What happened to the Jeffrey Epstein case? It’s devolved into the unfinished horse meme. We were promised transparency, accountability, and the whole truth regarding the notorious sexual predator, alleged sex trafficker, and well-connected New York financier. Epstein was well acquainted with the world’s wealthy and influential families. In the summer of 2019, federal agents arrested him on sex trafficking charges. On August 10, 2019, he was found dead in his cell.
The FBI has insisted it was suicide. Even FBI Director Kash Patel, who’s reviewed the evidence, says it was a suicide. It had not quelled skeptics, many of whom rightly think something else is afoot here. The man who could take down the political class through their deviant sexcapades dies, prison logs were falsified, and no one kept an eye on him even under suicide watch—it all reeked of a cover-up. Now, a DOJ memo obtained by Axios claims that there is no client list, and Epstein was not part of a blackmail operation.
It flies in the face of what Attorney General Pam Bondi has said about the case, namely that the client list was on her desk. In April 2025, she was caught on video telling a bystander that there are videos of child pornography featuring Epstein. So, what the hell is this memo? Even worse, a former CIA agent said on Fox News that the ‘deep state’ likely destroyed the Epstein files:
🚨#BREAKING: During an appearance on Fox News, a former CIA officer alleged that the Deep State likely destroyed the Epstein files. pic.twitter.com/K64jjfiF3D
— R A W S A L E R T S (@rawsalerts) July 8, 2025
Independent reporter Michael Shellenberger noted Epstein’s ties to the deep state; Biden’s CIA director, William Burns, was a frequent guest at Epstein’s townhouse in New York City. There were other instances where Epstein’s protection was exposed, namely that he was part of the intelligence community, reportedly being a point person in sex blackmail operations.
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Shellenberger highlighted his defense of the Trump administration vis-à-vis exposing the Censorship Industrial Complex, the intelligence community’s targeting of COVID vaccine skeptics, the thought control operations between the FBI and Silicon Valley to control speech and influence public opinion—aka the Twitter Files story—and the Russian collusion hoax and the subsequent failed attempts to smear anything that makes Democrats looks bad as Russian disinformation. Vestiges of a deep state exist. Is it all-powerful? No—Donald Trump wouldn’t be president, which the independent reporter noted. But this has become a bungled operation. Even the most stalwart Trump supporters are miffed and irritated that the files have not been released. It’s a perpetual cycle of being served a big plate of nothing, that started embarrassingly for the new Justice Department by releasing information about Epstein that was already public, mainly from documents from the trial of his right-hand woman, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Releasing the files is the right thing in the pursuit of justice and holding these spooks accountable. There is ample evidence that we have some of these folks running amok, and they must be reined in. Also, there’s no way sweeping this under the rug is going to work. The Trump Justice Department made this a big deal—they can’t leave us hanging:
Strong evidence suggests that Epstein was part of a sex blackmail operation tied to intelligence agencies. Visitor logs show that William Burns, who served as CIA Director under President Biden, visited Epstein’s New York townhouse multiple times. The Wall Street Journal reported those visits in 2023 based on Epstein’s private calendar. In 2017, Alex Acosta, the Justice Department official who gave Epstein his 2008 plea deal, told Trump transition officials that he was told to back off Epstein because he “belonged to intelligence.” The Justice Department later admitted that all eleven months of Acosta’s emails from that period had disappeared.
This failure to follow through seriously undermines Trump’s explicit commitments to reform and shine light on the deep state. This is not just about Epstein. The Trump administration has not been particularly transparent about much else. The CIA, to its credit, released an internal evaluation last week admitting it had erred in the 2017 Intelligence Community Assessment by claiming that Russia “aspired to” help elect Trump. But it stood by the overall assessment, signaling the agency’s reluctance to admit fault, its continued defensiveness in the face of mounting evidence, and its impunity. The Office of the Director of National Intelligence has disclosed a limited amount of information about intelligence community abuses during the pandemic, including the targeting of COVID vaccine dissenters as potential violent extremists. But beyond that, the Trump administration has released very little, even on issues where transparency would appear to be in its political interest. The administration has kept classified large volumes of material related to COVID origins, the FBI’s role in Russiagate, the suppression of the Hunter Biden laptop story, and unidentified anomalous phenomena.
It is thus hard not to conclude that the intelligence community continues to operate in violation of the constitutional system of checks and balances by evading meaningful congressional oversight. The Constitution grants Congress the power and responsibility to oversee the executive branch, including intelligence agencies, through budgetary control, public hearings, and access to classified information. And yet the intelligence community is withholding and heavily redacting documents, delaying responses to lawful inquiries, and using national security classifications to avoid scrutiny.
This persistent obstruction undermines the legislative branch’s ability to hold agencies accountable and distorts the balance of power the framers designed. When unelected intelligence officials can withhold information not only from the public but from elected representatives, constitutional oversight becomes a formality rather than a functioning safeguard.
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To prove it is not simply the latest custodian of the deep state, the Trump administration must release the Epstein videos and related evidence, fully expose the scope of the sex trafficking and apparent IC blackmail operation, and ensure that every perpetrator, regardless of power or position, is held accountable under the law. It must also release the long-withheld files on COVID origins, Russiagate, the Hunter Biden laptop, January 6, unidentified aerial phenomena, and other topics. Even if these files do not reveal any “smoking guns,” the public has a right to full transparency. Only through this transparency can the credibility of the intelligence community be restored.
Congress must step up as well. Legislative leaders must hold public hearings on each of these issues, issue subpoenas if necessary, and demand full executive branch compliance with oversight. The Constitution grants Congress, not the intelligence agencies, the power to check secrecy, correct abuse, and uphold the rule of law.
These are not matters of political convenience but constitutional obligation. The American people have the right to know what their government has done in their name and against their rights. If the Trump administration fails to act, it will confirm the fear that even the most populist and combative president can be captured or neutralized by the very system he vowed to dismantle. And it will lose much of the legitimacy it gained by surviving and overcoming the lawfare, censorship, and weaponization of the deep state against it.
Many within the Trump administration acknowledge this and note that this is hardly the end of the Epstein affair.
“This is a total fucking disaster,” someone within the Intelligence Community told us this afternoon, as we were going to press with this editorial.
What a mess this has become, folks.
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