From the second I saw Trump say, Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?, I knew this scandal would roll out differently. At that point, I understood it only as a matter of attention — and I was right.

“POTUS is clearly furious,” said a person close to the White House, who, like others in this story, was granted anonymity to discuss the mood inside the West Wing. “It’s the first time I’ve seen them sort of paralyzed.”

A senior White House official told POLITICO the president is frustrated with his staff’s inability to tamp down conspiracy theories they once spread and by the wall of media coverage that started when Attorney General Pam Bondi released information from the Epstein case that was already in the public domain.

“He feels there are way bigger stories that deserve attention,” the senior White House official said.

Donald Trump survives (and thrives) via two super powers: his ability to command and redirect attention, and his exploitation of polarization to defy actual truth once he has that attention. And, in asking that question, Ae you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein, he expressed that he believed those super powers were failing.

At the time I only understood that his ability to command and redirect attention was failing, but given what has transpired since we can hypothesize about what brought him to this point.

Epstein is different than past scandals because it is so close to a motivating conspiracy of his base, QAnon. A third of his mob is motivated by an equally strong cult belief, and he relies on that mob to control political opinion and wield credible threats against defectors. Meanwhile, his base is suffering from what I’ll call “Justice deprivation,” (which I’ll return to — I’m sure there’s a better term), meaning they believe in him because he continues to stoke their belief he’ll deliver “Justice.” But they’re getting impatient. The John Durham investigation didn’t quench their thirst for vengeance against the Deep State, and now Pam Bondi has been caught stalling on delivering justice to the pedophiles.

And, Ghislaine Maxwell has a credible threat. This doesn’t mean she has proof Trump raped 15-year olds, though we can’t rule it out. Given how things are proceeding, I doubt we’ll ever learn what it is. What matters is the threat was and is serious enough he recognizes he must neutralize it.

But that credible threat meant that two parallel developments — Maxwell’s attempt to cut her 20-year prison sentence and the bumbling efforts from Pam Bondi, Kash Patel, and Dan Bongino to resolve the Epstein thirst they had stoked — collided in the week before John Sauer had to move forward on defending the prosecution against Maxwell’s appeal. Probably, Bondi’s frantic review of the case files in March was an assessment, as Maxwell was preparing her appeal, of how badly those two risks collided, and (as we’ll see) a creation of a list of names to target.

For a brief moment, the left — which has squandered any effort to be able to command attention, in part because most prefer to yell at Chuck Schumer — managed to piggyback on the right wing mob to be able to command attention and even, in Congress, political risks.

In those weeks, we’ve seen Sauer take an action (the response to her cert petition at SCOTUS) that Maxwell viewed as a threat to her ability to get out of prison. Then, her attorney David Markus publicly conveyed that he believed Donald Trump was reneging on a deal (publicly, that was a reference to the appeal, but this is a world of easy double entendres). Then the initial WSJ story — I can’t prove that it came from Maxwell but everything that happened since is consistent with that and this discussion assumes that’s true — demonstrated to Trump how Maxwell’s threat might play out against the backdrop of his mob’s dissatisfaction with Bondi’s dodge on the Epstein files, which convinced Trump to take steps to address the Maxwell threat, all the while against the backdrop of the second (Iran was the first) defections from his base, as they accused Trump of covering up.

It’s fairly clear the plan was to fire Maurene Comey, freeing up Trump to sell out the victims, create a delay and diversion with the grand jury head fakes, so as to shift Maxwell’s focus on Trump onto everyone else. Markus revealed that she was asked about 100 people in her two-day “proffer,” and the plan is to feed the base with scandals about those 100 people, some of whom will be the most prominent Democrats. That will provide Trump the space and excuse to get Maxwell out of prison.

Meanwhile, the Tulsi Gabbard conspiracy theories met with tremendous success at redirecting the focus, at least of the top trolls, from Epstein to transparently bullshit claims about The Black President. Kate Starbird shows that the Epstein focus tailed off by the end of day on Friday July 18, after Tulsi aired her conspiracy theories.

