AMY GOODMAN: In President Trump’s latest threat to journalists covering his administration and related scandals, he’s threatening to sue The Wall Street Journal after an article was published late Thursday that alleges Trump contributed a sketch drawing of a naked woman to a birthday album for serial sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein’s 50th birthday, compiled by Ghislaine Maxwell, now in prison for about 20 years. The paper did not publish the sketch, but described it as an outline of a naked woman with Trump’s signature scribbled below her waist in a way to mimic pubic hair. The sketch came with a typewritten note The Wall Street Journal called an “imaginary conversation between Trump and Epstein, written in the third person.” This is the note, quote:

“’Voice Over: There must be more to life than having everything,’ the note began.

Donald: Yes, there is, but I won’t tell you what it is.

Donald: A pal is a wonderful thing. Happy Birthday — and may every day be another wonderful secret,” unquote.

President Trump has denied he authored the message and is now calling the case the, quote, “Epstein hoax.” But amidst growing outrage among his MAGA base over the new allegations and their calls for the Department of Justice to release more Epstein files, President Trump said he’s directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to seek the release of grand jury testimony, which a judge would have to approve and would likely have little new information as only a partial set of pages from the massive amount of files that are called the Epstein files. On Thursday, White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was asked if Trump would appoint a special prosecutor in the Epstein case.

PRESS SECRETARY KAROLINE LEAVITT: Well, the idea was floated from someone in the media to the president. The president would not recommend a special prosecutor in the Epstein case. That’s how he feels. And as for his discussions with the attorney general, I’m not sure.

AMY GOODMAN: This comes after the Trump administration said Wednesday it had fired longtime U.S. Attorney Maurene Comey, who helped lead the successful prosecution of Jeffrey Epstein and his former girlfriend and accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. Maurene Comey is also the daughter of former FBI Director James Comey, who became a prominent critic of the president after Trump fired him in 2017.

Trump on Wednesday dismissed the Epstein story as “boring,” but said he backed the release of any “credible” documents. He later lashed out against members of this MAGA movement over demands he release the Epstein files, calling his own supporters “weaklings.”

For more, we’re joined by Asawin Suebsaeng, senior political reporter at Rolling Stone covering the modern American conservative movement and GOP. His newest pieces are headlined “Team Trump Was on 'F-cking Warpath' to Kill Story About Salacious Letter to Epstein” and “Inside Trump’s Frantic, Failing Mission to Crush the Epstein 'MAGA Rebellion.'”

Welcome to Democracy Now!, Swin. It’s great to have you with us from Cincinnati. Can you start off by explaining to people why the Epstein files have been so critical to the growth of the MAGA movement, have been so much a part of it, along — maybe as important as Trump’s allegation that the 2020 election was stolen?

ASAWIN SUEBSAENG: Well, since you mentioned his lies about the 2020 presidential election, isn’t it funny which conspiracy theories, rabid right-wing MAGAfied theories, in which lies from Donald Trump end up getting cemented into official federal government policy and Republican Party doctrine, and which ones are set aside as soon as they become sort of inconvenient for the dear leader? When it comes to his anti-democratic, authoritarian lies about elections and the 2020 election, across the federal government, in different departments, it is being cemented into actually policy and practice, the lie that the election was stolen from Donald Trump in 2020, and therefore something has to be done about it, and there are all these different crackdowns going on.

Now, when it comes to the far-right conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein, suddenly Donald Trump and his government, after saying for months that, to their supporters — not the American people specifically, but to their most MAGAfied, extremely online supporters — “We’re going to get this done. We’re going to do something about it,” suddenly they’re taking on a completely across-the-board, full-court-press, “nothing to see here, folks” attitude. It’s a stunning reversal, because for years some of the most prominent figures in the MAGA and also mainstream conservative movement, including some of the most senior appointees in Donald Trump’s second term, like Dan Bongino and Kash Patel at the FBI, have been fostering these MAGA conspiracy theories about Jeffrey Epstein, saying that his death behind bars in 2019 was likely a murder that was committed to cover up the alleged sins and crimes of a sort of pedophile Democratic Party-run cabal that helps run the so-called deep state, and that these enemies of Donald Trump and MAGA were bumping off Jeffrey Epstein because they were afraid his testimony or the files or what he had to say or his alleged blackmail operations would implicate them.

What I just described to you is, what I would describe, a borderline piece of holy writ and religious understanding within the MAGA movement. This isn’t a small thing or conspiracy theory that they adopt or bandy about just because they want to or for fun. Among so much of the so-called MAGA grassroots, this is taken as almost a level of religious principle for them. Donald Trump, in trying to tell a lot of his supporters to move on, finally, from this issue, might as well be telling his evangelical supporters, “By the way, adultery isn’t a sin. You read that wrong in the Bible. That part of Scripture doesn’t exist.”

