July 24, 2025: Trump’s Epstein crisis explodes

The Playbook Podcast

POLITICO

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3.9 • 699 Ratings

🗓️ 24 July 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

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Summary

It’s the biggest story in Washington: Yesterday, the Wall Street Journal dropped a bombshell report that Attorney General Pam Bondi briefed President Donald Trump in May and told him that his name — among many others — appeared multiple times in the files from the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Now, the White House’s Epstein problem has grown into a full-blown crisis and entered a new and potentially more damaging phase. Playbook’s Adam Wren and Dasha Burns unpack it all — the spin, the lines of attack and what you need to know about where things head from here.

Transcript

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0:00.0	presented by BP.
0:07.6	Hello, I'm Adam Wren.
0:09.4	And I'm Dasha Burns.
0:10.7	It is Thursday, July 24th.
0:13.6	And this is the Playbook podcast.
0:16.4	We probably don't have to tell you, but the big story driving the day is the fallout
0:20.6	from the
0:20.9	Wall Street Journal's bombshell that Attorney General Pam Bondi told President Donald Trump
0:26.2	in May that his name was one of many Emmy Epstein files. The story published at 308 yesterday
0:34.3	afternoon and completely took over Washington.
0:38.8	Yeah, so immediately after this dropped, I started making phone calls to some of my folks
0:43.0	in and around the White House.
0:44.2	And look, the line was largely playing down this story.
0:50.0	What I heard from both White House allies and people inside of the White House is basically,
0:54.7	they don't think there's anything new here.
0:56.8	They feel like, of course, it's not a surprise that the president was mentioned in the Epstein
1:02.1	files.
1:02.7	They told me everyone knew that Trump, alongside many other high profile names, had associated
1:08.0	with Jeffrey Epstein, that we'd already seen pictures of them together,
1:12.3	that this was nothing new. And this is basically sensationalized reporting from the Wall
1:16.7	Street Journal outlet with which they are already in a legal battle. And really trying to
1:22.2	emphasize that if there had been there or there in these materials that implicated President Trump and anything
	...

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