Three million pages still withheld. A federal judge overruled. Survivors thrown out of a party convention. And a French prosecutor doing the work the American Justice Department will not. What Epstein tells us about how this White House defines “leadership.”
Ten months after President Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act — the bill he had spent the previous summer denouncing as a “hoax” before reversing under overwhelming bipartisan pressure — the promise embedded in that signature has been broken by every measure that matters. The Justice Department has released roughly half of what the law required. It has heavily redacted much of what it did release. It has appealed a federal judge’s order to disclose more. It has invoked privilege to shield the President from congressional questioning. And in the same week that French prosecutors announced they had identified thirteen additional trafficking victims and new suspected recruiters, security guards at the Republican midterm convention in Dallas escorted three of Jeffrey Epstein’s American survivors out of the American Airlines Center for the offense of standing near a journalist who asked a candidate about the files. This is not a story about paperwork. It is a story about who the state is willing to protect and who it is willing to sacrifice — and about a President whose reflex, at every turn, has been to bury a scandal in which his own name reportedly appears more than a million times.
I. France Does the Work Washington Won’t
While the Trump administration has fought in federal court to keep the files sealed, French investigators have gone the other direction. On Thursday, Paris’s chief prosecutor Laure Beccuau announced that her office has now identified twenty-six potential victims in the French strand of the Epstein trafficking case — thirteen of whom had never appeared in any earlier proceeding — and that investigators have obtained the names of additional suspected recruiters that they are not yet ready to make public.
Beccuau opened the French probe last winter after the U.S. Justice Department dumped more than three million pages of files under compulsion from Congress. Her team has since pulled Epstein’s computers, phone records, and address books back into evidence, and, per her radio interview with France Inter, is now pursuing leads across New York, Cannes, Saint-Tropez, and Paris. She has described Epstein’s network as “labyrinthine” — “not just a single Ariadne’s thread you have to pull on; it’s dozens and dozens of threads.”
The contrast with the American posture is not subtle. In February, French police raided the Arab World Institute as part of a probe into former French Culture Minister Jack Lang and his daughter over alleged Epstein-linked tax fraud and offshore funds. In July, French modeling scout Daniel Siad — an alleged Epstein recruiter — was found dead at his home near Paris before investigators could formally question him. Beccuau announced the expanded probe anyway. Her office is moving forward. The Trump Department of Justice, meanwhile, is fighting a federal appeals court to keep its own redactions in place.
France · September 2026
26 potential victims identified by Paris prosecutor Laure Beccuau. 13 of them appear in no earlier proceeding. New recruiter names obtained but not yet public.
France · July 2026
Alleged Epstein recruiter Daniel Siad found dead near Paris before investigators could formally question him. Probe continues undeterred.
France · February 2026
Police raid the Arab World Institute over alleged Epstein-linked financial ties to former French Culture Minister Jack Lang and his daughter.
United States · Ongoing
DOJ files a “protective notice of appeal” on August 24 to block Judge Sullivan’s order to remove redactions from key documents.
II. The Convention That Ejected the Survivors
On the afternoon of September 10, three women who survived Jeffrey Epstein’s trafficking network — Sharlene Rochard, Marijke Chartouni, and Charleen Richard — passed through security at the American Airlines Center in Dallas, credentialed guests of independent journalist Tara Palmeri. They carried no signs. They did not chant. They were in town to attend a traveling exhibit called “The Donald J. Trump and Jeffrey Epstein Memorial Reading Room,” and they had decided, on their own, to see what the President’s midterm convention looked like from the inside.
They were inside for thirty-five minutes. After Palmeri interviewed Robert Burke — a Republican candidate for Massachusetts’s Eighth Congressional District — and asked him about his position on the Epstein Files Transparency Act II, convention security appeared. Credentials were revoked. Palmeri says she was told she could be arrested for trespassing if she attempted to return. The survivors were escorted out with her.
“This is not red or blue. What we are fighting for crosses all lines, and it’s not fair that we were asked to leave for no apparent reason.”
