Transparency’s most unfortunate victim can, paradoxically, be the truth: Witness the havoc wrought by the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Democrats and their allies in the media are engaged in yet another Epstein-induced feeding frenzy, this time over documents pertaining to President Donald Trump.
Independent reporter Roger Sollenberger first reported — and major outlets like NPR have subsequently confirmed — that the Justice Department deleted files about an allegation that Trump and Jeffrey Epstein both abused a girl between the age of 13 and 15 in the early 1980s.
As another journalist, Jacqueline Sweet, documented for lefty The Guardian, the accusation appears to be complete and utter rubbish.
The president’s accuser claims Epstein began to abuse her when she was 13, and at some point brought her to either New York or New Jersey by either plane or car to be assaulted by Trump.
She claimed to have been living on Hilton Head island at the time, where there is no record of Epstein spending his summers.
She alleged Epstein blackmailed her mother (who was later sent to prison for embezzlement), though records can’t found to back that up.
Her implication of Trump makes little sense, since his friendship with Epstein began later in that decade.
This undated and unlocated handout image released by Democrats on the House Oversight Committee on December 18, 2025, shows late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. House Oversight Democrats/AFP via Getty Images She’s faced criminal charges for fraud, theft and exploitation of an elderly person.
“There are so many problems with this woman’s story — it reads as lurid, fantastical, improbable . . . I can’t believe the Dems hitched their wagon to this,” Sweet posted on X.
None of that has stopped Trump’s enemies from running wild with this farce, using the administration’s alleged coverup to launder the accusation itself.
Sollenberger repeatedly referred to both the accuser and her allegations as “credible,” eliding the abundance of evidence that it is anything but.
President Donald Trump arrives to deliver the first State of the Union address of his second term to a joint session of Congress in the House Chamber of the United States Capitol in Washington, DC, on February 24, 2026. POOL/AFP via Getty Images NPR, too, understood its mission, emphasizing “how serious investigators took” her claims and that she sat with the FBI four times to discuss them.
Democrats like House Oversight Committee Ranking Member Robert Garcia (D-Calif.), Rep. Seth Moulton (D-Mass.) and prospective 2028 hopeful Pete Buttigieg have all seized on the DOJ’s ill-advised attempt to conceal the records to either subtly imply or outright suggest the allegations have merit.
“If these accusations had any semblance of being false, then they would release the records,” insisted Moulton in a particularly reckless affront to human reason on CNN.
Anderson Cooper, as is his wont, allowed that preposterous assertion to fly by without protest.
This episode is representative of the larger Epstein files experience.
Opportunists of all political stripes are using any and every tool at their disposal to make hay out of them with no regard for the victims of their misdirection — or the truth.
Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) have become media darlings for their work on the Transparency Act, but their conduct has actually been unbefitting decent men, much less congressmen.
The pair claimed to have discovered six men “likely incriminated” in Epstein’s nefarious activities in the unredacted files, and Khanna went so far as to name them on the House floor; it quickly turned out that four had no connection at all to Epstein. Oops.
Anti-Israel obsessives have weaponized Epstein’s relationship with former Israeli Prime Minister Ehud Barak to push the conspiracy theory that Epstein was a foreign agent.“The Israeli Government Installed and Maintained Security System at Epstein Apartment,” read one widely circulated headline.Yes, it did — in accordance with Israeli protocol at a building Epstein managed, because that’s where Barak was living.Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) promoted the ravings of a man who maintained he heard Trump laughing about abusing kids on a call with Epstein, and subsequently recounted the story to a woman who had, rather conveniently, been “raped” by Trump.She was later, rather inconveniently, murdered in a hit he attributed to Ghislaine Maxwell and a Mexican drug cartel, explained Lieu’s star witness.
House Republicans’ subpoena of Hillary Clinton stands out as yet another example of guilt implied by association, given the fact that she has no recollection of — and there’s no proof — she ever even met Epstein.
The American criminal-justice system requires law-enforcement officials to zealously guard information until they’re ready to prove criminality in court so as to guard against smear campaigns of the kind in vogue today.
Those rules ought to be adhered to even in exceptional circumstances — indeed, especially in exceptional circumstances.
Yet the country’s self-serving political class is incapable of responsibly navigating the slightest relaxation of them.
Isaac Schorr is a senior editor at Mediaite.