But those conspiracy theories are already creating their own problems. The John Durham investigation already proved there’s no legal there there. And Tulsi recklessly (but effectively) upped the ante, promising even better results than Trump ever promised Durham would provide. Treason, she said.

Trump is still struggling. Perhaps, most lethally for him, he’s not hiding that he’s trying to command and redirect attention — he has said as much three times now. Spectacle fails when you reveal its strings, and Trump, himself, is disclosing them.

He literally reeled off a list of things he wants journalists to cover other than his own Epstein problems.

What are you hoping Todd Blanche gets out of his meeting with Ghislaine Maxwell?

Well I don’t know about the meeting — I know it’s taking place. And he’s a fantastic man. He’s a great attorney, and people should really focus on how well the country’s doing, or they should focus on the fact that Barack Hussein Obama led a coup, or they should focus on the fact that Larry Summers, from Harvard, that Bill Clinton, who you know very well, and lots of other friends — really close friends of Jeffrey Summers [sic] — should be spoken about, because, you know — Jeffrey Epstein — should be spoken about. And they should speak about them because they don’t talk about them, they talk about me, I have nothing to do with the guy.

[pre-planned exchange about the homeless in which Trump asserts authority to take over DC]

Have you heard about Todd Blanche’s interview with Ghislaine Maxwell? Have you considered clemency for Ghislaine Maxwell?

Well, I don’t want to talk about that. What I do want to say is that Todd is a great attorney. But you ought to be speaking about Larry Summers, you ought to be speaking about some of his friends that are hedge fund guys, they’re all over the place. You ought to be speaking about Bill Clinton who went to the island 28 times. I never went to the island.

Do you maintain you did not write a letter?

I don’t even know what they’re talking about. Now somebody could have written a letter, used my name, but that’s happened a lot. All you have to do is take a look at the dossier, the fake dossier. Everything’s fake with that administration. Everything’s fake with the Democrats. Take a look at what they just found about the dossier. Everything is fake. They’re a bunch of sick people.

[turns back to talk about homeless people]

[Another conversation endorsing genocide of Palestinians]

Would you consider a pardon or a commutation for Ghislaine Maxwell?

It’s something I haven’t thought about.

If [inaudible] recommended it?

I’m allowed to do it, but it’s something I have not thought about.

But you wouldn’t rule it out.

But Markus, Maxwell’s attorney, is doing a good job of shifting the attention. After the first proffer, the WSJ magically came to focus on all those other people, some of the very same people Trump would name the next day (again, Markus revealed that Blanche brought in a list of about a hundred names, surely culled from what they saw in the case files; Maxwell is not being asked what happened, she’s being asked what kind of dirt she has on a pre-selected group of people).  And NewsMax and some key influencers are beginning to sell his narrative that Maxwell is the victim. Markus is a formidable lawyer in any context, but he happens to be South Florida’s formidable lawyer, and he knows these players and how they work.

And while Todd Blanche and Pam Bondi are nowhere near as formidable as Markus (indeed, Markus handed Blanche his ass on a cheap plastic plate), they do have the power and the shamelessness to do what needs to get done — the betrayal of victims, the clemency for a monster. Blanche already guaranteed that everything Trump will do going forward, including pardoning a sex trafficker to neutralize the threat she poses to him, will be rubber stamped by a SCOTUS already happy to sanction Trump’s crimes. We can’t probe his motives, even if they’re transparently deprave, SCOTUS already dictated.

That means only political pressure can thwart or impose a cost for Trump’s plan on rewarding a sex trafficker to redirect her weapons.

