I mentioned yesterday the importance of keeping up with stories that are absurd in their substance but real in their consequence. Along those lines I wanted to give you a brief update on the Jeffrey Epstein story. If you’ve been following it closely this may not be news. But I know not everyone is doing so. And while I said that it’s important for political journalists to keep track of these stories, that doesn’t mean that you (a non-journalist) have to.

So a few points.

The first is that Donald Trump really does appear to be seriously considering issuing a pardon to Epstein confederate, procurer and one-time girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell. I’m not saying he will. But I think it’s a real possibility. All the standard signs are there. He’s going into full “finding the real killers” mode, and getting “the truth” from Maxwell is central to that. The question has all the standard will he or won’t he drama. But this isn’t our first rodeo. We’ve been at this long enough to know the signs when Trump is warming to an idea and when he’s laying the public groundwork for it. We have the standard lines like, I haven’t decided to but I totally have the power to pardon her if I want. We’ll see. Everybody agrees I’m “allowed.” We’re seeing all the standard lines in the progression.

A friend asked me recently: how is it that MAGA is so over the top about finding out which rich and powerful men may have had sex with 16 or 17 year old girls when it’s apparently fine that the leader of their movement is a longtime sex abuser and serial predator? On the one hand, this person was saying, how is one thing so beyond the pale and the others are completely fine? On another level, this person was asking, is it really so hard to believe that a guy who appears to have routinely assaulting women just over 18 did the same with those just under?

There are a few different ways to answer this. At one level, in MAGA world, Donald Trump is different. No rules apply to him. It’s good to be the king. At another level, it’s a complicated question comparing the horror of different kinds of sexual predation, or whether a person who does one is likely do do another. But there is one level of MAGA’s hyper-focus on pedophilia and sex trafficking conspiracy theories which needs to be emphasized. Because at a basic level, that obsession has nothing to do with pedophilia as a thing in itself — not as most of us might understand it.

Every time I think Donald Trump is putting some distance between himself and the Epstein scandal he does some new thing to make it the centerpoint story in the American news ecosystem. Last night House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) decide to shut the entire House of Representatives for the rest of the summer so members don’t have to make any more painful coverup votes related to the Epstein case. Yesterday, the White House ordered the release of a vast trove of FBI files about Martin Luther King, Jr., a bizarre, pathetic, wrong and ultimately counterproductive attempt to distract from the Epstein Files.

We should start by noting that the King files were overwhelmingly the product of illegal surveillance that then FBI-director J. Edgar Hoover ordered to get blackmail information on King either to discredit him, force him out of public life, or, in specific cases, drive him to suicide. So it was anything but disinterested surveillance, and FBI agents had a huge incentive to include rumor, innuendo and more, whether it was true or not. With that said, King was also what used to be known as a womanizer. This is simply a fact of history along with King being one of the giants and heroes of the American 20th century. We know this mainly from the FBI files that were released decades ago — which is to say that we know from illegal surveillance that was conducted with the specific intent of neutralizing him as a leader of the civil rights movement.

I can only imagine that Trump ordered this with the idea that people can say “Ahha! Many prominent men had subpar sexual morality! Ahha! Ahha!” Either that, or to somehow cast Trump as another freedom fighter who the deep state is trying to bring down with sexual peccadillos. It is very important to note that I don’t think there’s ever been evidence or the suggestion that King’s paramours were anything but adult and willing. The part of this that is so wild is that I don’t think Epstein was really top of mind in the news world Monday morning, certainly not as much as was any day last week. But Trump put it right back there with the King materials. It’s the most obvious thing: releasing any trove of documents just reminds people of the trove Trump is moving heaven and earth not to release. I don’t think anything is more obvious. It’s like a quick fix that deepens the craving.

Today we learn that Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will be meeting with convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell looking for the “real pedophile” and presumably coordinating stories. And just this morning while meeting with the President of the Philippines, President Trump told reporters his intelligence chief has now proven that Hillary Clinton and “Barack Hussein Obama” are guilty of “treason” and they “ought to take a look at that and stop talking about” the Epstein files.

It’s really not too much to say that just as the House has been shut down to avoid more Epstein cover-up votes, the executive branch is now more or less exclusively focused on trying to shut down the Epstein story: MLK assassination documents, a meeting with Maxwell, a new Hillary/Obama treason investigation. It’s all they’re doing.

I keep thinking some new thing will happen or people will lose interest. This weekend there was an emerging conventional wisdom in the Beltway publications that Trump had flipped the script with the Wall Street Journal article, something that never made much sense. But that clearly wasn’t the case and Trump himself forced it back to the top of news attention with his flurry of new diversions.

What can possibly be in those files?