On Thursday, another day of fury on the front lines of the crisis that has opened up for Donald Trump over the Epstein case ended for the President of the United States with a threat to sue the newspaper The Wall Street Journal and its owner, Rupert Murdoch, for the publication of a congratulatory letter from Trump to the millionaire pedophile on his 50th birthday. The Republican, who on Friday doubled down on his threats to the Australian media magnate, claims that the letter is fake.

Within minutes, Trump also called on his social media platform, Truth, for his attorney general, Pam Bondi, to release certain procedural documents. The president hopes this will calm the scandal unleashed by the Justice Department's decision to close the Epstein case, after the Trump administration spent months promising information that they now say is irrelevant and that has fueled conspiracy theories about the pedophile financier's life and death for years.

It seems unlikely that the documents Trump has authorized for release will be sufficient to satisfy the demands of the MAGA (Make America Great Again) movement, which is outraged by the administration's change of heart.

Trump has asked Bondi, “in light of the ridiculous amount of publicity given to Jeffrey Epstein,” to ask the judge for a warrant for all relevant “grand jury transcripts,” the president wrote in Truth. The attorney general responded to that request in X by saying, “President Trump. We are prepared to ask the court to release those transcripts tomorrow.”

As a candidate, Trump campaigned on the idea that he would release all the material authorities possessed regarding Epstein. Bondi then promised the MAGA movement for months that he would shed light on the shadows surrounding the case. A couple of Sundays ago, his Department of Justice published a document, also signed by the FBI, that debunked all the conspiracy theories surrounding the millionaire pedophile, concluding that the alleged list of rich and famous people who participated in his child trafficking network does not exist and that he committed suicide (i.e., no one killed him) in the Manhattan cell where he was awaiting trial in 2019.

The documents Bondi and Trump want to make public are from the first steps of the case's investigation. U.S. law provides for the use of a grand jury in certain cases. Comprised of a variable number of citizens, the prosecutor presents his arguments and the evidence he hopes will lead to a conviction, so they can decide whether or not it's worth continuing the case. This work is confidential, and in this matter, the victims' privacy is a priority.

Epstein skeptics expect much more than that: flight logs from his private jet, compromising materials from the case file - such as videos, photographs and audio recordings - or the black notebook with a supposed list of clients that would prove the existence of a global elite dedicated to trafficking minors and of which, six years later, there is still no conclusive evidence of its existence.

A surprise from Ghislaine Maxwell

The final straw for Trump, who has been trying for days to convince his followers to forget the matter, came with the publication of a 2003 letter, which Trump says is a fake, in the conservative newspaper The Wall Street Journal. It is a congratulations to Epstein on his 50th birthday. The Journal is owned by Murdoch, one of the people who has done the most, sometimes reluctantly and always through his television station, Fox News, to keep the Republican in power. This Friday, Trump said on Truth that he is looking forward to Murdoch testifying in the trial against him and “against the pile of shit at your newspaper.” “It will be an interesting experience!” he added.

Since it was a momentous occasion, Ghislaine Maxwell wanted to prepare a surprise for him and asked the honoree's friends to write affectionate texts. Maxwell was an associate and confidant of Epstein, and the two maintained a"close relationship" in the 1990s, according to the case summary, which ended with Maxwell being sentenced to 20 years in prison, which she is currently serving for procuring the minors the businessman abused. Trump, who was then a real estate magnate in New York, was one of the friends who participated in the surprise gift, according to the Journal.

The letter, the New York Times article says, “contains several lines of typed text framed by the silhouette of a naked woman, which appears hand-drawn with a thick marker.” A pair of small arches mark the woman’s breasts, and the future president’s signature is a scribble of ‘Donald’ below her waistline, mimicking female pubic hair. The text concludes: ‘Happy birthday, and may every day be another wonderful secret.’”

A year after that birthday, the two friends broke up after clashing over a Palm Beach property they both coveted. In 2019, the year of Epstein's death, Trump said they hadn't spoken for 15 years. In 2005, the businessman was accused by a minor of paying her for sex. In 2008, he pleaded guilty and avoided a severe prison sentence. A decade later, a Miami Herald investigation concluded that some 80 minors were abused by Epstein between 2001 and 2006, and the case was resurrected. It is the work of that second grand jury that could now come to light.

The Journal's own report already appears to Trump as saying that the letter is fake, and that he doesn't draw"women." This argument was repeated by the president and his spokeswoman, Karoline Leavitt, after the Journal's publication. Before Friday's new message, Trump released a Truth statement that night in which he said he had"directly warned" the New York newspaper and "personally warned Rupert Murdoch" that the letter was "FALSE and that if they published it, they would be sued."

In his message, strangely written in the third person despite coming from his personal account, Trump, or whoever wrote the text, recalls that he “has already defeated George Stephanopoulos/ABC, 60 Minutes/CBS and others” and that he “hopes to hold the once great Wall Street Journal accountable.” He was referring to the capitulation of the television networks ABC and CBS in recent months to Trump’s lawsuits. Both have agreed to pay him millions of dollars to appease him.

The message ends by emphasizing a strategy the president debuted on Wednesday: trying to bury one conspiracy theory with another, by blaming Democrats for the"Epstein hoax." More specifically,"[James] Comey, [former FBI director], [John] Brennan [CIA], corrupt Hillary [Clinton, the candidate who lost to him in 2016] and other radical left lunatics," because, if the letter were true, it would have been published"years ago."

“If there was a ‘smoking gun,’ why would the Democrats, who controlled the files for four years, and had [Attorney General Merrick] Garland and Comey in charge? BECAUSE THEY HAD NOTHING!!!” he wrote in Truth on Friday. The US president seems to have forgotten that he himself fired Comey in 2017, two years before Epstein’s death.

The argument that if his rivals had information to harm him, they would not have wasted it is the latest defensive and offensive strategy."Certainly, [the list] would not have remained filed away waiting for 'TRUMP' [sic] to win three elections," he had said in Truth the day before. While it remains to be determined whether the letter is true, as the Journal claims, or false, as the US president maintains, one thing is certain: the post ends with a lie. Trump did not win three times at the polls. Despite what he has been claiming for years, Joe Biden legitimately beat him in 2020.