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.
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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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