— Marijke Chartouni, Epstein survivor, September 11, 2026
Chartouni said afterward that she and the others were treated “like criminals” despite having done nothing wrong. Fellow survivor Rochard said the group had been trying to “fit in,” not to embarrass anyone. The Republican National Committee did not respond to requests for comment on why women who survived the worst sex-trafficking scandal of the century were unwelcome at a convention where the sitting President — a man documented on Epstein’s flight logs as flying on the financier’s private jet at least seven times — headlined both nights.
The Reading Room exhibit itself became a magnet for state-level Democrats who traveled to Dallas to meet with survivors: state Representative James Talarico and gubernatorial candidate Gina Hinojosa both toured, meeting with survivors and their families. Texas Attorney General Ken Paxton, whom the survivors publicly invited to attend, did not come.
III. The State That Wouldn’t Back Down
The most consequential legal pressure on the Trump administration right now is not coming from Congress. It is coming from Santa Fe.
New Mexico Attorney General Raúl Torrez — after his office reopened its long-dormant investigation into Epstein’s 7,600-acre Zorro Ranch south of Santa Fe — asked the U.S. Justice Department for unredacted federal investigative files necessary to a state trafficking prosecution. On August 5, having been stonewalled, he filed a federal lawsuit against Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche and the DOJ in the U.S. District Court for the District of Columbia.
The complaint alleges something extraordinary: that in 2019, the federal government asked New Mexico to stand down its own trafficking investigation and promised in exchange to pass back evidence of state crimes. New Mexico complied, handed over its full investigative file, and — according to the state — nothing ever came back. Now the same federal government is refusing to hand over unredacted materials that the state needs to pursue crimes committed within its own borders.
The Zorro Ranch investigation is running on parallel tracks. On March 9, 2026, state investigators — assisted by New Mexico State Police and the Sandoval County Sheriff’s Office — conducted the first search of the property since Epstein’s death. In February, the New Mexico House unanimously created a bipartisan “Truth Commission” chaired by state Representative Andrea Romero, which released its first interim report on August 5. As Romero put it: “In the seven years since Jeffrey Epstein died, in the two decades since his crimes first drew attention of law enforcement, no government, federal, state, or local, has ever compiled an account of what he did in New Mexico.” That accounting is finally being done — not by the Justice Department, but in spite of it.
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IV. The Bill Trump’s DOJ Made Necessary
The Epstein Files Transparency Act, signed by Trump on November 19, 2025, required the DOJ to make public — in a searchable, downloadable format — every unclassified record, communication, and investigative material relating to Jeffrey Epstein by December 19, 2025. The DOJ missed that deadline. It has, in the ten months since, released roughly three million pages of what its own review identified as more than six million potentially responsive pages, meaning the government has withheld an estimated three million additional pages from the American public.
Even the material the DOJ has released has been so heavily redacted that Representative Jamie Raskin, after viewing the unredacted versions in the secure DOJ reading room, told Axios that when he searched the files for the President’s name, it appeared “more than a million times.” Raskin called what he saw “gruesome and grim” and accused the department of running a cover-up designed to hide Trump’s relationship with the convicted sex offender.
On July 15, 2026, Representative Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) — joined by Representative Ro Khanna (D-Calif.), Representative Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.) as chair of the Democratic Women’s Caucus, and Senators Jeff Merkley (D-Ore.) and Ben Ray Luján (D-N.M.) in the upper chamber — introduced H.R. 9694, the Epstein Files Transparency Act II. The bill adds the enforcement mechanism the original law lacked: it grants standing to Epstein survivors, state attorneys general, district attorneys, and members of Congress to sue the U.S. Attorney General directly for failure to comply with the disclosure requirements.
“Todd Blanche and the Department of Justice have refused to release as many as three million Epstein files: they are hiding the truth from the American people and creating even more injustice and trauma for survivors. When Trump’s administration does not comply with the law, there must be consequences.”
