This week, Epstein, Epstein, Epstein, a scandal that even President Trump can't manage or contain.

Just six months into the president's second term, lingering questions about his relationship with the deceased sex trafficker are consuming his White House and paralyzing Congress with no end in sight.

Next.

This is Washington Week with the Atlantic.

Good evening and welcome to Washington Week. I'm Franklin Ford in tonight for Jeffrey Goldberg.

It wasn't that long ago when Alon Musk, who was on his way out of Doge, posted what he called a really big bomb, that President Trump's name was in the files of the government's Jeffrey Epstein investigation.

Musk deleted that post, but a report from the Wall Street Journal this week confirmed his extraordinary claim and revealed that the president was briefed about it by Attorney General Pam Bondi in May. Joining me tonight to discuss this,

Peter Baker, the Chief White House correspondent for the New York Times. Eugene Daniels is a senior

Washington correspondent and co-host of The Weekend on MSNBC. Susan Glasser is a staff writer at The New Yorker, and Jonathan Carl is the chief Washington correspondent at ABC News.

Before we tumble down this sordid rabbit hole, Trump landed in Scotland today and took questions from the press.

I want to listen to this exchange.

No, I was never, never breathed on. Eugene, the Wall Street Journal reported that he was in

these files and he was briefed about it. The New York Times confirmed it. Why in the world is he denying this? Donald Trump denying something that everyone else is. It's true. I'm shocked by that. Because he knows, he feels like it's a bad, it's a terrible thing. Even though everyone who you will talk to who's an expert will tell you that just because someone's name is in these files doesn't mean they did anything bad, right? We know that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were friends. We know that Donald Trump and him hung out a lot, right? We know these things. We know he was on the plane at some point. And so we, but what Donald Trump has clearly made the calculation that he can't be connected to Jeffrey Epstein in any way, shape, or form. And because for years, he and a lot of the people that are in the administration stoked the files so much

and talked about how bad they were and all these pedophiles were in these files,

he knows he cannot cop to knowing that he was in these files.

But, you know, here's the thing.

When Pam Bondi put out what she called phase one of the Epstein files in those

binders to those right-wing influencers, those documents, which were mostly stuff that had already

been out, 300 or some pages, Donald Trump's name was in those documents. Those documents

included Epstein's address book, which had Donald Trump, it had his

brother Robert, it had Ivanka, it has his ex-wife, Ivana, had, you know, several Trumps,

and also had the flight logs from some of Epstein's flights between West Palm Beach and

...