Just like that, the shutdown is over. Six Democrats crossed the aisle to help House Republicans get a stopgap bill funding the government over the finish line yesterday evening, and Trump signed it at once last night. “This was an easy extension, but they didn’t want to do it the easy way,” the president grumped at Democrats as he signed it. “They wanted to do it the hard way.”

Democrats didn’t get the concession they wanted to renew expiring Obamacare subsidies, but the Senate will hold a standalone vote on that issue next month. Meanwhile, Congress now has two and a half months until we’re back in the same place of shutdown danger again. Happy Thursday.

Where There’s Smoke…

by Andrew Egger

All through this year’s resurgence of the Epstein saga, I’ve repeated one mantra: Trump acting guilty is not necessarily proof of guilt.

Ordinarily, a person who responds to serious accusations by telling colossal, ridiculous lies, trying frantically to change the subject, demanding an end to all inquiries, and trying to obstruct all investigation into the matter is all but telling you that those accusations are true. But that’s less helpful with Trump. He does that sort of thing all the time. Lying and obstructing are as easy and routine to him as breathing. You’ve got to watch out for false positives.

But I have to admit: My resolve in this department is starting to crack. Because as astonishing revelations about Trump’s relationship with Epstein keep piling up, a few simple facts keep getting clearer. Trump has never given and still cannot give a satisfactory account of his friendship with the late sexual predator, about which he continues to tell the most brazen lies. His behavior toward the investigation, about which he has dropped all pretense of impartiality, has grown steadily more frantic. And he is now openly trying to bully individual Republican lawmakers into dropping their support for further Epstein file disclosures.

Yesterday, the House Oversight Committee released thousands of pages of Epstein’s partially redacted correspondence, subpoenaed from his estate. The emails are an embarrassment to a number of prominent people with whom Epstein rubbed elbows during his time in high society.¹

But the most remarkable correspondence concerns Trump. In a 2011 email, Epstein muses to his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell about how Trump has oddly not turned up as a figure in the sex-abuse investigations into him, calling the future president a “dog that hasn’t barked” despite the fact that one of Epstein’s victims “spent hours at my house with him.” And as Trump’s political career took off and his past ties to Epstein started to draw scrutiny, Epstein and writer Michael Wolff discussed by email the leverage Epstein might have over Trump as a result.

“I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff emailed Epstein of Trump in late 2015—in other words, lie about the extent of his and Epstein’s relationship. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency. You can hang him in a way that potentially generates a positive benefit for you, or, if it really looks like he could win, you could save him, generating a debt.”²

The White House response to these latest revelations was both unsurprising and remarkable in its audacity. Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt took to the briefing room to do her best Bagdhad Bob impression: “These emails prove absolutely nothing other than the fact that President Trump did nothing wrong.”

Meanwhile, with the swearing-in of Democratic Rep. Adelita Grijalva just hours away and her pivotal 218th signature on the House’s Epstein discharge petition imminent, Trump pulled out all the stops to try to get one of the Republican signatories to back down. Colorado Rep. Lauren Boebert was summoned to the White House, where she met with Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, and FBI Director Kash Patel (in the situation room, no less!). In a Truth Social post, Trump fumed about the “Jeffrey Epstein Hoax,” said it was a political deflection by Democrats, and warned that “only a very bad, or stupid, Republican would fall into that trap.” Boebert nevertheless declined to take her name off the discharge petition, which Grijalva signed last night. The House is expected to vote on it—at long last—next week.

This is no guarantee that the full Epstein files will ever see the light of day. The Senate could refuse to take the petition up or vote it down, and of course Trump could still veto it. But this remains a remarkable step forward. Every House Republican will soon be forced to go on record on a simple question: Which is more important to you, obeying Trump or achieving transparency about Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes? The more frantic Trump’s attempts to stonewall the investigation become, the less plausible the controlled-release files strategy pushed by his allies like Speaker Mike Johnson becomes. Only four Republicans signed the discharge petition. But quite a few more are expected to vote “yes” once the measure calling for the Epstein files to be released in full comes to a floor vote. How high that wave can crest will be illuminating.

And we shouldn’t lose sight of one more thing: Trump, at least, seems very much to believe there are still more damaging revelations to come. He wouldn’t have cranked up the pressure on Boebert and company yesterday if he thought the stuff we’d already seen was the worst of it. Whatever the high-water mark of this scandal is, we likely haven’t hit it yet.