• One question is what Maurene Comey does. She has been silent (and, as far as I know, has not been a source for any story). But there are a number of steps she might take that would either clarify how important her own firing was in making this happen or fuel the response.
• I think Trump has also assumed the victims won’t find a way to speak up. That may well be true — after all everyone else is terrified and they have far less power than all the people cowering from Trump — but it may not be. There are a lot of journalists who have fought to tell their stories, and those stories are powerful.
• Epstein’s executors are clear they’ll accept subpoenas. And at least for the moment, Democrats have succeeded in forcing Republicans to vote for subpoenas.
• I’d love to do a campaign asking every Republican to go on the record about whether they would impeach Trump for a Ghislaine Maxwell pardon — but the moment for that may have passed.
• One reason Deputy Attorneys General don’t meet with sex traffickers is because it makes them a witness. And while I think Blanche may one day claim he is protected by dual privileges — those of a top law enforcement officer and those of the President’s consigliere — that’ll be a legally dodgy claim. He has done plenty, already, to warrant a subpoena for testimony about why he has broken every law enforcement protocol to meet with a sex trafficker.
• The three judges involved in the grand jury unseal requests seem to smell something is up; Richard Berman, in particular, is acutely aware of how badly the victims have and are being treated. (Note the docket in that case has shifted to non-public filing, which likely means victims have started filing their response to the unsealing request.)
• Bondi created 1,000 witnesses to what is in the Epstein files, and put everything on a SharePoint server, meaning it may be vulnerable to hacking under the zero day just released, and was vulnerable to Elon’s DOGE boys.
• NewsMax, which employs Alex Acosta and is front-running the pardon Ghislaine campaign, could be pressured for coddling pedophiles. And for the moment at least, the twin powerhouses of the Trump bubble, are taking different approaches (silence versus complicity) to helping Trump kill this story.
• And until the far right totally gets on board, it is still possible to keep this swamping the news.

All of which is to say there are other sources of attention and power. Trump has a plan forward and a shit-ton of tools (and an exceedingly competent partner in Markus), but cannot be sure he’ll be able to reclaim that attention.

Still, a number of other things are going on, as Trump’s accelerating sprint to consolidate power.

Again, he is disclosing his strings. You don’t shift attention by telling people to avert their gaze, you entice them elsewhere. First Trump started yelling at his influencers for covering Epstein (most of them complied with his orders, but not all), and then he started giving people a list of things to cover instead: Trump’s claimed successes, his Potemkin trade deals, or the Obama conspiracy theory, or Larry Summers and Bill Clinton. You gotta pick, grandpa. You pick your focus and lead the way, you don’t give a multiple choice test!

The diversion — Tulsi’s conspiracy theory — may create its own problems. NYT reports that Tulsi did that without giving Pam Bondi a heads up (in the same way Bondi staged the first Epstein influencer event).

Ms. Bondi was given little warning the director of national intelligence was about to demand she investigate one of Mr. Trump’s most longstanding grievances: claims without evidence that the Obama administration overstated Russia’s meddling in the 2016 election in order to undermine him.

Ms. Bondi, fresh off a nasty fight with a top F.B.I. official over who was responsible for the political mess around the Epstein case, felt blindsided and annoyed, according to several people familiar with her thinking. They said that in reality, however, Ms. Gabbard was acting as little more than a proxy for a president demanding action on his vengeance agenda.

Ms. Bondi’s staff scrambled for a solution that would satisfy Mr. Trump while not committing the department to a tit-for-tat Obama investigation with unpredictable legal and political consequences.

Ms. Gabbard, standing at the White House briefing room lectern on Wednesday, made a series of provocative claims and pointedly said the onus was now on the Justice Department.

Several hours later, Ms. Bondi’s deputies posted an ambiguous, four-paragraph statement on the department’s website that announced the formation of what they described as a “strike force” to look into the Gabbard accusations.

In several posts, Ben Wittes has unpacked the series of non-announcements that Bondi has made.

So if the two conspired as government officials—as the Fox News article suggests—to do something nefarious to cook intelligence to get Trump, the statute of limitations for that offense, assuming such conduct even maps onto any known criminal offense, would have lapsed long ago. Ditto the statutes governing false statements and perjury. In other words, it’s completely unclear what the Justice Department—so eager to announce the investigation—might actually be investigating.

I can think of only two possible answers to this question.

Third, the first possibility is that some of the investigations of these matters dragged on for years, and some interviews might have taken place late enough that statutes of limitations have not yet run. For example, Comey gave one congressional testimony as late as September 2020, which would leave a few months yet before the statute of limitations on that. Brennan was interviewed by the John Durham investigation in August of the same year. So it’s theoretically possible that the investigation is limited to supposedly false statements made in the context of interviews made within the past five years.

