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This morning, President Donald J. Trump told Republican members of Congress that his popularity is rising and that talk about the Epstein files is a distraction from what he insists is the real story: that former president Barack Obama cheated in the 2016 election. Trump insisted the cameramen cut their cameras when he made that accusation, although there was no break in the recording. He told the congressmembers: “[Y]ou should mention that every time they give you a question that’s not appropriate, just say, ‘Oh, by the way, Obama cheated on the election.’”

At a press briefing today, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt pushed this story, insisting that Democrats led by Obama had tried to sabotage Trump’s first administration and had done “grave material harm to our republic.” She called it “one of the greatest political scandals in American history.”

Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard followed Leavitt to talk about today’s release of a report drafted in 2020 by Republicans on the House Intelligence Committee to push back on the idea that Russia preferred for Trump, rather than Democratic candidate Hillary Clinton, to win the 2016 election.

Despite her claims that it is a damning bombshell, the material in the newly released report in fact does not challenge the conclusion of the U.S. intelligence agencies, the Mueller report, and the Senate Intelligence Committee that Russia preferred a Trump presidency to a Clinton presidency and worked to get Trump elected in part by attacking Clinton and spreading lies about her health.

What the report did do was deliver red meat to the MAGA base by spreading the same sorts of rumors about Clinton the Russians spread in 2016.

Gabbard compounded that effort at the White House press conference by reading material in the report as if it were fact, saying that Russia had “high-level [Democratic National Committee] e-mails that detailed evidence of Hillary’s ‘psycho emotional problems, uncontrolled fits of anger, aggression, and cheerfulness.’ And that then-secretary Clinton was allegedly on a daily regimen of heavy tranquilizers,” along with a number of other charges that Clinton had broken the law. Gabbard did not mention that these allegations were in fact identified in the report as material prepared by Russia’s Foreign Intelligence Services.

Just to be clear: The director of national intelligence for the United States of America is making allegations against a former U.S. presidential candidate based on material from Russia’s intelligence services.

This seems to be another unforced error, reminding Americans of another story the administration would prefer they forget, since opponents of Gabbard’s nomination for her post noted that she has a long history of repeating Russian propaganda. While Trump seems determined to reach back to the rhetoric that got him elected in 2016, it’s hard to see that as a powerful distraction from the Epstein story, since Americans have now had eight years to contemplate the many times Trump has deferred to Russian president Vladimir Putin and weakened Ukraine’s ability to fight back against Russia’s incursions. And claims about the health of a losing presidential candidate from nine years ago seem pretty weak sauce, especially since today she seems far more stable than Trump.

In any case, the distractions seemed to be for naught, since Sadie Gurman, Annie Linskey, Josh Dawsey, and Alex Leary of the Wall Street Journal dropped a story just after 3:00 this afternoon, reporting that Attorney General Pam Bondi and her deputy informed Trump in May that his name appeared “multiple times” in the Epstein files. They told him they did not plan to release any more documents from the investigation because the files contained both the personal information of victims and child pornography.

Ohio’s David Pepper noted that this timing checks out with the feud between Trump and billionaire Elon Musk, who tweeted on June 5: “Time to drop the really big bomb: [Trump] is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public. Have a nice day, DJT!” Musk followed that tweet with another: “Mark this post for the future. The truth will come out.”

While that “sort of felt like old news,” Pepper wrote, “for the White House, that was Musk revealing something that had only recently been confirmed (and that clearly had hopes to bury). So it was a far more brutal tweet than we realized at the time. And the reason why Musk took it down two days later.”

The Department of Justice set off the current firestorm on July 7 when it announced it would not release any more information from the Epstein files. When an ABC News reporter asked Trump on July 15 what Bondi had told Trump about the review, he denied any knowledge that he was in the files. The reporter asked, “specifically, did she tell you at all that your name appeared in the files?” and he responded, “No, no, she’s—she’s given us just a very quick briefing.” Then he claimed the files were created by Democrats.

House speaker Mike Johnson told reporters today that the House didn’t need to do anything to release the Epstein files because the administration was “already doing everything within their power to release them,” and indeed, the Trump administration made a show of saying it would ask the courts to unseal the transcripts of the Epstein grand jury. But legal analysts say those records would cover only Epstein and his associate Ghislaine Maxwell, who was convicted of grooming victims for Epstein. In any case, a federal judge denied that request today after the government attorneys did not submit an argument that met the requirements for unsealing the evidence.

Today, under pressure from Democrats, the House Oversight Committee voted to subpoena Maxwell. The Department of Justice also wants to talk to Maxwell, sending Trump’s former personal lawyer Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, to talk with Maxwell’s lawyer, who appears to be his personal friend. Alan Feuer of the New York Times notes the job fell to Blanche after the department fired Maurene Comey, the prosecutor of both the Epstein and Maxwell cases, last week. Maxwell is appealing her conviction, giving her incentive to say what the president wants to hear.

The Democrats on a subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee, supported by three Republicans, also voted to subpoena the Justice Department for its files on Epstein, although writing the subpoena will take negotiation. “If the Republican Party, if our colleagues on this committee don’t join us in this vote, then what they’re essentially doing is joining President Donald Trump in complicity,” Representative Summer Lee (D-PA), who introduced the subpoena motion, told reporters.

It does not seem likely the Epstein story is going away anytime soon.

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Notes:

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/us/politics/trump-russia-obama-gabbard.html

https://www.dni.gov/files/ODNI/documents/DIG/DIG-Declassified-HPSCI-Report-Manufactured-Russia-Hoax-July2025.pdf (pp. 16–17).

https://www.factcheck.org/2025/07/gabbards-misleading-coup-claim/

https://www.durbin.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/durbin-condemns-tulsi-gabbards-nomination-to-serve-as-director-of-national-intelligence

https://apnews.com/article/gabbard-trump-putin-intelligence-russia-syria-a798adaf9cd531a5d0c9329f7597f0f6

https://www.wsj.com/politics/justice-department-told-trump-name-in-epstein-files-727a8038

https://abcnews.go.com/US/trump-told-bondi-appeared-multiple-times-epstein-files/story?id=124014441

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/07/23/us/politics/todd-blanche-epstein-ghislaine-maxwell-trump.html

https://apnews.com/article/epstein-files-congress-democrats-subpoena-republicans-trump-5d17ea83f7ffeff5784159848b97f38e