So, for days now, going on nearly two weeks, as we’ve been reporting out at Rolling Stone, a very fundamental and sort of perversely fascinating aspect about this story is that President Trump and other senior lieutenants in his administration, in the White House and elsewhere, have been throwing a ton of time and resources at trying to mitigate the damage they’ve done to themselves, both within the federal apparatus and also outside among the broader, shall we call it, the MAGAsphere and among President Trump’s supporters. They’ve been doing a ton of damage control and a bunch of outreach efforts, including to top MAGA influencers, who Trump himself has been personally beseeching, trying to get them to lay off of him and just, you know, drop this whole Epstein kerfuffle. What we’ve been picking up on in our days of reporting on this is a level of operation that you typically see from administrations and White Houses when they’re trying to pass major pieces of legislation on Capitol Hill, not when you’re trying to get the Charlie Kirks of the world to lay off of Pam Bondi when it comes to the famous pedophile.

So, there’s a lot of layers to this, a lot of rifts and backlash that’s going on throughout MAGA world, not just in influencer communities, but even within the vast federal apparatus and within the very tippy-top levels of federal law enforcement itself. And these are having dramatic consequences for Donald Trump right now in a way that currently has no end in sight. And again, this is all over conspiracy theories that his people long nurtured for years and years. It’s absolutely fascinating.

AMY GOODMAN: So, if you can talk about Dan Bongino, number two at the FBI, as it’s been described, a former Epstein obsessive, also Kash Patel, head of the FBI? Is this a true rift between them and Pam Bondi, the attorney general, and Trump, Trump who just talked about speaking with Dan Bongino and that he’s doing fine? And then, what more do you have on the divisions within the Trump administration around this, for example, JD Vance doing damage control and more? And how damaging is this that Trump is telling his own supporters he doesn’t care about them anymore, insulting them by calling them “weaklings,” saying this is a democratic plot, when in fact it’s come up, a groundswell, from within the MAGA movement?

ASAWIN SUEBSAENG: Right. Well, when you talk to people close to Donald Trump, whether it’s those who work in the upper echelons of his second administration or other Trump advisers or just people in his broader social and political orbit, one recurring element that they’ll tell you in recent days is, look, the way Donald Trump is conducting himself publicly and the way he keeps talking about this and trying to post through it online is making it exceedingly difficult for some of his biggest supporters and boosters to not start at least suspecting that he has something to hide, or maybe even that, well, he’s kind of acting like someone who is in the so-called Epstein files in some sort of embarrassing or nefarious way. Whether he is or isn’t, that’s an issue for transparency that Trump and the federal government have the power to follow through on. They’re just absolutely refusing to right now and playing all of these different bait-and-switch games.

So, like, anybody who follows the MAGA fever swamps even casually can see that this is something that’s not going away anytime soon and that this is something that, as much as they would like to say over and over and over again, Donald Trump is promulgating these ridiculous conspiracy theories that, oh, Obama and Hillary Clinton wrote the Epstein files, in part maybe to try to get Trump. That’s something that just does not scan for people who adore Donald Trump, generally speaking, because that’s a conspiracy theory that was just invented out of thin cloth by Donald Trump and is just not anywhere in the MAGA lore about what these Epstein files may or may not say.

And to your other question about what is going on within the actual federal government, not just in far-right influencer communities or whatever, something we flicked at in our reporting over the past nine days or so at Rolling Stone is an element which actually hasn’t really permeated that much in national political media, going on for quite a while, at least several months. Attorney General Pam Bondi and other officials in Trump’s appointed federal law enforcement, like Trump hyper-loyalist Kash Patel, who is, of course, now director of the FBI, they do not like each other. There’s been petty feuds and long-simmering tension between them for — personal tension between the two of them for quite some time. And this whole Epstein debacle has only exacerbated that and brought that back to the fore. And also, even more so than that, it’s definitely no secret nowadays that the number two at the FBI, Dan Bongino, and Pam Bondi are incredibly distrustful of each other, especially with this whole Epstein mess, and really, really do not like each other, to the point where anybody of any level of influence you talk to in Trumpland or within the federal government right now will tell you that Dan Bongino has basically torched his reputation or standing, as it were, with other senior lieutenants in the Trump administration, and that no matter how long he officially stays on the job right now, his days are numbered, both because of his own antipathy for this situation and the bridges that he has just burned completely into the sea on this matter.

So, all of this, it’s not hyperbole at all to say that the Epstein affair, as it is right now, has kind of set the Trump administration, at its very highest levels, on fire and has threatened to tear it apart, in the form of we don’t know what in the next week or two, necessarily, the makeup of the leadership of federal law enforcement is going to be. I also think it is not an exaggeration at all to say that over this issue, within the past less than two weeks, President Trump has managed to sustain more political damage and self-inflicted blowback on himself than he did when he literally bombed Iran last month. That is a wild — that is an objectively wild thought to consider or to fathom. But if you know anything about how the MAGA grassroots function, it is weirdly expected with how this administration has been going lately.

AMY GOODMAN: Swin Suebsaeng, I want to thank you so much for being with us, senior political reporter at Rolling Stone. We will link to your articles, “Inside Trump’s Frantic, Failing Mission to Crush the Epstein 'MAGA Rebellion'” and “Blaming 'Obama, Crooked Hillary': Trump’s Epstein Memo Meltdown Gets Even Worse.”

Next up, we go to a survivor of Jeffrey Epstein. We turn to Teresa Helm. Stay with us.

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AMY GOODMAN: “Temes” by iLe, performing in our Democracy Now! studio.