Vice President JD Vance took a seat at
the head of the table in the John F. Kennedy Conference Room of the
Situation Room complex. “This is a huge problem,” he told the group.
Arrayed around him were the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles; the
White House counsel, David Warrington; the press secretary, Karoline
Leavitt; the deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich; the communications
director, Steven Cheung; the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche; the
associate attorney general, Stanley Woodward Jr.; and the deputy chief
of staff James Blair. Attorney General Pam Bondi and the F.B.I.
director, Kash Patel, joined on speakerphone.The
…
vice president appeared panicked to others in the room about the way
the subject of Epstein was already dividing the MAGA coalition. Some
senior officials 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. Wiles would tell others that the vice
president had proved himself to be a major conspiracy theorist. Another
top official said later that Vance had been pounding on the Epstein
issue since the release of the memo. He was privately pressing for the
administration to release all the Epstein files, everything in the
Justice Department’s possession, even encouraging a congressional
investigation.Option 2 was to have Justice Department lawyers question Maxwell and publicly release the transcript — a twist on the idea proposed earlier by Vance. Blanche offered to interview Maxwell himself.
“What if we got her to talk to Congress?” Vance suggested.
Blanche raised the possibility that Maxwell’s lawyer might expect something in return for her candor.
Warrington, the White House counsel, responded by laying out the available choices, without advocating any of them. Maxwell could be given a pardon, he said, or she could have her sentence reduced.
At that, several around the table spoke up to register their strong disapproval.
“Pardoning Maxwell, a trafficker of young girls, would create a huge P.R. problem,” Cheung said. He predicted that in the wake of a pardon, the Epstein accusers would be fanning out on TV, telling their stories and ripping the administration to shreds.
Blair was also adamantly opposed to a pardon. “We can’t offer Ghislaine Maxwell anything,” he said. “A, I don’t know why we would. And B, if we give Ghislaine Maxwell any sort of break whatsoever and then she turns around and says nice things about us, or says nice things about us and we give her a break, it will undermine the entire point of her saying good things. That will feed the conspiracy theory, period. If there’s nothing for her to say that hurts us, we shouldn’t have to offer her anything.”
….
Suddenly, one of the officials in the Situation Room raised the subject of a disturbing but uncorroborated accusation against Trump that had come to light in unsealed filings from a 2015 defamation case brought by Virginia Giuffre against Maxwell, which had been settled two years later. The secondhand accusation, alleging a specific type of sexual abuse, was the perfect example of something that would show up on the public website and put the spotlight on Trump, whether it was true or not….
In the emails, Ransome claimed that she knew a girl in Epstein’s sex-trafficking ring named Jen, who said she had sex with Trump. Ransome also claimed that Jen had told her that Trump had a predilection for nipples and that he had aggressively flicked and sucked hers. Ransome wrote that she had seen evidence when she shared a bathroom with Jen. “They looked incredibly painful as they were red and swollen and I remember wincing when I looked at them,” she wrote.
Ransome’s credibility was not uncomplicated; she had made another claim that she possessed video footage of prominent men having sex with young girls in Epstein’s entourage. She later retracted the claims, saying she feared for herself and her family if she proceeded. But after a federal judge ordered the unsealing of some of the Giuffre case files in 2023, the document that connected Trump to the claim about abused nipples was among the material that came out. It was an unconfirmed allegation and had not been made publicly, but the disclosure led to some articles that were quickly lost in the swirl of election-year news.
Some of Trump’s advisers in the Situation Room had never heard of the nipple claim; those who had seemed to have only a passing familiarity with it. Many in the room thought this was all just discredited nonsense. But it might not matter. The Ransome emails could get new attention if they were included in a “public-facing and searchable” Epstein library that carried the branding of the Justice Department.
— 📎 Otto Von Danger (@ottovondanger.bsky.social) June 13, 2026 at 11:19 AM
If the Epstein files are a “hoax,” why did the response require the Situation Room?
— 💙Beebs (@blue-rosary52.bsky.social) June 14, 2026 at 3:27 PM
