House GOP Flees D.C. Over Epstein Files While Trump’s DOJ Meets With Ghislane Maxwell

By Jacob Weindling  |  July 22, 2025 | 12:59pm
Screenshot via Aaron Rupar
Trump Administration Jeffrey Epstein
House GOP Flees D.C. Over Epstein Files While Trump’s DOJ Meets With Ghislane Maxwell

Since we are the kind of site that editorializes based on known facts and reports, it can be hard sometimes to know whether our headlines are takes or aggregations of news. This headline is 100 percent news. “Flee” perhaps could be described as dramatic editorializing, but it is a word pointed in the same direction as Axios’ lede today about how the “House bails early.”

The House is leaving Washington a day early for it’s five-week August recess after tensions erupted over efforts to force release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

GOP Speaker Mike Johnson even confirmed this, saying “we’re not going to play political games with [Epstein].” Pam Bondi, Trump’s Attorney General, also said today that the Department of Justice will meet with Ghislane Maxwell, Jeffrey Epstein’s mistress who was sentenced to 20 years in prison for, per the Department of Justice, “conspiring with Jeffrey Epstein to sexually abuse minors.”

I want to reiterate that we have remained entirely in the realm of facts up to this point. I am holding back a take with every atom in my body right now, but the key to being successful at this kind of writing is giving readers the reported and confirmed stuff up front, that way they can judge for themselves whether they think your take is full of shit or not. This whole Epstein saga is a bit surreal, but like I have been writing about with UFOs over the last year, there is a lot of good, solid evidence supporting the cultural lore’s allegation that this is what it looks like.

I was on vacation last week, detoxing from the news cycle and trying to gain a bit of clarity on the state of the world, and then I found myself up at 3 a.m. in Belfast, gobsmacked by the Wall Street Journal’s report (the last time I went on an extended vacation? Michael Flynn got indicted. Perhaps I need to go on more for the good of the country). I don’t think there is much question that the Wall Street Journal has the goods on this lewd and cryptic letter that Trump wrote to Epstein given how few bylines are on that report, and the most “let them fight” moment in modern political history has emboldened Rupert Murdoch to take on his Frankentrump in court with it.

It is delicate stuff, writing in public about a federal child sex trafficking trial that the president would very much like you to stop talking about, but writing for a website borne from the GOAT that exposed the flight logs exposing Trump and a Democratic president for flying on the world’s most famous pedophile’s plane makes it a responsibility. The absurdity that Trump brings to everything, but especially his response to this saga that answers the question of “how could he consistently make it worse,” makes this something of a peak Trump comedy fit for the sardonic nature of Splinter. It has all the familiar slapstick Trump tones, but around something that is monstrously horrifying.

Over a thousand women and children’s lives were devastated by Jeffrey Epstein, Ghislane Maxwell and their clients and disgusting enablers. Writing about the worst moments of someone’s life is a grave responsibility far too few people take seriously, and the most important aspect of thinking about this is that the victims’ needs must be centered. They deserve justice, not celebrity or scrutiny or scorn. The men at the center of Epstein’s web are not the antagonists versus the protagonists of a real-life TV show, they are real-world monsters creating real-world victims.

To be fair to the news consumer, it is shocking watching this cultural lore rooted in real harm and evidence play out on our televisions and Trump’s TruthSocial posts, and the slapstick humor of Trump fumbling the bag over and over is impossible to avoid, but this is a serious story that must be focused along serious ramifications. Especially given the power that surrounds it, and the implications it has for that power and how it was potentially utilized throughout Jeffrey Epstein’s reign of terror.

The MAGA revolt provides this saga with another well-known meme attached to it, as the worst people you know really do have a point. We live in a world now where Dan Bongino is taking mental health days on principle (and/or betrayal, this is where speculation inevitably creeps into this blog). Things are happening, man.

And I am afraid to write about them, even though I must. My own personal meme attached to this situation is the one from Community, as I went on vacation in a pre-WSJ report world, and came back to a room on fire with people doing inexplicable things after reading some really fucked up innuendo Trump wrote to Epstein that even has its own enigmatic Q-notes for liberals. What the hell is happening!? What did I walk back into???

And now the Speaker of the House is openly saying that the Democrats and Republican allies like Thomas Massie are forcing the GOP to close Congress early so they can all go on vacation until September and not talk about Jeffrey Epstein in front of a camera. Congressional Republicans are literally running away from the Epstein files! All while Trump is jangling every key possible in front of his Epstein-obsessed base. And now Pam Bondi wants the DOJ to talk Ghislane Maxwell???

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Applying my UFO “this is mostly what it looks like” thesis to the Epstein mystery is…man. That Trump TruthSocial post about his “’boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals’” was so, so sweaty. A lot happened while I was gone last week, and now a lot is happening in Congress and Trump’s lawyers’ office this week. And it’s all pointed in the direction that I can quote Trump on, where he thinks that talking about a pedophile he used to hang out with is a “waste of time.”

Jeffrey Epstein said he was Trump’s “closest friend” to biographer Michael Wolff before he died. There is a lot more harrowing detail to that claim that Epstein goes into in the tape that the House put into the Congressional record, and you don’t exactly come away from it thinking Trump isn’t connected to these investigations he does not want made public. Analyzing this situation is a high-wire act given Trump’s litigiousness, but between bragging to Howard Stern about how “it was the funniest” to barge in on naked girls at his teen pageants and Trump’s admitted connections to Jeffrey Epstein, to say nothing of his reported connections to Epstein, now combined with President Trump promising Epstein revelations and backtracking?

Saying this is all what it looks like does not make it look good for Trump.

Which would explain his self-destructive behavior. There are a lot of puzzle pieces that we know are puzzle pieces sitting on a partially obscured board connected to a lot of very powerful people, but we don’t know how. One of these powerful people around Jeffrey Epstein is alienating his base for reasons that no one can quite figure out. Putting some of these puzzle pieces on the board together would help explain these illogical actions, and one cannot wonder if we are in the process of doing just that.

 
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