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Bulwark Takes

White House Spins Epstein Setback

Bulwark Takes

The Bulwark

News, Society & Culture, Politics, News Commentary

4.71.2K Ratings

🗓️ 11 August 2025

⏱️ 10 minutes

🧾️ Download transcript

Summary

Trump’s White House tried to spin the Epstein scandal by pushing for grand jury files they knew were safe, then blaming the judge when nothing came out. Tim Miller and Andrew Egger explain how the stunt worked, Maxwell’s cushy prison move, and whether we’ve really hit “peak Epstein.”

Transcript

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0:00.0

Building a coffee business, serving the best Americano in town is up to you. But winning back time and growing your business, leave that to sum up. Take orders and payments anywhere with the new SumUp terminal. Turn occasional customers into regulars with a free loyalty program. And with the sumup point of sale system, you'll always know when you're running low on your best selling blends. Visit sumup.com.com.com to learn more. Hey, everybody. It's Tim Miller from the bulwark here with my buddy, Andrew Eger.

0:23.7

We had some news this morning that Eger wanted to chat about regarding Jolene Maxwell.

0:30.3

A judge, Judge Engelmeyer, denied the Trump administration's request to unseal the grand jury records.

0:38.3

This was folks not remember the Trump administration's effort to kind of do a look over here

0:43.2

on releasing the Epstein files, which was like, oh, I'd ask a judge to release the grand jury

0:47.2

reports instead, which is separate, which we can get into.

0:50.7

Also, interestingly, Engelmeyer said he reviewed the grand jury material and confirmed

0:54.7

there was basically nothing in there that wasn't already in the public, but since Maxwell,

1:00.4

you know, had public trials. So, Edgar, I wanted to get your reaction to the latest in the Epstein

1:07.0

story. Yeah, it's interesting because there's kind of two different ways you can look at it.

1:11.2

One is that, you know, in the real world, this is sort of a embarrassing face plant for the White House,

1:18.0

right? They get this pretty stern brushback from this judge. They had kind of pretty theatrically,

1:23.4

I would say, tried to work up these grand jury materials as like a big possible reveal for the Epstein files in general and specifically for the Gleine Maxwell stuff where they were saying like, yeah, you know, you're all really mad at us for sitting on some of this stuff that we are declining to release from the Justice Department for reasons that we don't really want to talk about or get into. But don't think that we don't care. Don't think that we don't want to get to the bottom of this story. Look, we're going to go to this back to Florida, back to these grand jury proceedings. We're going to try to get this stuff unsealed. So that'll be something, won't it?

2:00.9

Will that be great?

2:01.9

And then now the judge instead of releasing it is saying,

2:05.8

I'm not releasing this because there's nothing to release.

2:07.9

I mean, he essentially said the government, it was kind of funny.

2:10.5

He said the only argument for releasing these files would be to demonstrate the sort

2:17.3

of government's lack of a foot to stand on

2:20.0

when it said there was a bunch more stuff in these files, but that he didn't think that that

2:25.0

rose to the level, right? So that's one way of looking at is that it's kind of kind of embarrassing

2:29.0

in that way. The other way of looking at it, though, and I think that this is probably the

...

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