Predator-in-Chief: The Docket of Trump’s Crimes, and America’s Burial of the Evidence

Let us now pause to admire the grotesque symmetry. Trump, Epstein’s associate, is the only man to emerge from that ring of hell with a legal finding of sexual abuse—while Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime accomplice, received a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking in 2021. Everything else—other powerful figures, potential clients, and institutional inquiry—was sealed off and sterilized by the FBI and DOJ. No names to summon, no charges to file, no trail of currency or carnality worth pursuing. Not a single subpoena for Trump’s flights, his contacts, his cameos in the archive of abuse. His evasion of criminal prosecution for the rape allegations themselves is not a vindication but rather an indictment of process—a system so calcified by theater and proximity to power that it cannot prosecute its own disease. The only person from that network to serve time beyond Epstein was a woman. The only man legally branded a predator now snarls at reporters from the West Wing, dismissing any further questions about Epstein as a “desecration”:

“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years. You’re asking — we have Texas, we have this, we have all of the things. And are people still talking about this guy? This creep? That is unbelievable.”

Then there is the matter of minors, which Trump treated less as a red line and more as décor. In a 2005 interview on The Howard Stern Show, Trump boasted:

“Well, I’ll tell you the funniest is that before a show, I’ll go backstage and everyone’s getting dressed… no men are anywhere, and I’m allowed to go in because I’m the owner of the pageant and therefore I’m inspecting it. You know, I’m inspecting because I want to make sure that everything is good… the dresses. ‘Is everyone okay?’ You know, they’re standing there with no clothes. ‘Is everybody okay?’ And you see these incredible looking women, and so, I sort of get away with things like that.”

Several Miss Teen USA contestants corroborated the story, saying he walked in while they were changing, some as young as fifteen. But this was hardly an isolated moment of sleaze—it was a lifelong pattern. In a 1992 video, Trump gestures toward a group of preteen girls and, when one says she’s “going up the escalator,” turns to the camera and declares, “I’m going to be dating her in 10 years. Can you believe it?”

He would later refer to his own daughter, Ivanka, as someone he “might be dating if she weren’t my daughter,” during an appearance on The View. And in another 2006 interview with Stern, Trump nodded along as Stern called his daughter “a piece of ass.” Trump even deployed adultery as spectacle—while Melania was pregnant with Barron, he allegedly carried on an extramarital affair with adult-film star Stormy Daniels, hiding hush‑money payments orchestrated by Michael Cohen. This is not a quirk—but a worldview. A man who reduced teenage pageants to hunting grounds, joked about incestuous desire, and paid to conceal adultery has no place near public trust. 

The pattern is surgical in its repetition. Jill Harth, a business associate who worked with Trump in the early 1990s, filed a lawsuit in 1997 alleging that he groped her, attempted to rape her in his daughter’s bedroom at Mar-a-Lago, and forcibly kissed her against her will during a business dinner in 1992. In her sworn affidavit, Harth stated that Trump “was relentless,” and that she only withdrew the suit after reaching a confidential settlement related to a separate business dispute. She later reaffirmed the sexual assault allegations in multiple interviews and under oath. Summer Zervos, a contestant on The Apprentice, accused Trump of aggressively kissing her, grabbing her breast, and thrusting his genitals at her during a 2007 meeting at the Beverly Hills Hotel. After Trump publicly called her a liar, Zervos filed a defamation lawsuit in 2017. The case proceeded through discovery and depositions—including Trump’s—before she dropped it in 2021, citing threats, legal delays, and the toll of the process. Alva Johnson, a campaign staffer, alleged that Trump forcibly kissed her without consent at a 2016 rally in Tampa. She filed suit in 2019, stating she was subjected to a racially hostile work environment as well. Although the case was dismissed on jurisdictional grounds, the judge did not evaluate the merits.

