I’ve got a sneaking suspicion that, somewhere in a makeshift situation room in Mar-a-Lago, there’s a whiteboard with “very high IQ strategies to distract everyone from Jeffrey Epstein” written on the top.

“Kidnap a foreign head of state” will have already been crossed off this hypothetical whiteboard. The capture of the Venezuelan president, Nicolás Maduro, dominated headlines for a while but it hasn’t stopped the ghost of Epstein from haunting Donald Trump.

All the chest-beating around annexing Greenland doesn’t seem to be doing much to memory-hole the Epstein files either. During a visit to a Ford plant in Michigan this week, Trump was heckled by an autoworker who reportedly called the president a “pedophile protector”. And Shawn Ryan, an influential podcaster, who supported Trump’s 2024 run, also publicly accused the president of “protecting pedophiles” by not fully releasing the Epstein files. “I voted to get these damn files released, and it’s like a total 180 just happened,” Ryan complained on a podcast released Thursday. Your first problem, sir, was ever believing a word the convicted felon said.

The newest plan to take the heat off Trump’s Epstein connection? Judging by recent events, it seems to be to try and make us all focus on the Clintons’ Epstein links instead.

While things escalated this week, the Trump administration has been slinging mud at Bill Clinton for a while. Which, to be fair, isn’t difficult to do, considering the Democratic former president’s personal history, and his well-documented ties with Epstein. The disgraced financier visited the White House at least 17 times during the early years of Clinton’s presidency. The pair also travelled together. However, Clinton maintains that (unlike several other powerful people) he cut ties with Epstein in 2005, before the sex offender pleaded guilty to solicitation of a minor in Florida. Clinton has never been formally accused of any wrongdoing in relation to Epstein.

The Trump administration, however, has done a lot of informal accusing. Last year the Department of Justice released a number of photos of Clinton alongside Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell. Karoline Leavitt, the press secretary, posted one photo on X in December with the caption........

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