 "Attorney General Pam Bondi and President Trump at a roundtable at the White House on June 5. AFP")
As the Epstein scandal takes America by storm, reports are emerging that US President Donald Trump is increasingly frustrated with how his administration is handling the furore surrounding his ties with the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein . Officials close to the matter told The Washington Post that the president is upset with how the scandal has overshadowed his agenda.
However, two people familiar with the matter claimed that despite being upset with the team, Trump would not sack anyone, because a firing would act like fuel to the fire that Trump wants to die down. The president’s exasperation follows weeks of missteps and no clear strategy among top officials who underestimated the outrage, especially from the president’s base, and hoped the country would forget about the unreleased Epstein Files.
“This is a pretty substantial distraction,” one person close to the situation told The Washington Post. “While many are trying to keep the unity, in many ways, the DOJ and the FBI are breaking at the seams. Many are wondering how sustainable this is going to be for all the parties involved — be it the FBI director or attorney general.”
Trump is hesitant to say ‘You’re fired’
Despite his frustration, officials said that Trump has been hesitant to make personnel changes. “He does not want to create a bigger spectacle by firing anyone,” a person close to the president told the American news outlet. At the centre of the storm is US Attorney General Pam Bondi .
For months, the release of the Epstein Files was one of Bondi’s signature agendas. However, during the July Fourth holiday weekend, Bondi, her top deputy and FBI leaders swiftly gave final approval to an unsigned memo about the Epstein files that ignited a whole new furore.
The controversial memo argued that the Trump administration had found no evidence to dispute that Epstein died by suicide in jail in 2019 and said there was no “client list” that would lead them to prosecute anyone else. Apart from this, the memo noted that no more documents would be released in the case in order to protect the privacy of the victims.
The memo garnered backlash from both Democrats and Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) Movement supporters. Both sides started to demand more transparency while the White House struggled to respond. Since then, anonymous officials claim that Trump and Bondi have been discussing the matter “almost every day”.
Impact Shorts
More Shorts“They completely miscalculated the fever pitch to which they built this up,” Stephen A. Saltzburg, a former Justice Department official in the Reagan and George H.W. Bush administrations, told The Washington Post. “Now, they seem to be in full-bore panic mode, trying to change the subject and flailing to make sense of what makes no sense," he added.
The cracks within the Trump team
White House soon went into a damage control mode with a steady series of announcements from the administration has failed to quiet the clamor, including the release of FBI records on the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr .’s assassination, a newly launched investigation into former FBI director James B. Comey and an substantive treason accusation against former president Barack Obama over the 2016 presidential election.
However, none of it seemed to sway the public’s attention from the Epstein files. “We had the Greatest Six Months of any President in the History of our Country, and all the Fake News wants to talk about is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax!” Trump vented on social media this month. Apart from this, cracks are propping up within the Trump administration.
The Epstein scandal has left the DoJ and the FBI on opposing sides. FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino even threatened to resign from his post. Not only this, Bondi accused Bongino of leaking information to the media around the handling of the Epstein files, three people familiar with the matter told The Washington Post.
With disagreements within the team and the reports of Trump’s name being mentioned in the files multiple times, the Epstein Files have become a recurring headache for the president.