The Trump White House treated the Jeffrey Epstein files as a political crisis requiring Situation Room-level management — a narrative problem to be contained, not a crime to be reckoned with — convening emergency meetings among senior officials as the administration struggled to contain a scandal it had helped create, according to a New York Times exclusive drawn from a forthcoming book by reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
The exclusive previews “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump,” due June 23 from Simon & Schuster and based on roughly 1,000 interviews. The Epstein chapter describes a White House consumed not by questions of accountability but by how to manage a narrative slipping beyond the president’s grip.
A week and a half after the DOJ and FBI published a memo declaring Epstein had no client list and died by suicide, Vice President JD Vance presided over a Situation Room meeting among senior administration officials — held without Trump — to address a rebellion within the MAGA base over the administration’s handling of the files. Vance advocated most forcefully for full public transparency. The rest of the room resisted.
Acting DOJ chief Todd Blanche countered with two proposals. The first: that he or another DOJ lawyer interview Ghislaine Maxwell in prison. The second: petitioning federal courts in Florida and New York to unseal Epstein-related grand jury testimony. Haberman and Swan describe the court petition as a move Blanche advanced knowing it would almost certainly fail — grand jury materials are among the most protected in US law — and characterise both proposals as designed to project transparency while delivering nothing substantive.
Blanche conducted a two-day Maxwell interview in July 2025 — a step former prosecutors called highly unusual for a senior DOJ official. Neither move quieted the political firestorm.
Haberman and Swan describe Trump as growing increasingly frustrated with Epstein dominating his presidency’s news cycle — unaccustomed to losing control over his base’s loyalties. Every internal discussion, the authors report, focused on how to contain or spin the story.
Their conclusion is unsparing: as Haberman and Swan write, the president who broke institutions and deployed the Justice Department against his enemies “could not, it turned out, make Jeffrey Epstein disappear.”
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