What did Donald Trump do today?

He "lost" a court battle on the Epstein scandal.

As legal experts had predicted, a federal judge today refused the Trump administration's request to unseal the grand jury records relating to Trump's longtime friend and confidant Jeffrey Epstein. Grand jury records are almost never made public, and are among the most closely guarded confidential information in the judicial system. 

Because the purpose of a grand jury is to determine whether there is sufficient evidence to warrant a trial, the evidence introduced may only be a tiny fraction of what the prosecution knows at the time, or unrepresentative, or ultimately inadmissible at trial. And because they often include testimony from witnesses who don't want to be a part of the actual trial, releasing them can violate the privacy of victims, too.

In other words, Trump would have known his request to have the records unsealed was extremely unlikely to be granted—and even if it had been, it would have amounted to only a tiny fraction of what Trump's DOJ knows about its own investigation into Epstein.

In other Epstein news, the Wall Street Journal today reported that Attorney General Pamela Bondi told Trump in May that his name was mentioned in the files. In and of itself, that's not surprising: Trump was in office when Epstein was indicted, and he had a close personal relationship with Epstein for well over a decade. It was already known that Trump and Epstein were close friends, that Trump had accepted rides on Epstein's private jet, and that they socialized together frequently among other people and by themselves. The investigative records will necessarily contain the names of hundreds of people who are not in any way suspected of wrongdoing. 

However, that doesn't explain why Bondi saw fit to warn Trump about it, shortly before killing the release of the files that Trump had campaigned on releasing, and that she had publicly promised she was about to release.

Why does this matter?

• The only reason to pretend to try to be transparent is if you want to avoid actually being transparent.