Dead six years, child sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein is causing a problem for President Donald Trump and the Republican Party and has now caught House Speaker Mike Johnson, who is backflipping wildly.

This week, the Trump toady lived up to that description by sending the House out of town early on its month-long summer recess right as bipartisan members were scheduled to force a vote on release of Epstein files, this after Johnson himself said last week “we should put everything out there.”

That’s just fine by Trump, who in complete about-face had his administration claim there was no Epstein client list and has insisted that his own supporters are rubes for wanting to see the documents he’d promised he’d show them. If he’s frustrated that so many people are fixated on this particular question, he can find that culprit in the mirror.

Part of Trump’s electoral successes have been cemented on his ability to deliver very simple political promises. He was going to deport all the “bad hombres” illegally in the country; he was going to bring prices down and revitalize American manufacturing; he was going to end the war in Ukraine and keep the U.S. out of foreign military entanglements; and he was going to finally bring clarity to whole sordid Epstein debacle, which tied together a number of his MAGA supporters’ paranoias and fascinations with elite cabals and pedophiles lurking in every corner.

In the end, he’s been unable to deliver these simple promises because, as it turns out, the world is complicated. There’s no way to have massive arrest numbers of hardened criminals while preserving everyone’s civil and due process rights. There was obviously no path towards a quick and easy resolution of Putin‘s invasion of Ukraine, nor the decades-in-the-making collapse of American industrial capacity.

Yet, the Epstein case was one area where he essentially could pretty easily carry out his promises. The files, he assured everyone, did exist and would be expeditiously released by his Justice Department and his FBI so that the public would finally have full insight into these crimes and coverups. He can’t credibly say here that he has been foiled by an intransigent Congress or liberal judges or foreign leaders. His transparent and indisputable attempt to get out of his own commitment raises some pretty obvious questions for even ardent supporters around who exactly he’s trying to protect and what information he’s trying to keep obscure.

As much as Trump has mastered misdirection and red herrings throughout his time in politics, we doubt this will be easy to squirrel out of with as blunt a tool as U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi‘s request for release of grand jury transcripts from a Manhattan federal judge, which will likely produce next to nothing.

The real meat of things are the files that federal agents hold on the totality of the Epstein investigation and the rumored client list, as well as what Ghislaine Maxwell (now serving 20 years in federal prison and appealing her conviction, and probably hoping for a presidential pardon) has to say about her insight as Epstein‘s longtime right hand.

That seems to be why former Trump personal criminal defense attorney Todd Blanche, now the DOJ No. 2, is seeking to speak with her ahead of her chance to potentially testify publicly. Trump might claim that he didn’t know about this effort, but he is quite simply not a credible source on pretty much anything and especially not here given the real possibility that he could be personally mentioned in the documents.

The president is banking on the media and his supporters to just move on. This time, he might be wrong.

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