Donald Trump’s panicked aides met without him in the Situation Room during an emergency meeting in which they desperately sought to quell the MAGA civil war that had erupted over the administration’s failure to release the Epstein files, according to an explosive new report.
Ten days after the Justice Department and FBI released a memo last July declaring there was no Jeffrey Epstein client list and that the disgraced financier had killed himself in jail, Vice President JD Vance presided over a heated debate about how to appease the president’s outraged supporters, New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan write in their new book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.
Vance, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, Communications Director Steven Cheung, Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, then-Attorney General Pam Bondi, and FBI Director Kash Patel all joined either in person or on speakerphone, according to an adaptation of the book’s account published Wednesday in The New York Times.
There, the group hatched a plan to offer an empty gesture of transparency that would calm Trump’s base and convince them the president was sympathetic to their concerns—even though he clearly wasn’t.
This is a developing story and will be updated.
