The Trump White House is on the hunt for the source of a leak after the details of sensitive conversations between senior Trump officials were exposed in a new report.
On Wednesday, the New York Times published an excerpt from the forthcoming book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump by its White House reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
In the excerpt, Haberman and Swan describe secret, emergency meetings in the Situation Room between the president’s aides, without the knowledge of the president, in which they sought to contain the scandal that erupted as a result of the administration’s botched handling of the release of the Epstein files.
Many of Trump’s senior aides participated in a meeting on July 17, 2025, ten days after the Justice Department and FBI released a memo declaring there was no Epstein client list and that the disgraced financier had killed himself in jail.
Those present, either in the Situation Room or on the phone, included Vice President JD Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Communications Director Steven Cheung, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel.
During the meeting, the group worked to develop a gesture of transparency that would convince the president’s MAGA base that he was sympathetic to their concerns. “Which itself was a problem, because he clearly wasn’t,” Haberman and Swan note.
One suggestion, floated by Vance, was an interview between Tucker Carlson and jailed Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell, in the hopes that Maxwell would say that Trump had not been involved in Epstein’s crimes.
CNN’s Brian Stelter reported on Wednesday that, following the publication of the excerpt, a “massive leak hunt” was now underway at the White House in order to find the source of the leak.
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment.
In Haberman and Swan’s description of the meeting, Vance “appeared panicked” about the way the Epstein case was dividing the president’s base.
Haberman and Swan also note that some senior officials within the Trump administration “had the impression that Vance had bought into the darkest theories about Epstein and a cabal of predators hidden within the country’s ruling class.”
Other members of Trump’s administration, including FBI Director Kash Patel, have previously promoted conspiracy theories involving Epstein, including claiming that the government was hiding his client list and withholding names in order to protect powerful people.
The Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein case caused significant friction within the Republican Party, with previously diehard Trump supporters like former Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene breaking ranks with the president to criticize the secrecy and obfuscation surrounding the release of the files.
In a February interview, Greene described Trump’s handling of the case as the “biggest political miscalculation” in his career.
“He fought the hardest to stop these files from being released,” Greene told podcaster and host of The Owen Report Owen Shroyer.
“It became a massive political problem—biggest political miscalculation in Donald Trump’s career was calling this a hoax, fighting the release of it, and having Mike Johnson refuse to bring the bill to the floor,” she added, referring to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which passed in November and forced the Department of Justice to release the files associated with the case.
The Justice Department ultimately released some 3.5 million pages associated with the case, falling far short of the 6 million pages it had in evidence.
Amid accusations of a cover-up, then-Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche announced in January, following the second release, that the department’s obligations under the Epstein Files Transparency Act had been met.
