Epstein Files Cover-up Explodes! Ari Melber on WHY Trump is hiding 95% of docs, risk of Nixon spiral

The Trump administration is engaged in an illegal cover-up of the Epstein files. That is news. That was not the case until Friday when they blatantly blew through the deadline. The evidence we have for the administration, the DOJ, hiding documents, playing games and cover-up with documents, and holding back the majority of the documents that exist, the evidence is from the DOJ themselves, which shows that if this is a type of cover-up or strategy, it is already a bungled one. That's often the case with cover-ups. I'm

going to walk through what comes next in this video and why we are in a new chapter in this long-running story, because until Friday, the debate over Epstein transparency was one of opinion and ideas and what people thought was best. Now there's an actual law and the deadline has been blown through. So we are into illegal cover-up territory, Nixon territory. I'm Ari Mober, a lawyer and journalist, covering this and other issues.

This video is going to go through where we go as we start the new week and have a lot more information. Let's start with why this is so bad for the Trump DOJ. This is not a situation which happens in court sometimes where you get close to something but you don't get the full, you don't meet the full obligations. That could happen in civil or criminal court. It could happen when you're dealing with the government and you say, hey we're 90% there, we're trying

to comply, and you basically deal with the other side and a judge over that. This is a situation where Pam Bondi, the Attorney General, was caught lying about the Epstein files and now is not really involved directly publicly. She's not even claiming to be overseeing this, which is her job. She's been thrown under the bus by the chief of staff and others and her deputy, Todd Blanche, the president's former criminal defense attorney, has taken center stage. He's the guy you see on TV doing interviews, he went on Fox Friday, he's the guy actually sending the letter out to Congress explaining what they've done. And so Blanche has boxed himself in. He

doesn't have a ton of experience with this kind of complex government congressional litigation. He has other experience and people can debate how good of a criminal defense attorney he is. But by coming out on Friday and admitting they're blowing through the deadline while then putting forward a letter that claims they're complying, he sort of tried to have it both ways but protect himself for litigation

or other challenges he may expect, where they say, did you even try to comply, and he has a letter claiming he did. But then the evidence doesn't really work for him, and that matters because he's dealing with both parties in Congress, the victims, advocates, lawyers, who are going to put what he says through the grinder and test it. And so remember, he claimed they were releasing all this material.

A lot of it was old. The new material was about 4,000 documents. He also admits and says there's over 100,000 documents to come. So what they released is about 5% or less of the files. That is nowhere near complying. And it raises the question, why would they so blatantly fail to comply?

And admit it. Admit that it's only 5%. And I'll give you some possible answers. But that's fact number one. This is 5%. Not 90 or 70 or some debatable amount. Number two is, he's provided other information that if if he's exaggerating or minimizing that'll be tested but on his own information it doesn't add up and this is why cover-ups can become a jumble of

claims that get people in trouble. People in government maybe gets his boss or his boss's boss in trouble which goes all the way to President Trump. And here's what I'll say because I've studied all the documents. Blanche claims that they have 200 attorneys in the DOJ working on this. And these aren't first year junior attorneys to be a DOJ attorney. You have some experience. That's a lot. But he released about 4,000 documents. And they had a month under the law, and we know from reporting in FOIA, Freedom of Information Requests, they've

been working on reviewing this earlier than that. So if you take Blanchett as word, these 200 attorneys spent a month looking at these documents and could only put out 3,900 roughly with some redactions. Well, that means each attorney would have worked on 20 documents over the whole month or less than one document a day. When I say documents, I'm just using everything which is the most fair, open standard. That includes a photo they released of Epstein in a row, which doesn't need any redactions. You could look at it for 10 minutes or an hour. You could double check things, but at

the end of the day, that's one file. That counts for one item. And it would be less than one item a day for 200 attorneys to turn this out. So that brings you to the next inference, that these attorneys were not working full-time on actually complying with the law. Whatever they were doing, maybe you say, okay, Ari, maybe they did comply

and they reviewed a bunch of material but they didn't release it. Well, that's part of the same problem because they've blown through the legal deadline. So if material was ready and they didn't release it, that violates the law. And if material wasn't ready, then they're completely incompetent or defying the law, which is not okay for the Justice Department.

