The FBI burned through about $850,000 in overtime paying agents to grind through Jeffrey Epstein related files and black out the names of powerful men, including Donald trump, under what the bureau and White House insist is a “privacy” review for a man who just happens to be the sitting president. It is the kind of inside game that turns “transparency” into a punch line. Voters were promised sunlight and instead got a taxpayer funded Sharpie party.
What has come out so far is that trump’s name appears throughout the Epstein materials and that an FBI review team was specifically instructed to flag and redact references to him along with other elite figures. That might technically fit within privacy rules, but in the real world it looks a lot like the system bending over backward to spare one very famous man embarrassment. When the government is working overtime to erase the president from the record, people are not crazy to wonder what is being protected.
trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in November, starting a 30 day clock that runs out in mid December, even though he has always had the power to push for a full release on his own. Instead of dumping everything months ago, his administration slow walked, stonewalled, and let the lawyers and redactors eat up time and money. For someone who keeps insisting he has nothing to hide, he is acting like a man fighting the calendar, not welcoming the truth.