Johnson released contemporaneous texts and a video that appeared to corroborate her account. And then there is Ivana Trump, his first wife, who stated during their 1990 divorce proceedings that Donald raped her during a violent encounter. In a sworn deposition, she described an assault in which Trump tore out a handful of her hair and penetrated her against her will in retaliation for a painful cosmetic procedure he blamed her for. Though she later softened the language under pressure, the original account remains on the record—and was detailed in the 1993 book Lost Tycoon: The Many Lives of Donald J. Trump by Harry Hurt III.

These horrific allegations come not from political enemies or distant observers, but from women who knew him, worked with him, married him. 

In Trump’s world, every woman is a liar, and every lawsuit is a hoax. “Every woman lied when they came forward to hurt my campaign,” he shouted during a 2016 rally. When Brett Kavanaugh wept and whimpered his way onto the Supreme Court, Trump lamented that “it is a very scary time for young men in America.” And now, in 2025, his DOJ quietly wipes away the last traces of Epstein’s empire of procurement—without so much as a footnote mentioning the man who shared his parties, his jet, and his perverse perspective.

It is not difficult to see the choreography. The girls disappear. The files disappear. The clients dissolve into rumor. The legal mechanisms sputter and die. And the former defendant—civilly liable for sexual abuse, named in lawsuits across four decades, caught on tape describing his method—now signs executive orders from the Resolute Desk. If Epstein had lived, he wouldn’t have needed a defense attorney—only a cabinet position.

What the DOJ has buried is not merely a man or a case, but a ledger of national shame. In the space where prosecutions should bloom, we now have memo and myth. The archive is ash, the evidence embalmed, and justice gagged with its own red tape. There is no client list, they say. And in saying so, they make clear who the client was all along.

The Record He Couldn’t Erase

It is the fate of archives in despotic hands to smolder in silence. Not in fire, which at least declares itself, but in the smog of redaction, where erasure arrives dressed as protocol and ash leaves no fingerprint. Somewhere beneath the Department of Justice’s marble facade lies a cold vault of tapes, affidavits, flight logs, hard drives, witness statements, and names. What entropy did not claim, we buried by choice. What could not be denied, we refused to confront. And what should have shattered institutions was quietly filed under “routine”—a burial shroud stretched over the decomposing corpse of justice.

The raids on Jeffrey Epstein’s properties yielded over 10,000 digital files—many in pristine 4K resolution—alongside labeled DVDs cataloged by name and date, stacked like trophies in a predator’s library. Surveillance cameras captured every room—in bedrooms, bathrooms, corridors, and massage rooms across both coasts and islands—not for security, but, one suspects, for leverage. We know these recordings exist. The FBI seized them, catalogued them, reviewed them. Their contents, we are told, were horrific. Pam Bondi herself admitted they included “tens of thousands of videos” involving Epstein, “children, or child porn.” No one is asking for them to be released. They shouldn’t be. But the indictment begins where the footage ends. The very existence of these tapes is a matter of record. And with that record comes another certainty: the FBI, if competent at all, used them to construct a working list of potential co-conspirators—built from flight logs, phone books, surveillance footage, testimony, email chains, and wire transfers. Epstein was a monster, but he wasn’t stupid. He didn’t keep notes on a criminal conspiracy. There was no folder labeled Client List, no spreadsheet titled Powerful Men Who Like Underage Girls.xls. But the government had every tool necessary to infer what he never needed to write down. And yet, since his death, not a single client named. Not a single co-conspirator charged—beyond the woman convicted of trafficking to men with no names. Not a single official compelled to explain the tapes that vanished into institutional ether. The silence now hums like a powerline over a mass grave—steady, indifferent, and hot with the energy of everything buried beneath it. The evidence exists in negative space, outlined in chalk by a country that refuses to exhume what it cannot bear to admit.

