Blondi booted, Blanche boosted, Jeffrey smiles

I had an item today in Unherd about the unceremonious sacking of Pam Bondi, our dearly-departed Attorney General, and the installation of Todd Blanche to that role in an acting capacity. Of course, I examine the development with a particular eye toward the “Epstein Files.” Remember those?

British etiquette standards apparently precluded me from referring to her as “Pam Blondi,” even though I was merely quoting the nickname once impolitely bestowed by the famed online bomb-thrower Laura Loomer. Laura, always a firecracker, was certainly not wrong when she complained that “Pam Blondi’s disastrous handling of the Epstein Files created a PR nightmare for the admin.”

My point, though, is that whatever outlandish incompetencies may have been characteristic of Blondi herself, culminating in Trump opting to fire her “like a dog” this week, the basic contours of the nutball controversy Laura was grousing about, and which has continuously “dogged” the Second Trump Administration — despite a detour over the past month for a “little excursion” to Iran — will never be fundamentally resolved with a simple personnel swap. Even if Blanche, the new Big Dog in town, does constitute an appreciable upgrade in the “bare-minimum competency” department. (I suspect Trump will eventually want to nominate Blanche for AG on a permanent basis.)

According to the WSJ, Trump had grown progressively “frustrated” that Blondi “didn’t do more to contain fallout from the DOJ’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigative files.” Well, OK. There were a handful of especially comical PR flops that might’ve been peculiar to Blondi, most notably the notorious Binders from Hell incident, in which a posse of right-wing “influencers” sauntered down to the White House and were presented with some dopey prop binders — the idea being they supposedly contained explosive new Epstein revelations. This was quickly discovered to be a total ruse; it was mostly just stuff anyone could’ve easily found on Google. (Which didn’t stop the dopey “influencers” from hoisting the binders over their heads like Superbowl trophies.) One of the lucky Bondi Binder recipients, an odd fellow named Mike Cernovich, continues to insist that he “never saw Pam Bondi as trying to do people dirty. I was there. The picture stuff was pure accident.” If so, it remains doubly odd that Cerno appeared to be trying to hide his face in the resultant photographs. But maybe we can chalk that up to another odd “accident.”

“I never saw the binders as a betrayal,” Cerno added. “Bondi was trying to do something good, but didn’t know the backstory.”

Aaaand… therein lies the problem. Yeah, Blondi was just as clueless as any Joe or Jane Schmo when it came to the larger Epstein issue. What little she did know seemed to stem mostly from her vague awareness that the right-wing social media id was highly exercised by the topic, and had built up a widespread expectation (thanks to hucksters on the podcast circuit, like the current FBI Director) that Trump and his Anti-Establishment™ Avengers Squad was going to triumphantly storm into office for the Big, Beautiful Second Term and vanquish the Deep State Pedos, by way of which, something called the “Epstein Client List” would be dramatically unveiled. And at long last, all those Demonic Child Rapin’ Democrats would get exposed, then frog-marched straight to the slammer.

This was always an impossibly braindead fantasy, but Blondi herself was in no position to dispel such algo-slop theories in any sort of cogent or articulate way. Because the political incentives circa the first year of Trump 2.0 all gravitated toward ostentatiously placating the right-wing social media masses — hence a Botched Binder Spectacle with hand-picked “influencers.”

Blondi lacked the intellect/acumen/cleverness to navigate these competing imperatives: to rein in the Wild Epstein Delusions that had long been stoked across the Trump-aligned media landscape, with numbskulls like Elon Musk leading the charge, while also somehow remaining in good standing with this all-important constituency. Because if they ever loudly revolt, the Based Right millennial staffers in the White House are going to be absurdly over-attuned to it, and the bad news will eventually reach the Big Guy. An impossible conundrum, even if Blondi was a majestic PR maestro. Which she clearly wasn’t. Hence, her shrill tactic of pivoting obnoxiously to “The Dow” at a Congressional hearing nominally focused on recent Epstein-related conduct of the DOJ — which predictably became an instant and decidedly unflattering “viral moment.” Because actually addressing the substance of Epstein mania, and refuting the overwrought public misconceptions flowing from it, would’ve created an even bigger political nightmare, even if it happened to be grounded in some approximate version of reality. But sadly, Blondi was too much of a ditz to thread that needle. She still might not be fluent enough in the relevant facts/evidence/arguments to convey a properly reality-based representation, even if she were inclined to do so.

Todd Blanche, on the other hand, has been thoroughly immersed in this mayhem for many months now, whether he’s liked it or not. And according to things I’ve heard through the grapevine, he is quite well-versed in the swirling phantasm that is “Epstein” — namely, how popular perceptions do not correlate much with reality. Based Blanche is definitely better at communicating than Blundering Bondi — which is why he’s already been on TV quite a bit in lieu of his ostensible superior. I’ve also heard his personal views are somewhere in the same ballpark as mine on certain facets of the “Epstein saga,” as he tellingly calls it. But does he have the stomach to actually drill down into specifics in any public-facing manner? Probably not. More likely, he’ll just be marginally more adept at changing the subject than Blondi was, and at lawyering his way out of tricky PR situations. Though that hasn’t worked out too well thus far, because he already got sandbagged with “so who did Epstein spy for????” questions last night, in his very first interview as acting AG, on Fox News of all places.

Speaking of the rampant cluelessness that has so dominated this fiasco, it’s amazing how clueless Thomas Massie still fundamentally is about the “Epstein Files” — even though it’s all he can ever talk about. There is perhaps nobody in Congress, apart from his loyal compatriot Ro Khanna, whom the media loves to amplify more these days. Massie went on the BBC last week and claimed melodramatically that important emails and memoranda from the 2006-2008 federal investigation of Epstein have still suspiciously not been released. Yo, Thomas — there is literally a gargantuan volume of exactly those records available right now in the public domain. I wrote about a bunch of them last summer, and a huge quantity of additional records have since been produced by the DOJ. I even took the liberty of showcasing a small cross-section of such “files” via handy short-form video, for those of you with limited attention spans:

Massie just doesn’t bother to actually read of any of this stuff. He’s not on the lookout for any genuine insights to be gleaned from the vaunted “files” he loves to pontificate about so relentlessly. Instead, he’s on a single-minded political mission to vindicate the peremptory suppositions he already made nine months ago, and which he’s shrewdly been leveraging into national political stardom. So why bother going through the actually-existing “Epstein Files”? Boring! Waste of time! After all, he’s got a Republican primary to win in Kentucky, and the Epstein Main Character Quest has generated lots of helpful donations to that end. Especially with Trump & Co. looking to get rid of him. (I’m planning on a “little excursion” myself to Kentucky next month to cover that race.) In the meantime, there’s simply no downside for this top Epstein Evangelist to demonstrate a grasp of the underlying source material which resembles, tellingly, that of a poorly-informed YouTube pundit.

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