Fourth, the second possibility—maybe more likely—is that the investigation is premised on a fanciful theory that the supposed “conspiracy” continued past the two men’s service in government. If you posit some conspiracy, after all, the statute of limitations runs five years past the end of the conspiracy, not five years after any of the specific acts that make up the conspiracy.

With respect to any supposed conspiracy involving Brennan and Comey to cook the intelligence on Russia to get Trump, we are operating in the land of fantasy. And when exactly does a conspiracy to commit a fantastical act end? In other words, if one predicates an investigation based on nonsense, it is possible to nonsense one’s way back quite a few years using a theory of conspiracy to nonsense.

Fifth, I actually doubt that either of these things is what is really happening here. What I think is happening is what one might call a ghost investigation.

I’d add another several points about evidence:

• First, DOJ and FBI already conducted assessments about some of this evidence, both as they assessed it in counterintelligence reviews and as part of the John Durham investigation. As I’ve shown, Tulsi’s claims include an SVR document that HPSCI not only selectively cited, but which they had to know had been deemed “objectively false;” revisiting that decision would require, among other things, conceding that Jim Comey intentionally threw the election to Donald Trump in 2016. The Durham investigation showed that to try to make an investigation of these files, you have to fabricate things that aren’t even in the underlying Russian spy reports.
• Now, think of the witnesses. DOJ can’t pursue this for the same reason it would have been nearly impossible to reopen the Russian investigation; because a credible witness (in that case, Bill Barr) had weighed in definitively. Tulsi’s recent claims conflict with things Kash Patel, Marco Rubio, and John Ratcliffe have had to say, after reviewing the same evidence. As I’ll show, the HPSCI Report right wingers are frothing over actually added an egregious error years after Kash sort of got the same assertion correct.
• And that would also mean that the FBI and CIA Director would be natural, irreplaceable witnesses. Want to create a shitshow? Invite John Brennan to call Kash Patel as a hostile defense witness to both what happened in 2017 and what has happened more recently.

Will Sommer has been tracking what he calls “hype-debt” among Trump’s rubes.

But as I dove into the MAGA internet to get a sense of whether this distraction was working as intended, I was surprised to discover that not everyone was buying it. Yes, it’s only been a few days. But my sense is that Trump is racking up a sort of hype-debt within the party, as he tries to refocus his base away from one disappointment by setting them up for an even bigger one when Obama fails to face a military tribunal.

Take Liz Wheeler, a conservative pundit who received one of Attorney General Pam Bondi’s fateful Epstein binders back in February, and has since become one of the most vocal critics of Trump’s attempt to shut down questions about Epstein. On Monday, demonstrating why she was trusted to participate in the binder photo-op in the first place, she gushed that Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard had published “new evidence” of a scheme by senior members of the Obama administration to undermine Trump’s first term. (That was, coincidentally, a day after the infamous Wall Street Journal story on Trump writing a note to Epstein). Gabbard’s moves against Obama, she wrote, marked “the first glimmer of what I would call real justice.”

But even Wheeler couldn’t miss the contradiction here. If Obama and his aides committed treason, why don’t they actually get, y’know, arrested? Can a Trump Justice Department that can’t manage to release the Epstein documents without stepping on a series of rakes really pull off the criminal prosecution of an entire past presidential administration?

Wheeler said the only way to fulfill Trump’s new commitment to his supporters would be actual prosecutions.

Though he was also one of the first to catch NewsMax prepping the way for Maxwell’s clemency.

Meanwhile, Republicans are the only ones who buy this. In Gallup’s latest, Trump has started closing in on his all-time lows — his support immediately after leading an assault on the Capitol — among support from Independents. And that’s as the effects of his tariffs builds.

It seems likely that Trump’s defense attorney will pull of some kind of non-Trump Epstein distraction. What’s not yet clear is how much backlash that will elicit. Or whether Trump will reclaim his ability to grab attention.