Advisers and allies of President Donald Trump swarmed NBC News reporters to outline a new strategy of strict silence on the so-called “Epstein Files” flap.
It has been almost three weeks since the Trump administration first tried to bury the promised mountain of information on deceased sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, and the heat just keeps going up. At every turn, Trump’s efforts to quash the story have only intensified interest in it, and deepened Trump’s own association with it.
Just this week alone:
- Trump flipped out and threatened to sue after The Wall Street Journal dropped a hotly anticipated profile of the Trump-Epstein relationship that included a highly suggestive note.
- A slew of unearthed videos depicting Trump as a sex creep went viral.
- A new bomb that Trump was previously told he’s in the Epstein Files dropped.
- The rollout of Trump’s baseless and discredited accusation of “treason” against former President Barack Obama appears to have flopped.
- A House subcommittee voted to subpoena all documents relating to the case.
The latest attempt to persuade the press and the public to drop it appears to be telling the press just how strictly the White House plans to enforce a policy of total silence.
A phalanx of Trump aides and Republican allies spoke to the NBC News reporting team of Jonathan Allen, Matt Dixon, Henry J. Gomez, Allan Smith, and Natasha Korecki about the strategy:
President Donald Trump and his aides have settled on silence as a strategy to stamp out criticism of his refusal to release files detailing the federal government’s investigation of Epstein, according to a senior administration official and Republicans familiar with the White House’s thinking.
For weeks, stories about Epstein, the financier and pal to political luminaries who died by suicide awaiting trial on sex-trafficking charges in 2019, have been making headlines.
In a break from Trump’s usual crisis communications template — which emphasizes an all-hands-on-deck approach to defending him on television and on social media — the Epstein case has been met with more restraint from the White House.
Trump himself has signaled that he doesn’t want members of his administration talking about the matter nonstop, a person close to the White House told NBC News. And White House aides have made it clear that no one in the administration is allowed to talk about Epstein without high-level vetting, according to a senior administration official who spoke on the condition of anonymity.
“The communications office has to be directly involved in every aspect of this,” the official said. “Every ‘i’ must be dotted, and every ‘t’ must be crossed through us.”
The piece is unlikely to decrease the questions being asked, but could serve as a warning to Republicans who wish to stay in the White House’s good graces.
Read the full report here.
