Merry Christmas. Trump is in the Epstein Files.
We no longer have to imagine.
Merry Christmas, one and all. This is the penultimate Jackal of 2025 and it will be about the Epstein files, again.
As a reminder, we are fully in the season of Christmas. On this day in the Christmas calendar, your true love should be getting you FIVE GOLDEN RINGS. Or, if you read the Bluey version, FIVE DOLLARBUCKS. So continue saying Merry Christmas to all your friends until the 12 days are up. You can even cite to me if you want.
I do have a Christmas confession for everyone: I had heard prior to my last Jackal that Elise Stefanik was going to suspend her campaign for governor. Given that it was happening in relative proximity to the release of the Epstein Files, I assumed it meant something super bad was in them. So, I teased it a little bit. But then they came out and you couldn’t find Trump anywhere in the files. Or so we thought.
I don’t want to rehash what everyone has probably gone over the past couple weeks, but I think we went from everyone suspecting that there was an Epstein coverup going on to everyone straight up saying, “Oh, we are fully in the middle of an Epstein coverup.” What basically happened is that the Trump Administration released some records related to Epstein, but curiously had redacted large portions of them and omitted any photos of Trump. Or so we thought.
Internet sleuths1 figured out that Trump’s DOJ redacted the files incorrectly, and that you could simply copy and paste the redacted materials into a new document and see what was blacked out. #Competence
But the icing on the cake is what happened after people found a few photos of Trump in the files that got released by the DOJ. Once those became public and people started noticing that Jeffrey Epstein had a few pictures of Trump with women, the DOJ deleted the files from the release. If it wasn’t obvious that we were in the middle of a coverup up until that moment, it became abundantly clear after that.
Some of the stuff in the files is nuts.
Lots of people have texted me about the crazy stuff that came out in a second batch of files, so I’ll go through them quickly, ranking them from least believable to most believable:
Trump was present when an underage woman’s infant child was killed, after the child was thrown off a yacht in Michigan. The woman was allegedly one of Epstein’s victims.
Epstein spent a lot of time in Michigan, but that’s about where the plausibility of this one ends. The lake where this supposedly happened is too shallow to fit anything but a really small yacht.
A limo driver overheard a woman saying Trump and Epstein threatened her:
The limo driver who reported all of this has a history of psychotic episodes and was hospitalized at one point. And while it is true that there was a reported suicide in Kiefer, Oklahoma that syncs up with the time frame, the limo driver tried to report this to the FBI right before the 2020 Election.
Jeffrey Epstein wrote a letter to Larry Nassar in which he explicitly said that Trump engaged in sex with minors.
I actually think this one could be true, although the DOJ has explicitly said it was a fake letter. CNN was able to verify that it came straight from the prison where Epstein was locked up. So, that means some guard (or someone else) faked a letter to Larry Nassar right around the time of Epstein’s death? However, even if it is real, Epstein - as is evidenced by his now public emails - regularly made stuff up.
The FBI identified somewhere around ten co-conspirators with Epstein who were not charged with crimes.
This one is the most relevant to me. Who are these people? Are they witnesses in Epstein’s case? Are they also subjects of investigations? Based on the actual text of the bill Congress passed to release the Epstein Files, we should know.
Trump rode on Epstein’s plane many more times than was publicly reported.
This was said internally by a DOJ attorney during the Department’s prosecution of Ghislaine Maxwell. It is true, but shouldn’t be surprising; Trump and Epstein were very close.
Trump’s DOJ was monitoring an Epstein reporter’s flights in 2019.
This was actually confirmed by the reporter herself, Julie K. Brown, whose (heroic) reporting on Epstein led to his arrest. Why was Trump’s DOJ tracking a reporter’s flights in July 2019?
Suffice it to say, it is clear that Trump is “in the Epstein files.” And I would bet we eventually see evidence of him doing something extremely bad in them. Why? You should really read Marjorie Tayler Greene’s very long interview with the New York Times, from start to finish. She makes clear that her falling out with Trump has to do with Epstein and he is terrified of the subject in general. One part of it jumped out at me, where Trump attacked Greene for trying to release the Epstein Files:
After the hearing, Greene held a news conference at which she threatened to identify some of the men who had abused the women. (Greene says that she didn’t know those names herself but that she could have gotten them from the victims.) Trump called Greene to voice his displeasure. Greene was in her Capitol Hill office, and according to a staff member, everyone in the suite of rooms could hear him yelling at her as she listened to him on speakerphone. Greene says she expressed her perplexity over his intransigence. According to Greene, Trump replied, “My friends will get hurt.”
That last line. Here’s the thing: Trump has no friends and no compassion for other people outside of himself. He has betrayed family members for small slights and cares about no one else.
He’s talking about himself and he knows he’s going to get hurt.
End of the year Jackal comes soon. Merry Christmas.
This is a Boomer phrase.