In the week and a half since the Justice Department released a memo saying there’s no evidence that indicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein was murdered, that he never kept a “client list,” and that the department doesn’t plan on releasing any new documents on the matter, the calls from across the political spectrum to “release the Epstein Files” have only grown louder.
Rep. Hank Johnson, a Democrat from Georgia, released a video of himself performing a parody of Jason Isbell’s “Dreamsicle.” In the video, he sings in a higher register than his normally bellowing voice, “Epstein died by suicide. Believe that and you must be blind. You’ve been telling us you’ll release the files, but where are they?”
House Speaker Mike Johnson had this to say about the so-called Epstein Files in an interview with conservative influencer and commentator Benny Johnson: “I agree with the sentiment that we need to put it out there.”
And of course there’s the far-right political provocateur, podcaster, and conspiracy theorist Steve Bannon, who told conservatives at Turning Point USA’s “Student Action Summit” in Tampa, Florida, over the weekend that the “Epstein Files” could help uncover more than just individual offenses: “Epstein is a key that picks the lock on so many things, not just individuals, but also institutions, intelligence institutions, foreign governments, and who is working with him on our intelligence apparatus and in our government,” he said.
The only folks who seemingly don’t want to release the full findings of the investigation into Epstein are the two people who could snap their fingers and make them public: Attorney General Pam Bondi and President Donald Trump.
To understand what’s going on, Today, Explained co-host Sean Rameswaram spoke with Elie Honig, a former federal and state prosecutor and author of the upcoming book, When You Come at the King: Inside DOJ’s Pursuit of the President, From Nixon to Trump.
You can read an excerpt of their conversation, edited for length and clarity, below, and listen to the full episode of Today, Explained on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you get podcasts.
If you’re someone out there who’s like, “release the Epstein Files,” who should they be most mad at right now that they don’t have their Epstein Files?
I’m going to answer with a “what” rather than a “who.” The first thing they should be mad at is an ancient DOJ policy that says, we DOJ, we federal prosecutors, do not just make public our closed investigative files because people want to know.
People want to know a lot of things. People want to see all the closed files on the Trump cases. People want to see every piece of paper from Robert Hur’s investigation of Joe Biden. People want to see everything from the Hunter Biden cases. But there is a longstanding DOJ policy and principle that has been observed by both political parties that we don’t turn these things over. We don’t slag people in public who can’t defend themselves, who aren’t charged with anything, who don’t have the ability to go to trial.
Now listen, let me just say that that policy sucks sometimes. It’s very unsatisfying at times. As a member of the public and the media now, I hate that policy. But it is a longstanding policy and it exists in part to give DOJ prosecutors some cover. There’s other good reasons for it too. But I think you should start with that policy.
What’s confusing people, I think, about that policy, at least right now, is one very specific moment. The moment where the person in charge of the department that doesn’t typically release this kind of information said that she would. Why would Pam Bondi say, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review” if she didn’t intend to?
I have no earthly idea. It could be that she’s incompetent. It could be that she doesn’t know what she’s doing. It could be she’s trying to respond to the political winds of a given day or what she perceives to be the political winds or what she perceives to be Donald Trump’s best interests or wishes.
Pam Bondi has handled this whole situation in an utterly inexplicable, inconsistent, and I think often dishonest manner. She blazes into office as attorney general and she basically by her actions makes clear: I don’t give a crap about that policy that I just talked about. I’m going to be turning this all over. I’m going to break the cover off this thing and you all are going to know everything. And by the way, it goes back. If you remember months ago, Pam Bondi had her much-ballyhooed “phase one disclosure,” right?
She called all these conservative influencers to the White House and gave them these thick binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase I.” And you’ve seen the photo of people triumphantly holding up these files. Well, what happened when they opened those binders? They realized it was crap. It was 200 pages of stuff that had basically already been out there in the public that revealed nothing new.
And maybe at that point, Pam Bondi was hoping this kind of fades away. But she made it worse when she was asked awhile back on Fox News about the client list. She said, “It’s on my desk, waiting to be reviewed.” And now, last week, there’s an FBI memo saying, Nothing to see here, everything closed, everyone should shut up.
Clearly when she said “the client list is on my desk,” it wasn’t. Because it appears there is no client list, per se. Now that doesn’t mean nobody is implicated, but this notion that there’s some list, there’s some piece of paper entitled Jeffrey Epstein’s client list, one, two, three, seems to be pretty clearly an oversimplification. So I think that’s the $64,000 question. Why this very sudden, very stark turnabout?
Since we can’t necessarily answer that question yet, can we maybe answer the question of how Pam Bondi came to be sitting at the top of the United States Department of Justice?