So that's where we're at just on the DOJ side. I want to turn and talk a little bit about what we know about this kind of cover-up, which it clearly is, again, by the evidence we have. And so this is gonna be part two of my breakdown. I kind of sometimes go into more depth here in these videos. I also of course do other reporting interviews on TV. You can always subscribe here on YouTube

if you wanna get what may be deeper in the weed stuff, which sometimes is interesting, and other times you say, five minutes, I got it, move on to the next video. But here's where we turn to. Why would you bungle a cover-up this way? Why would you approach it this way? What are they up to? And I think on the outside sometimes when we review and look at these developments we

say, as the public, we sometimes feel like, well, they must have another plan after this. They must have some evolved strategy. And in real time, who knows? But when you learn from history, and history they say it doesn't always repeat itself, but it rhymes or it echoes. In Watergate they said the cover-up was worse than the crime. Here the crimes of Epstein and Maxwell, sex traffickers, are horrific, some of the worst crimes imaginable. So maybe the cover-up isn't quote worse than the crime in a legal sense, maybe it's equal or almost as bad. But the reason why they have that saying and why there are charges of obstruction of justice, which every prosecutor uses, is because it is common, indeed it is one of

the most common reactions, when people are in trouble to do the cover-up. There are many obvious reasons for that. I mean, as a lawyer, and I once interned in the public defender's office in Manhattan, where you see a lot of street-level crimes, someone who's already gone down that road doesn't just reverse. Sometimes they say, okay, let me just get away. Sophisticated people, rich people, lawyers, people doing tax evasion, they go down that road and then sometimes say, well, I'm already in this deep, can I get out? And so with government malfeasance, it's a different thing. The first obvious

reason being the government has more power. They're usually the one prosecuting the crimes. But in the Nixon era, we saw what Bill Kristol and others recently reminded everyone in terms of the known history, which was what they call a limited hangout. That's where you're under pressure, that people are asking for something, giving them literally nothing doesn't work, so you give them a little bit and hope that satisfies them. That's a common thing you see in non-government context. Sometimes it's when someone doesn't want to do a full proffer and cooperate, but they sort of try to tell the government something.

It doesn't usually work very well. Now in this case, it's clearly a cover-up. I just got a call, like I see it, I showed you the evidence. History is full of cover-ups that worked for a while in the sense that they took time and tried to run out of clock and then eventually failed in the sense that they blew up, got people in trouble. In the Nixon case, the president was dislodged from office. That was a very different time. Maybe that wouldn't happen now in modern times. I'm not even speaking about

the current president, just in general. The Attorney General at that time went to jail. Other people got a lot of trouble. I've interviewed people from that era. That's one example of a cover-up that completely blew up. You can come up with other examples where things worked. Malfeasance worked. Obstruction works. I referenced the John Gotti case, which is a little bit famous, where because they did a cover-up obstruction and jury tampering, he got off. And people said, oh my god, how did he get off when there was so much evidence. So you could say that the cover-up crime in that case worked if you're a student of that true crime story. In

the end, God, he still got busted and there's the reality shows and everything since then. So what I want to emphasize here is as we look at this and say, well, do they really think they're gonna get away with it? They're gonna drag out these disclosures. What's the plan? History suggests that sometimes the plan is first give very little or in their case they may have given things on Friday disclosure that they think isn't a problem for the Trump administration, things that they think go more towards their opponents,

although the law doesn't care who is embarrassed. The law demands all material. But then they might turn to something that looks a little bit bad for some of one on their side of their friends and then they'll drag it out further. The Congress is now talking about taking them to court or contempt. That takes time. So if they look at it like some sort of business deal where you're negotiating and you start by offering very little and then over time you offer a little more and then you hope that the other side says, oh well that's something and you never actually have to give up all right they may have that view of it they may also do what Donald Trump did remember to not

just go all the way back to Nixon but I covered the cases that Jack Smith brought I was in the courtroom in DC watching them toe-to-toe with interestingly Todd Blanche who at the time was the defense attorney now is the person I mentioned number two at DOJ the way history works I covered that case and Jack Smith was an excellent prosecutor. He brought a case against Democrat John Edwards.

