The President Looks for an Exit - and Turns the Justice Department into a Circus

Pam Bondi’s reaction was so quick that it was hard to tell where the order ended and the execution began. No sooner had Donald Trump publicly demanded that Bill Clinton, Larry Summers, Reid Hoffman and other political opponents be targeted over their past contacts with Jeffrey Epstein than the attorney general announced the opening of an investigation, led of all people by New York’s chief prosecutor Jay Clayton. No new facts, no new evidence, no victim accusing anyone. Just a president under pressure who needs a new enemy. And a Justice Department eager to obey.

While the public debates the emails in which Epstein writes that Trump had “known about the girls,” the White House is trying to flip the scandal as if the direction of a storm could simply be willed around. Trump suddenly speaks of an “Epstein Hoax,” supposedly invented by Democrats, even though Epstein was deeply embedded in Trump’s orbit for years and the president himself promised as recently as 2024 to release the files in full. Now he calls those documents, which he once demanded be made public, a political setup.

Bondi’s move feels like an attempt to suspend gravity. Her dependence on Trump is no secret. None of the people Trump is now attacking has ever been accused by an Epstein victim. The contacts that did exist are well known, documented, understood. Yet Trump uses them like a distraction so finely placed that it feels less like a tactic than the quiet attempt of a man trying to outrun the shadow of his own truth. A president in flight mode.

At the moment Epstein’s emails begin raising concrete questions about Trump’s own circle, the administration does not turn to clarification but to counterattack. Not with evidence but with a political punitive mission. That Clayton, the man Trump once elevated to lead the SEC (Securities and Exchange Commission - the most important U.S. financial regulator), is now supposed to investigate Trump’s rivals is more than irony. It is a warning sign of how fragile the boundary between government and prosecutors has become.

When a journalist asked Trump on Friday what Epstein meant by “You knew about the girls,” he did not merely evade. He immediately shifted to Clinton, as if it were an old schoolyard quarrel and not the words of a convicted sex offender. No attempt to contextualize anything. No word of contradiction. Only the automated counterpunch of a man who does not explain a problem but hands it off.

The White House line is now as clear as it is radical: Do not talk about the content, but control the direction. Twenty three thousand pages of Epstein documents, new email threads, connections reaching into the president’s inner circle, all of that is not answered. It is drowned out. A government that does not disprove reality but overwrites it.

What becomes visible is not an attempt to find truth but to enforce power. Trump does not want the scandal understood, but owned. And the Justice Department follows him faster and more willingly than is healthy for any democratic institution. The president demands an investigation no one needs. And blocks the one that concerns himself. This day marks not just a political decision but the attempt to reorder reality before it catches up with him.