Pam Bondi on paper looked like she was quite qualified to be the attorney general of the United States. She had been a prosecutor for [almost] 20 years. She was the attorney general of Florida, the state attorney general for two terms, for eight years. If you just take that resume, I’d say, yeah, that’s actually quite comparable to several other AGs.
Perhaps more qualified than, say, Matt Gaetz?
Right. Matt Gaetz had zero qualifications.
The objections that were lodged at Bondi related to her independence and her credibility. Primarily, two things: One is she has a long history with Trump. She has represented him briefly during one of his impeachments. They’ve had political support for one another. That’s not that big of a deal.
The bigger problem, though, is she was and in part remains a 2020 election denier. After the 2020 election, well before her nomination as AG, she was very vocal. She said, We won Pennsylvania. I have evidence — by the way, another example of her saying she has some piece of paper that she clearly doesn’t. She said, we have evidence, we have fake ballots that never surfaced. And when she was confronted about her election denial at her confirmation hearing in 2025, she fell back on the old line, the cop-out line of “Joe Biden is the president of the United States.” She wouldn’t disavow her prior election denialism. And so there was a question about her credibility.
There’s been a lot of writing that Pam Bondi has perhaps brought the Justice Department under Donald Trump in a way that we haven’t seen in decades. What do you think is the clearest evidence of that?
I think that’s true and I think it’s provable. If we think back through the last many AGs, and by the way, I’d include Donald Trump’s prior AG, Bill Barr, who by the way, my first book is a criticism of Bill Barr’s tenure as Trump’s AG called Hatchet Man. But I think Bondi is different and worse—
Because even Bill Barr didn’t believe the Big Lie.
Barr had his lines. Bondi has no lines. And I’ll give you something that to me was a really telling moment for Pam Bondi. It’s been almost forgotten already in the shuffle. The Signal scandal, when Mike Waltz and other officials — JD Vance and Pete Hegseth and Marco Rubio — were discussing a military strike over the Signal app, right?
What does Pam Bondi do? And by the way, we have precedent for this. We’ve had comparable situations of presidents potentially mishandling or other high ranking officials mishandling classified information. Every time there’s at least been an investigation opened, whether it was Hillary Clinton’s email, whether it was Joe Biden mishandling documents, whether it was Donald Trump mishandling documents. And so at a minimum, any modestly halfway semi-independent AG would at least say, we’re going to investigate, we’re going to get to the bottom of this, and then who knows, maybe come back in six months and say, alright, we looked at it and while people were reckless, there was nothing quite criminal.
Pam Bondi, in contrast, basically announces three days in, we’re not going to be investigating, nothing wrong was done here, none of that information was classified, everyone should just be cheering on the fact that this was a successful military strike. And that moment showed us that she is completely at Trump’s beck and call and she will never intentionally do anything contrary to Trump’s political interests.
Like maybe release the Epstein Files?
There you go. That’s one of the theories out there, that perhaps there’s something in there that’s bad for Trump. And by the way, who knows? But we do know Trump, it’s already been disclosed that Trump is in the address book, the black book. There’s all sorts of phone numbers for Donald Trump and Mar-a-Lago in there. We know they’re old friends.
This is a sort of forgotten moment, but Donald Trump, some magazine, I’m blanking on which one, did a magazine feature on Jeffrey Epstein years ago, before he had been convicted of any crime. And both Bill Clinton and Donald Trump are quoted in the magazine. And Trump’s quote is something like, He sure does like beautiful women, even younger than I do. I’m not getting it word for word, but it’s very close to that. Would it be shocking if there was something embarrassing for Donald Trump in those files? Or Bill Clinton or whoever? No.
Do you think the anger that’s directed at Pam Bondi right now is misdirected and in fact it should be going right to the top when Donald Trump is out there clearly stating he has no desire to see these files released? Not to mention he has previously made no secret of his relationship with Jeffrey Epstein.
Let me put it this way: Both the president and the attorney general have the power, almost without question, to disclose whatever they want to disclose with a snap of the fingers. I mean, yes, look, they should not do that for the reasons I said before. There are policies against this and I think it was Pam Bondi who said at one point, We’d have to do redactions and there are victims. And yes, of course you’d have to protect victims and minors and redact out pornographic materials and all that stuff. However, any one of them does have the ability to disclose whatever they deem fit tonight if they wanted to.
You think they’ll do it?
I don’t think they’ll ever open the files and just say, Here you go, everybody. I think they will try to appease the public and the media by making some sort of partial disclosure, but that’s not going to satisfy anybody.
And Pam Bondi just now reiterated she is sticking to that DOJ memo, which says basically, Nothing more to see here, no cases to be brought, and case closed. Pam Bondi just doubled down on that. She said that’s our position and I’m not answering any other questions. So if people are wondering are we ever going to see a complete dump and complete satisfaction, no, I don’t think that’s ever going to happen.