He obviously brought these two Trump cases. He'd been at the Hague. He brought a traditional evidence-driven case. He ran up against the Trump tactics which mix courtroom efforts like delay with out-of-court efforts like all the people that Trump would bring in politically to try to muddy it, to try to sort of work the system. And by the way

unlike say the January 6 crimes or other things Donald Trump and his team trying to work the system every which way was lawful there was not a known crime in doing that. But a lot of it worked if you remember they dragged out the clock on that to the point that even as bad stuff came out if you are a patriotic American You probably think that trying to overthrow an election is bad

Who cares what what side you voted for or that attacking cops viciously like all those Jan six convicts it is bad And what came out was how much Trump had been working behind the scenes secretly to do more Jan six stuff and at the time people Said that's unfair. Don't try to tie him to all of it. Well, fast forward, he freed all those people, including the people who did sedition and attacked the cops.

So he tied himself to all of it very clearly throughout. But my point is that even as some of that stuff came out that looked bad, their tactic of running out the clock ultimately worked. If they had another election they hoped to win, had they lost, delay would not have necessarily helped him because he would have still gone on trial. But a lot of things can happen when you delay. And so the Nixon example is you give a little bit, you give even some stuff that might make some people

look bad but not the main person, in that case the president, and you see what happens. That failed for them in the long term. You also had an aggressive press, you had independent accounting, and famously at the time you had people in politics who drew a line. But that can change. We've seen Trump's Trump's whole Republican Party slip on this very issue, which is why there wasn't a single Republican in the Senate that would even help or delay the ultimate vote on the Epstein Transparency Act, which passed unanimously in the Senate. So again, that's those examples.

That's Nixon. If they continue to delay, though, they may find that by the middle of next year, they're in court, and they get some sort of split decision or see what happens there, and then they fight that out about what they have to give up from the Epstein files.

And by that time, people feel that some stuff has come out and many months have gone by, and you go towards the midterms. My point as a legal reporter here is not to tell you that that's good or not. In general I would tell you that the best thing is to comply with the law. Duh. But that's part of what we're watching for. Does this go down more of the Nixon road? Limited hangout, lies, denials, people turn on each

other before you know it, it takes on a life of its own? Or does it look more like the strategy that none other than Todd Blanch executed for Trump in 24 and now Todd Blanch is executing this strategy as Bondi sort of fades away in 25 and 26? Following those details and learning from history I think matters because it helps us understand what otherwise can seem completely absurd, like hard to even fathom what they're doing.

They ran on Epstein transparency in 24. They dragged this out all year. Then they lost that big clash, dragging out the loss, signed the law, and now here we are in December, and they're giving up so little, 5%, that it's clearly gonna be dragged out in January. If you're a citizen or a person who cares, remember there are people, and this is something

I talk about here when I have more time to do these on YouTube, there are people who want you to give up or want you to look up at the deadline and see that they seem like they're getting away with it. But it was public pressure that also got us here. And that's how democracies actually work. It's become somewhat, I don't know, trendy to be cynical about everything, kind of like when you look at something

online and people say immediately, is that real or is it fake or is it AI? That whole mood and I get it. But they're on the run and they're figuring it out as they go. The Attorney General has already had to step back.

The Deputy Attorney General now is caught in what I described as a bunch of admissions of breaking the federal law here, which is not good. And a heck of a lot of people are still demanding the files. So that's where we're headed. Again, Ari Melber. Subscribe if you're files. So that's where we're headed. Again, Ari Melber. Subscribe if you're interested in these updates. Stay informed.