The Department of Justice, eager to quell disbelief, released nearly 11 hours of grainy surveillance footage from the night Epstein died—offered up as definitive proof that the man died by suicide. But the camera wasn’t trained on his cell. It was fixed to a lower tier, aimed down the corridor, and offered no view of the death scene itself. More damning still, the footage contains a conspicuous jump: a one-minute, two-second gap beginning at 11:58 p.m.—the minute before Epstein’s reported time of death. When pressed, Pam Bondi insisted the missing minute was routine, the result of a nightly system reset: “Every night the video is reset, and every night should have the same minute missing.” It is a rare prison where the surveillance system malfunctions on cue. Rarer still the raw footage whose metadata reveals post-capture edits—missing frames, corrupted timecode, and compression anomalies incompatible with a direct system rip. The DOJ released a file altered in both form and function—engineered to obscure rather than reveal, stripped of evidentiary integrity, and polished into an artifact of institutional narrative, not forensic truth.

And while the Bureau of Prisons swore by suicide, Dr. Michael Baden—the former chief medical examiner of New York City, who observed the autopsy—said the wound on Epstein’s neck was far too narrow for a bedsheet. The mark was dead center, not beneath the jawline as in typical hangings—consistent, he said, with manual strangulation by wire or cord. Blood stained the neck, but not the ligature. “I think that the evidence points more to homicide than suicide,” Baden later concluded. The bed was stripped. The timeline closed. And the nation moved on as if closure were the same as truth.

In February 2025, 15 right-wing influencers emerged from the White House grinning like game show contestants, each clutching a glossy binder labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1”—as if the anatomy of a criminal empire could be laminated and filed under tabbed dividers. The binders were distributed with great fanfare by Attorney General Pam Bondi, under the watchful gaze of President Trump, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Vice President J.D. Vance, in what was billed as a revelatory act of transparency.

But instead of indictments, there were indexes. Instead of evidence, ephemera. The contents were insultingly familiar: Epstein’s publicly available flight logs, the well-worn “little black book,” a smattering of recycled court filings—all readily available online and, in some cases, sold in airport paperbacks. Influencer Liz Wheeler, blinking into the anticlimax, confessed, “That’s not what’s in [the folder].” Representative Anna Paulina Luna, who chaired a House task force on Epstein-related declassification, called the stunt a “ploy for media attention” that served only to “obscure critical evidence.” If anything had been declassified, it was the theatricality of impunity.

Donald Trump’s name repeatedly appears in unredacted Epstein files. Kash Patel and Dan Bongino—podcast demagogues turned federal inquisitors—spent years vowing they would expose Epstein’s network, if only their crusade against the cover-up ended with them holding the shovel. In 2025, they got their wish: Patel as FBI Director, Bongino as his deputy. But when the burial was made official—when the Justice Department issued its final memo denying a client list, shuttering the investigation, and sterilizing the records—they stood at the helm of the bureau that sealed it shut. Bongino, once a sermonizing firebrand, didn’t even show up to work the following Friday. After a screaming match with Attorney General Pam Bondi over the handling of the Epstein files, he was reportedly considering resignation. They stormed the gates of the archive only to weld the vault shut from the inside—curators of the very silence they vowed to shatter.

Before Epstein’s death was sealed in concrete, it was swaddled in the silk of official discretion. The first great vanishing act took place in 2008, when Alexander Acosta—then U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of Florida—brokered the most notorious non-prosecution agreement in modern American history. The outcome functioned as diplomatic immunity for predators by and through the machinery of American justice. Despite a police investigation identifying dozens of underage victims and recommending felony charges for sex crimes against minors, Acosta rerouted the case into a backroom plea. Epstein served just 13 months in a county jail—on state charges of solicitation—granted work release six days a week, allowed to return each night to a private wing of his cell block. But the real obscenity lay in the footnotes: the agreement granted federal immunity to “any potential co-conspirators,” effectively shielding an entire network of enablers from future indictment. Victims were not notified. The deal was kept secret. And in 2019, a federal judge ruled that Acosta’s office had violated the law by concealing it from the very people it claimed to protect. When the scandal resurfaced, Acosta—by then Donald Trump’s Secretary of Labor—defended the bargain as necessary, claiming the case might have collapsed without it. Then he resigned. But the damage had metastasized. Epstein had already become something far more dangerous than a criminal. He had become a precedent. And the next man to inherit that precedent would make the burial permanent.

