Anatomy of a Coverup

 

"According to information my office received, Attorney General Bondi then pressured the FBI to put approximately 1,000 personnel in its Information Management Division (IMD), including the Record/Information Dissemination Section (RIDS), which handles all requests submitted by the public under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) and Privacy Act, on 24-hour shifts to review approximately 100,000 Epstein-related records in order to produce more documents that could then be released on an arbitrarily short deadline. This effort, which reportedly took place from March 14 through the end of March, was haphazardly supplemented by hundreds of FBI New York Field Office personnel, many of whom lacked the expertise to identify statutorily-protected information regarding child victims and child witnesses or properly handle FOIA requests.

 

My office was told that these personnel were instructed to "flag" any records in which President Trump was mentioned." Senator Dick Durbin (IL) to Pam Bondi, July 18, 2025

 

     After Watergate, as if one needs a blueprint for what a high-level political coverup looks like, I give you the Epstein files.

     It's a scandal that's reached such proportions that TV and print journalists have had to review their old Journalism 101 notes from college in order to remember how to be journalists. It's fractured MAGA World, perhaps irreparably. Some MAGA figures have actually called for Pam Bnndi to resign, especially after announcing last week that there was no Epstein client list, after all, and that she didn't want to talk about it any more. Suddenly, there was no there there.

     Seriously, all this scandal needs is a Rolling Stone cover photo by Annie Liebovitz showing Pam Bondi flushing pieces of paper down the same toilet at Mar a Lago where Trump stored those stolen classified documents. Or maybe Trump can license his name and likeness to his own brand of paper shredders (Made in China and not subject to tariffs, of course).

      Allison Gill, more famously known online by the handle Mueller, She Wrote, has been all over this. In a post a couple of days ago, Gill went into exhaustive detail about the contents in Durbin's letter to Bondi. This is what Gill had written:

     "First, approximately 1,000 personnel in the Information Management Division (IMD) and the FBI New York Field Office were assigned to this task, confirming the whistleblower account made to Senator Durbin’s office. I can also confirm that a log exists tracking the mentions of Donald Trump in the files, and that there were approximately 100,000 files containing roughly 300,000 pages. Individual analysts were told to flag mentions of Trump by document and page number by logging them in an Excel spreadsheet, then they’d hand in their spreadsheet at the end of their (sometimes 24 or even 48-hour) shift. But it’s important to note that the agents were not told to flag Trump until later in a process that began mid-March."

      Yes, you read that right. The "Attorney General" of the US, who apparently is still working off a $25,000 bribe from Trump to drop the Trump University case when she was Florida's AG, is abusing her authority by ordering 1000 DOJ employees, and the NY FBI field office, to cherry pick Trump's name out of the Epstein files and then to stovepipe the results directly to her office.

     Actually, I should be referring to this coverup in the past tense because this all had silently happened last March before Trump was back in office for two months. And who among us thinks that Blondi is smart enough to have committed this skullduggery on her own initiative? Who among us thinks it's impossible that this directive would've come directly from the Oval Office?

     And why would Bondi do this unless she was absolutely sure Trump's name would be all over the 300,000 pages of the Epstein files?

     To show you how incredibly rushed and sloppy this coverup had been conducted, the DOJ even hastily cobbled together training videos for the 1000 DOJ employees (working 24 or even 48 hour shifts, turning the DOJ's Information Management Division's, or IMD, office into a boiler room operation), they had put the videos on an unsecured server. The Epstein files also met a similar fate, meaning the entire IMD office, including those not given the necessary security clearances and weren't part of the cheery picking process, theoretically could have had access to it.

     And then, to go beyond Allison Gill's post, there's Todd Blanche's public announcement that he was going to interview Ghislaine Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein's madame in his sex trafficking ring (something that took Trump by surprise when he was asked about it today). In case you've been, understandably, living under a rock since January 20th, Blanche is the Deputy Attorney General and Trump's former and current fixer (representing Trump in the Manhattan fraud case). He was also jailbird Paul Manafort's former lawyer, showing what a totally competent attorney he's been.

     For a high-ranking DOJ official to personally interview a convicted felon post-trial is extraordinary in itself, especially as there's every possibility that Maxwell could be compelled to testify before Congress in exchange for immunity. With congressional testimony very much on the table, what Blanche is essentially doing is engaging in witness tampering. Who among us thinks this isn't being done at the behest of someone who nervously asked after Maxwell's arrest almost exactly five years ago, "Did she say anything about me?" and said over and over again, "I wish her well."

     To say the least, this puts House Republicans in a ticklish position. Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, of all people, filed a legislative measure to compel the DOJ to turn over the Epstein files. This gave the Rules Committee the dry heaves and they adjourned yesterday rather than vote on it, which essentially paralyzed the House. It's obvious the Republicans will try to kick the can down the road as far as they can at least until after the House returns from its summer vacation.

     People, this is not like Watergate, which was the very delineation of a conspiracy. Not only is this much worse but a conspiracy is defined as a secret agenda carried out by a limited number of individuals. This coverup involves much of the Justice Department at the highest levels as well as the White House and the US House of Representatives.

      And let's not forget what Watergate taught us- That the coverup is always worse than the original crime.