the Epstein files, it seems unlikely to do so. MAGA and other Americans are interested in the Epstein files because they expect the files will show that the government has been covering up for powerful men who have been able to rape children without facing legal accountability. In contrast, the King files will likely show the government harassing a citizen to pin illegal activity on him, a different side of the same coin that suggests the government is working for rich and powerful white men.

The King files were compiled by the FBI in projects associated with its COINTELPRO, short for Counter Intelligence Program, that operated between 1956 and 1971. These projects illegally surveilled and worked to discredit Americans that FBI director J. Edgar Hoover thought were a danger to American society. Hoover singled out King as a target, bugging his home and hotel rooms and urging him to take his own life.

Attorney General Bondi also announced that the Department of Justice has released additional documents from the FBI’s investigation into former secretary of state Hillary Clinton’s email server. In 2016, after then-candidate Donald Trump insisted that her use of a private server had been criminal and made “Lock her up!” a chant at his rallies, the FBI concluded that while Clinton had been “extremely careless,” she did not act with criminal intent. She was never charged.

Last night, House speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) sent members of the House of Representatives home early for their summer break rather than take a vote on whether to release the Epstein files. The House will not reconvene until September 2.

Last night at 9:03 p.m., the White House account posted on X an image of Trump in front of American flags, eagles, and fireworks with the caption: “I was the hunted—NOW I’M THE HUNTER. President Donald J. Trump.”

Things seem a little unstable at the White House.

That panic continued today. When a reporter asked about Blanche’s meeting with Maxwell, Trump exploded, attacking former president Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton. Trump claimed they "tried to rig the [2016] election, and they got caught. And there should be very severe consequences for that.”

Trump was referring to the allegations Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard made on Friday, when she called for the prosecution of former president Barack Obama and former senior national security officials for participating in a “treasonous conspiracy” against Trump that indicated Russian operatives had worked on his behalf during the 2016 presidential election.

Gabbard told Congress last March that the U.S. Intelligence Community assessed that Iran was not working on a nuclear weapon, putting her at odds with Trump, who justified his attack on Iran with the insistence that the country was close to achieving nuclear capabilities. Her defense of Trump now seems likely to help her restore her favor with the White House.

“We caught Hillary Clinton,” Trump said. ”We caught Barack Hussein Obama. They’re the ones, and then you have many, many people under them…. And it’s the most unbelievable thing I think I’ve ever read. So you ought to take a look at that and stop talking about nonsense, because this is big stuff, never has a thing like this happened in the history of our country. And by the way, it morphed into the 2020 race, and the 2020 race was rigged, and it was, it was a rigged election. And because it was rigged, we have millions of people in our country, we have—we had inflation, we solved the inflation problem. But millions and millions of people came into our country because of that, and people that shouldn’t have been, people from gangs and from jails and from mental institutions.”

Trump continued: "This was treason. This was every word you can think of. They tried to steal the election. They tried to obfuscate the election. They did things that nobody’s ever even imagined, even in other countries.”

Trump appears to be touching all his greatest hits in an attempt to regain control of the narrative. But the more he protests that he is not connected to the Epstein files, the more he reinforces the idea that he is. That nervousness showed in the attempt this weekend, uncovered by Slate’s Ben Mathis-Lilley, to reassure major media outlets that the White House had neutralized the Epstein story. Mathis-Lilley noted that the stories making that argument in the New York Times, the Washington Post, and CNN all had the same source: Trump ally Steve Bannon.

After Trump’s outburst today, President Obama’s spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush issued a statement saying: “Out of respect for the office of the presidency, our office does not normally dignify the constant nonsense and misinformation flowing out of this White House with a response. But these claims are outrageous enough to merit one. These bizarre allegations are ridiculous and a weak attempt at distraction.

“Nothing in the document issued last week undercuts the widely accepted conclusion that Russia worked to influence the 2016 presidential election but did not successfully manipulate any votes. These findings were affirmed in a 2020 report by the bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee, led by then-Chairman Marco Rubio.”

Today CNN published more newly discovered photos of Trump and Epstein together.

And as of yesterday, there is a billboard in New York City’s Times Square asking: “TRUMP, WHY WON’T YOU RELEASE THE EPSTEIN FILES?”

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Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/05/01/us/politics/marco-rubio-national-security-secretary-state.html

https://apnews.com/article/martin-luther-king-fbi-files-donald-trump-1a58c3f0c9ec8878e487434e0d372b81

https://explorethearchive.com/martin-luther-king-fbi

https://www.newsweek.com/pam-bondi-jeffrey-epstein-files-hillary-clinton-emails-2101893

https://www.newsweek.com/hillary-clinton-cleared-wrongdoing-private-email-probe-1466426

https://www.cbsnews.com/news/johnson-house-recess-epstein-files-vote/

https://www.pbs.org/newshour/politics/americas-spies-say-iran-wasnt-building-a-nuclear-weapon-trump-dismisses-that-assessment

https://abcnews.go.com/Politics/deputy-attorney-general-todd-blanche-meet-ghislaine-maxwell/story?id=123954983