Bill Barr, the Houdini of institutional misconduct, deserves his own monument in this necropolis of evidence. Appointed by Trump in 2019, Barr presided over the collapse of the Epstein case—issuing stern declarations of disbelief after Epstein’s death, only to then endorse the suicide ruling with the deference of a state priest. Under his tenure, the Department of Justice sealed the seized surveillance files, indicted Ghislaine Maxwell but never compelled her cooperation, and assured the public—without a hint of irony—that no other defendants would be named. Prosecutors under Barr’s command admitted to deleting the footage of Epstein’s first suicide attempt “by accident” and recovering other critical surveillance in corrupted form.

Chain-of-custody protocols—bedrock to any serious investigation—were disfigured. Hard drives were never logged publicly. Surveillance footage remained sealed, unseen in court, and withheld from congressional oversight—its contents too incriminating to surface and too illicit to share. And internal sources confirmed that material had gone missing. In any functioning court, such malpractice would render the remainder fruit of the poisonous tree: tainted, inadmissible, and legally inert. What better way to vanish a scandal than to erode its evidentiary spine?

And Epstein was not the only name Barr helped bury. He intervened to reduce Roger Stone’s sentencing after career prosecutors issued their recommendation—prompting all four to resign from the case in protest. He moved to dismiss charges against Michael Flynn, despite Flynn’s sworn guilty plea, and with such conspicuous timing that even the presiding judge questioned the DOJ’s motives. He redacted and suppressed entire passages of the Mueller Report, misleading the public with a summary so tendentious, so distorted that a federal judge later declared it lacked credibility. 

And above them all, looms: Donald J. Trump. The only man whose fingerprints are on every rung of this decaying ladder. It was his administration that sat on the tapes, sealed the evidence, and declared the case closed. And still, his followers—wide-eyed with the fervor of betrayed pilgrims—claim they are waiting for “the list.” That he promised them disclosure. That any day now, he’ll unlock the vault. But what they won’t consider—what they will themselves not to see—is that the list, if it ever existed, would indict him first.

He appears in Epstein’s flight logs at least eight times, including three flights with Epstein himself. He was photographed and filmed alongside Epstein for years. Epstein once called him his “closest friend.” Trump was accused in court filings of raping a 13-year-old girl alongside Epstein. He appointed Alexander Acosta—the very man who brokered Epstein’s non-prosecution deal—to Secretary of Labor. He installed William Barr, son of the Dalton headmaster who gave Epstein his first job, as Attorney General. He named as Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick—Epstein’s neighbor on East 71st Street. The architecture is unmistakably Trump—each hallway built, named, and lit under his direction. 

The edifice of denial rests on foundations he poured—fortified with loyalty, secrecy, and power. Still, the stories rise—unpaid, untried, unhealed. Jessica Leeds remembers being groped on an airplane: “It was like he had 47 arms—like an octopus.” Rachel Crooks, a Trump Tower receptionist, says he forcibly kissed her on the mouth. Tasha Dixon recalls him walking in on topless teens at the Miss USA pageant. Natasha Stoynoff, on assignment at Mar-a-Lago, recalls he shoved her against a wall and forced his tongue into her mouth. Jessica Drake alleges he kissed her and two other women without consent. Stacey Williams claims he groped her in the presence of Jeffrey Epstein. Mariah Billado, then a teen contestant, remembered Trump entering the changing room and announcing: “Don’t worry, I’ve seen it all before.” The details change. The dynamic does not. Each story a flare ignored. Each woman, a ledger uncashed.

So where does that leave us? With a dead man in a locked cell. A convicted madam with no clients. A hard drive of digital evidence sealed in procedural ice. And a man still sitting behind the Resolute Desk while the women he molested watch justice dissolve from a distance. The United States did not lose this case—it bled it. It dressed the wound in red tape and called the hemorrhage closure. If evidence could speak, it would scream. 

And Trump? He’s the only man alive who touched every chapter of this atrocity—and walked away holding the pen.