— Rep. Teresa Leger Fernández (D-N.M.), Chair, Democratic Women’s Caucus
Massie has since moved to force a floor vote through a discharge petition, and as of last week he had gathered 106 signatures — needing four Republican defections to reach the 218-signature threshold.
V. What the Administration Is Actually Doing to Block Release
Strip away the White House talking points and a specific pattern emerges. It is not a story of good-faith delay. It is a story of a Justice Department transformed into a shield for the President personally.
The pattern is not ambiguous. When Congress passed a law, the DOJ ignored the deadline. When a journalist sued to enforce it, the DOJ resisted discovery. When a federal judge ordered compliance, the DOJ appealed. When a state attorney general demanded evidence for his own prosecution, the DOJ stonewalled. When the former Attorney General was asked under oath whether the President had personally directed any of it, she refused to answer. And when the current President was asked, in July, whether he had told Bondi to bury the material — he called the question a “hoax” and moved on.
Meanwhile, the President ordered Bondi to investigate Democrats’ ties to Epstein — an order she publicly acknowledged receiving, even as she refused to say anything at all about the ones concerning him.
A President who obstructs a trafficking investigation into himself is a President who cannot be said to be “discharging the powers and duties of his office.”
The Twenty-Fifth Amendment, ratified in 1967 in the shadow of Kennedy’s assassination, has four sections. The one that matters here is Section 4: it authorizes the Vice President, together with a majority of the Cabinet — or such other body as Congress may by law provide — to transmit to Congress a written declaration that the President is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office. Upon that declaration, the Vice President immediately assumes those powers as Acting President. It exists precisely because the Framers of the amendment understood that a Constitution silent on incapacity is a Constitution that dies with the first President who becomes unfit.
Representative Jamie Raskin (D-Md.) has been the loudest voice invoking it. In April, following Trump’s public demand to “Open the F—-ing Strait” of Hormuz and his threat to “kill Iran’s whole civilization,” Raskin wrote to White House physician Sean Barbabella demanding a formal cognitive assessment. In September, following an all-day AI-generated posting spree, the President’s own niece — Mary L. Trump, a clinical psychologist — publicly called for the amendment’s invocation, writing that “Donald is decompensating in real time.” Former Trump White House counsel Ty Cobb has said the Cabinet “will not invoke the 25th Amendment for a man who is clearly insane.”
The specific relevance to Epstein is not that the President’s conduct in this scandal proves clinical unfitness. It is that his conduct proves a categorical inability to discharge the powers of the office in the constitutional sense — because he cannot separate the office from himself. A president who uses the Justice Department to bury an investigation in which he is a named subject, and who orders that same department to investigate his political opponents on the same underlying facts, is not exercising the executive power. He is converting it to personal use. That is the definition of an executive who is functionally incapable of executing the laws.
The practical barriers are real. Section 4 requires either Vice President J.D. Vance and a Cabinet majority — none of whom will move against the President who appointed them — or an act of Congress creating an alternative body. Congressional Republicans control both chambers and have shown no appetite. Raskin has argued that the amendment’s “such other body as Congress may by law provide” clause is precisely the vehicle Democrats should be preparing to use in a future Congress.
The barriers do not negate the constitutional case. They describe the political failure of the current Congress to enforce it. And the moral case — that a President who instructs the Attorney General to shield him from a child-trafficking investigation has forfeited any legitimate claim to the powers of the presidency — does not become weaker because Republican senators refuse to hear it. It becomes more urgent.
VI. What This Says About the Leadership of This Country
A President’s priorities are legible in what his administration does when it thinks no one is looking. In the case of the Epstein files, the Trump administration has been asked, over and over, to do the simple thing the law requires. It has instead: withheld half the files, appealed to keep them withheld, invoked privilege to protect the President from questions about his role, refused to share unredacted materials with a state trying to prosecute traffickers, thrown survivors out of a political convention for the crime of being present, and installed the President’s personal defense lawyer as Acting Attorney General to oversee the entire operation.
