BROOKINGS INSTITUTION SUDDENLY GETTING COLD FEET: No, Don’t Release the Epstein Files.

All of a sudden, it seems like everyone is calling for the release of the Epstein files. The MAGA movement is angry at President Trump and Attorney General Pam Bondi for not coming through for them and delivering the cabal of rich pedophiles who benefited from relationships with Epstein.

Democrats and other Trump opponents, smelling blood in the water, have joined the calls for transparency on the theory that they might hoist Trump and his attorney general on their own conspiracy-packed petard.

Allow me a moment’s dissent: Have you all lost your minds?

Should the FBI and the Justice Department release willy-nilly their investigative files into a major child-exploitation and human trafficking case involving a large number of victims—given that truly vile conduct directed at them, and an untold number of witnesses who may be wholly innocent of wrongdoing, is likely to be unleashed?

The question answers itself.

For one thing, at least some of the information in the so-called Epstein files is likely grand jury information—that is, information protected by Rule 6(e) of the Federal Rules of Criminal Procedure—or otherwise protected by court seals. It is illegal to release this material. It’s not a choice the attorney general gets to make: Should I dump all this information into the public domain? She can’t. She shouldn’t. And if she does, she should go to jail.

Attorney General Bondi should resign if she was lying when she declared that she had Epstein’s client list on her desk—something the FBI now says does not exist. If she simply misspoke, she did so recklessly and stupidly and should probably resign anyway. But the solution is not a data dump of material, much of which is properly protected by federal law.

Even among the materials that are not protected by court seals, the Epstein files necessarily contain a wide range of information about victims. Are people seriously calling for this material to be dumped into the public’s hands?

Flashback to Julie Kelly in 2020: Brookings Institution: A Key Collusion Collaborator.

Related: Matt Tiabbi asks, “Do we want to know how the world really works, or is it too disgusting to countenance?” The Epstein Circus Will Shatter Our Last Delusions:

“Release all of the Epstein Files” was a siren call for the MSNOW set as recently as this weekend, but now that Trump has issued a statement calling for House Republicans to vote for their release because “we have nothing to hide,” everything is in play. The House Oversight Committee already started the avalanche with a series of releases that over the weekend had me answering TextEdit prompts like, “Are you sure you want to open 897 files?”

If you’re a Democrat, you’ve already seen the Trump lowlights: a 2011 email from Epstein saying of former Mar-a-Lago spa attendant Virginia Giuffre, “VICTIM spent hours at my house with him,” and this 2019 note to author Michael Wolff: “Of course [Trump] knew about the girls.” There are mitigating docs with both issues (Giuffre, another suicide from earlier this year, wrote Trump “couldn’t have been friendlier” in a posthumously published memoir). Still, Pam Bondi’s Epstein files pirouette earlier this year never made sense and has been driving intramural MAGA turmoil since, with Marjorie Taylor Greene now railing against the idea that “rich, powerful people should be protected.” For an administration that’s done well sending roaches scurrying in the FBI, CIA, and DHS via Russiagate and Covid investigations, Epstein stands out as an unforced error. If it’s not dirt on Trump himself, and administration sources insist it isn’t, what’s the holdup?

Democratic Party hysteria over this issue is obviously absurd because “all of the Epstein files” could have been released over the last four years. There must be reasons why the last administration didn’t take that step, and there should be scandal in MAGA-world if those reasons overlap at all with the Trump administration’s. Between Epstein’s own hysterical rants about Trump in the newly released documents (he sounds like Kathy Griffin in some of the emails) and the blue party’s seeming entanglement with Epstein from the Clintons to Larry Summers to Reid Hoffman, it’s hard to imagine where that overlap might be, unless it involves major corporate names and/or overseas relationships. Some of that is suggested in [Dem Virgin Islands delegate Stacey Plaskett’s] story.

Faster, please.