What did Donald Trump do today?
He had the Justice Department declare him innocent of anything you might imagine he'd done.
Another tranche of Epstein investigative documents was released today, along with a social media post by the Justice Department preemptively clearing one person of any suspicion based on what they contained: Donald Trump:
Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election. To be clear, the claims are unfounded and false. And if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.
The DOJ is not supposed to act as the president's personal defense lawyer—although several of its top officials were exactly that in private life. Outside of Trump's terms in office, there has been a strict policy against giving any appearance whatsoever that the Justice Department is acting out of political motivations rather than its mission to defend the integrity of the American judicial system. President Nixon was eventually forced to resign as a direct consequence of the so-called Saturday Night Massacre, in which he fired a succession of attorneys general until he found one who would dismiss the investigation into him. And when former president Bill Clinton had a brief airport meeting with the current attorney general, Loretta Lynch, the mere suggestion that he might be trying to influence an investigation into presidential candidate Hillary Clinton was a major scandal. (Trump himself called it "so horrible.")
By contrast, the current AG, Pam Bondi, took an illegal campaign contribution from Trump's fake charity as Florida's attorney general, then dropped the state from a lawsuit against Trump's scam "university." She later became his personal defense lawyer.
The files released today do contain "sensationalist" claims involving Trump, but also more mundane details of how intimately connected Trump and a great many other wealthy and powerful people were with Epstein. That in and of itself isn't news, as even Trump's own subordinates have started to admit, but there are also documents that underscore how anxious Trump has been to try to rewrite history. One bombshell revelation is that Trump apparently misled his own DOJ during his first term about his Epstein connections, to the point where an assistant US Attorney felt compelled to warn someone in the Trump administration about how much more implicated he was.
Trump once again spent the entire day cloistered away from the public and reporters.
Why does this matter?
- The Department of Justice is supposed to serve the American people, not protect one person from scandal at all costs.
- Again, Trump could not possibly be behaving more like someone with something terrible to hide than he is right now.