Set that record next to the record of the French Republic, which has no President to protect and is therefore free to follow the evidence. Set it next to the record of the New Mexico Department of Justice, which is spending state resources to sue the federal government for the files it needs to prosecute crimes committed on American soil. Set it next to the record of the four lawmakers — Massie, Khanna, Merkley, Luján — who spent a year writing a law, then spent another year writing a second law to enforce the first, because the President they made sign the first one refused to obey it.
What that comparison shows is not merely that the President has bad politics. It is that the government of the United States, under this President, has stopped being able to hold its own institutions accountable when the accountability points inward. Every functional arm of American oversight in the Epstein scandal — the federal judiciary, the state attorneys general, the bipartisan bill sponsors, the survivors themselves — is now working around the Executive Branch, not through it. That is not leadership. That is an obstruction that has metastasized into the operating logic of the presidency.
Editorial Conclusion
A President who uses the Department of Justice to shield himself from a sex-trafficking investigation is not exercising the powers of his office — he is stealing them. The Epstein files were never just about Jeffrey Epstein. They are the test case for whether a sitting American president can be personally investigated by his own government at all. So far, this presidency’s answer has been no. The French have identified twenty-six victims. New Mexico has sued to see the evidence. Congress has written a second law to force the first one to work. And the survivors — the ones this whole edifice is supposedly built to protect — were told, in Dallas, that they were not welcome in the President’s tent. That is the moral state of this leadership. The Constitution provides a mechanism for what to do when a President cannot discharge his office. This one cannot. The question is whether we still have a Congress willing to say so.
Sources & References
- Congress.gov — H.R. 4405, Epstein Files Transparency Act, Text
- Congress.gov / GovInfo — H.R. 9694, Epstein Files Transparency Act II, Introduced Text
- Sen. Jeff Merkley — Massie, Khanna, Leger Fernández, Merkley, Luján Introduce the Epstein Files Transparency Act II
- Rep. Ro Khanna — Press Release on H.R. 9694
- Common Dreams — Massie and Khanna Push Second Epstein Transparency Act to Fight Trump DOJ Violations
- France 24 — Around 10 ‘new’ victims come forward in France’s Epstein investigation
- IBTimes UK — France Uncovers New Epstein Potential ‘Recruiters’ After Modeling Scout Found Dead
- Al Jazeera — France listening to 10 ‘new’ suspected victims of Epstein: Prosecutor
- Euronews — French prosecutors widen Epstein probe with raid on Jack Lang’s former institute
- The New Republic — Epstein Survivors Got Kicked Out of the Republican Midterm Convention
- The Daily Beast — Epstein Survivors Booted From Trump’s Midterm Convention
- Tara Palmeri (The Red Letter) — I Asked a Republican Candidate About Epstein. Then the RNC Revoked My Press Credential.
- KERA News — Jeffrey Epstein an unwelcome presence as Trump critics protest GOP midterm convention
- New Mexico DOJ — New Mexico Sues DOJ For Blocking Access to Unredacted Epstein Files in Zorro Ranch Probe
- CNN — Investigations into Epstein’s New Mexico ranch add pressure on Justice Department
- Source New Mexico — New Mexico Epstein Truth Commission Releases Interim Report
- ABC News — Judge orders DOJ to turn over some unredacted Epstein files
- IBTimes UK — Trump DOJ Fights Appeals Court To Keep Key Redactions Secret in Epstein Files
- ABC News — Bondi invoked privilege, declined to answer questions about Trump on Epstein files
- Heather Cox Richardson — February 10, 2026 — On Raskin, the reading room, and one million mentions
- Newsweek — 106 Lawmakers Sign Petition to Make DOJ Release More Files
- Rep. Jamie Raskin — Letter to White House Physician Barbabella on 25th Amendment Assessment
- IBTimes UK — Trump Is ‘Decompensating in Real Time,’ Niece Claims as She Calls for 25th Amendment
- DOJ Epstein Library — Official DOJ Epstein Disclosure Page (Updated Sept. 11, 2026)
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