On Feb. 27, 2025, fifteen online MAGA influencers walked out of the West Wing holding white binders stamped “The Epstein Files: Phase 1.” Rogan O’Handley, AKA “DC Draino,” held his high for the cameras. Liz Wheeler went live on X and flipped through the pages. Jessica Reed Kraus described the scene as though she’d been handed the Pentagon Papers. Attorney General Pam Bondi had personally delivered the documents, with President Donald Trump and FBI Director Kash Patel in attendance.
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It was terrific political theater, but aged terribly. The binders contained flight logs and address book pages already in the public domain. Wheeler admitted on her livestream that the files contained nothing new. By July, the DOJ released a memo acknowledging that Epstein did not maintain a “client list,” the very document Bondi had suggested was sitting on her desk. Patel told the House that no investigative leads warranted further action. Elon Musk posted clown-makeup memes mocking Bondi. Laura Loomer called for her resignation. The MAGA faithful felt betrayed. Trump took to Truth Social to call the whole thing a “Witch Hunt” and urged everyone to move on.
This is crucial context for what happened next, because it was into this void of broken promises that progressives eagerly rushed, driven by the same paranoid certainty that motivated the very conspiracy theorists they’d spent years mocking. Yet they emerged with no better information than those they ridiculed had.
