How many more times will we have to read the words, “It’s way worse than you think?”

The past has caught up to them

That phrase was uttered this time by, of all people, Marjorie Taylor Greene after she had visited the ultra-secure room in the Department of Justice where members of Congress can read, but not copy, the unredacted Epstein files. Greene’s sometime friend, more often rival, Lauren Boebert emerged from what is now being called “the redaction room” confirming that there are “definitely” more co-conspirators of Epstein than have been revealed and that Ghislane Maxwell, currently domiciled in a minimum security prison facility in Texas, should spend more time behind bars and should not be granted clemency by Donald Trump.

Good luck with that, Lauren, given the implied threat made yesterday by Maxwell’s lawyer that if she is pardoned, she could exonerate Donald Trump and Bill Clinton -- the ability to exonerate meaning that she also has the ability to incriminate.

The big headline of the day was made by Congressman Jamie Raskin, who upon exiting the redaction room told the press that a search of all the unredacted Epstein files – not just the redacted files released publicly – revealed that Donald Trump’s name appears more than one million times. That means Trump is mentioned in one way or another 960,000 more times in the files that haven’t been released than the 38,000 times his name appears in the files the DOJ has revealed. Remember last spring, when we learned that FBI agents had been sent from all over the country to go through the Epstein files? We were told that they worked for weeks. What we suspected but weren’t told was that their job was to black-out Trump’s name every time they found it.

Let’s take a moment to ponder how the name of one man, who is now the President of the United States, appears so many times in what have been called the Epstein files, but in reality are mainly the work product of three separate criminal investigations of Jeffrey Epstein. These include the initial investigation of Epstein that began in Palm Beach in 2004 for sexual abuse and unlawful sex with minors; the federal investigation of Epstein and four co-conspirators that began in 2006 and ended in 2008 with a corrupt plea deal that cancelled the federal investigation in favor of a guilty plea to a state charge for soliciting a minor for prostitution; and the federal investigation in New York City that began in 2018 and resulted in a 2019 charge for sexually exploiting and trafficking underage girls in multiple locations.

The point is, ordinary citizens of the United States don’t have “files” devoted to them that contain millions of pages of documents. For such files to be accumulated, you have to be under criminal investigation. What we have been calling “files” are actually evidence from the multiple investigations of Epstein. So, if your name appears more than a million times along with the target of a criminal investigation, or in this case investigations, that means you were associating with a criminal.

One of the things reported today by members of Congress who saw the unredacted files was the existence of an email between Epstein and his criminal associate, Ghislane Maxwell, in which they discussed a phone call with Trump during which he admitted that Epstein had never had his Mar a Lago membership revoked because he never had been a member. He was a guest of the club’s owner every time he visited Trump’s Mar a Lago, and as a guest, he had never been asked or told to leave the club. That exchange of emails was written in 2009, the year after Epstein completed his so-called jail sentence that did not require him to actually be behind bars during the day, when he was permitted to be at his Palm Beach office or residence.

So, this piece of evidence from the unredacted files seems to prove that either Epstein or Maxwell was still speaking with Trump a year after Epstein’s conviction for soliciting a minor girl for prostitution. In other words, Trump knew what Epstein was doing with underage girls, a fact confirmed in yet another unredacted file about a conversation between Trump and the Palm Beach chief of police during which Trump confessed that “everybody knew” what Epstein had been doing.

What else is revealed in the 960,000 mentions of Donald Trump that are in the unredacted files that have not been released by the Department of Justice? As of today, we do not know.

What we do know is that Donald Trump and Jeffrey Epstein were close friends in New York and Palm Beach. We know that Trump traveled on Epstein’s business jet that was called the “Lolita Express.” We know from photographic evidence that Trump was close enough to Epstein that he appeared in photographs with the woman who would become his wife, Melania, alongside Epstein and his criminal associate, Ghislane Maxwell. We know from the unredacted files that Epstein claimed to have introduced Trump to Melania. We know that Trump appointed two men who appear in the Epstein files to his government – Howard Lutnick as Labor Secretary and John Phelan as Secretary of the Navy. Lutnick now admits to having visited Epstein’s Caribbean island and being in business with him. Phelan is listed at least twice on Epstein’s “Lolita Express” flight logs. We know that Trump contributed the notorious cartoon sketch of a naked woman’s body and poem about shared secrets to Epstein’s birthday book.

We know that these two men are revealed to be very, very close in the files that have been released, and we know there are at least 960,000 more mentions of Trump’s name in the unredacted files that have not been released.

This is why Trump is employing the Roy Cohn defense of deny, deny, deny. It is why he has dispatched his former criminal attorney and current Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to declare on network television that the Epstein review “is over,” when clearly it is not.

This story is not going away. The way the drip-drip-drip of revelations is going, the Epstein files with their repetition of the name of Donald Trump, will still be in the news after Labor Day this year when the midterm campaigns for Congress kick into gear.

When you’ve lost Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, both of whom have had a look at the unredacted Epstein files, you have a whole lot to worry about. Trump is cornered by the life of sexual abuse he led in the past. He doesn’t just face allegations from women and a legal judgement against him from a woman he raped. His associations with a pedophile are in files from a criminal investigation. Even his wife, the First Lady, is in the files.

We will be treated to many more midnight Truth Social rants in the weeks and months to come. The Epstein criminal files are much, much worse than we think, that is now for certain.