What did Donald Trump do today?

He announced he wouldn't be complying with the Epstein document release law he signed a month ago.

Today is the deadline for the Trump administration to release materials the DOJ gathered during its  investigation of Trump's longtime friend Jeffrey Epstein. After fighting tooth and nail against its near-unanimous passage in Congress, Trump signed a bill into law last month that set this deadline, with a 30-day window in which to redact certain details like the identities of Epstein's victims. The law also requires that the DOJ provide a specific and explicit justification for any materials withheld from public view, in order to prevent it from simply refusing to release materials that might be embarrassing or incriminating for Trump or his political allies. 

This morning, the Trump administration announced it was not complying with the law, and issued a vague timeline for when it would supposedly produce the documents. It did release some documents, including a vast number of documents that had been entirely blacked out.

But as the normally Trump-friendly Fox News reported today, Trump's DOJ is explicitly redacting the identities of "politically exposed individuals," even though the text of the law expressly forbids that. 

Trump, who knew and was befriended by and partied with Epstein for decades, and who is mentioned thousands of times in files released by Congress from the Epstein estate, is mentioned only twice in today's document release—all but guaranteeing that he was either deliberately kept out of today's file release, or illegally redacted.

Even the law's authors admit that it's ultimately powerless to force Trump to release anything that is actually damning to him: as today's announcement demonstrates, simply breaking the law is always an option for Trump. Given the horrendous implications of some of the material regarding Trump's ties to Epstein that have already come out from other sources, that might be the correct tactical choice anyway.  

There's no smoking gun that Trump was ensnared in Epstein's blackmail web or had sex with the children that Epstein trafficked—yet. But it's almost impossible to escape the conclusion that Trump knew what Epstein was doing and kept quiet about it, at least until their friendship began to deteriorate over business conflicts. As e-mails that his estate released make clear, Epstein himself believed in 2011 that Trump had been an informant for the Palm Beach police, something he was in a position to do because he'd spent "hours" alone with one of Epstein's victims. (That person, Virginia Giuffre, had previously been employed by Trump as a Mar-a-Lago "massage therapist" despite being underage.) And in 2019, shortly before he apparently committed suicide while awaiting trial, he told a reporter that "Trump knew about the girls."

Why does this matter?

• The American people are allowed to read something into the fact that Donald Trump could not possibly be acting any guiltier than he is.