Last summer, as pressure mounted on the Trump administration to release material it held on Jeffrey Epstein, the president’s top advisers gathered in a series of meetings, many of them in the White House Situation Room — typically used during national-security crises — as they struggled to contain a scandal engulfing Donald Trump himself. The discussions included the vice president, JD Vance; the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles; the White House counsel, David Warrington; the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche; and the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, among others.

去年夏天，随着要求特朗普政府公布其所掌握的杰弗里·爱泼斯坦相关材料的压力不断增大，总统的高级顾问们召开了一系列会议，其中许多是在白宫战情室举行——这个房间通常用于应对国家安全危机——试图遏制一场波及唐纳德·特朗普本人的丑闻。与会者包括副总统JD·万斯、白宫办公厅主任苏茜·怀尔斯、白宫法律顾问戴维·沃林顿、司法部副部长托德·布兰奇以及联邦调查局局长卡什·帕特尔等人。

The reporting, which documents many previously undisclosed conversations and conflicts, is drawn from our forthcoming book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump.” We discovered how the Epstein files consumed and often paralyzed the highest levels of the Trump administration, far more than the public knew.

这篇摘自我们即将出版的新书《政权更迭：唐纳德·特朗普的帝王式总统任期内幕》(Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump)的报道记录了诸多此前未披露的谈话与冲突。我们发现，爱泼斯坦档案以远超外界所知的程度消耗着特朗普政府的最高决策层，时常令其陷入瘫痪。

Here are six takeaways from the article in The Times Magazine.

以下是这篇刊载于《纽约时报杂志》的文章的六大要点。

The government’s national-security bunker became an Epstein war room.

政府的国家安全堡垒变成了爱泼斯坦危机作战室。

The secure Situation Room complex, where President Obama and his team monitored the raid that killed Osama bin Laden, became the setting for a string of meetings in which the Trump administration’s most senior officials gathered — without the president — to manage the fallout from public fury over their failure to release the Epstein files. To their surprise, much of that backlash was coming from what they had considered the reliably loyal MAGA base.

当年奥巴马总统及其团队曾在安防森严的战情室内监督击毙奥萨马·本·拉登的突袭行动，如今这里却成了特朗普政府最高级官员（总统本人除外）一连串会议的举办地，旨在管控因未能公布爱泼斯坦档案而引发的公众愤怒。令他们惊讶的是，许多反对声竟来自他们原本认为绝对忠诚的MAGA基本盘。

As the calls for disclosure grew louder, Trump’s inner circle spent more and more time in the Situation Room, which became inseparable from the crisis — a guarded space used not to weigh a foreign threat but to steer the president around a political problem concerning a notorious dead pedophile.

随着要求公开文件的呼声日益高涨，特朗普的核心圈子在战情室里待的时间越来越长，这里已与这场危机密不可分——这个高度戒备的空间不再用于权衡外来威胁，而是用来出谋划策，以便让总统躲开一桩由恶名昭彰的已故恋童者引发的政治麻烦。

The officials knew that prominent people, including Trump, were named in the records of F.B.I. agents’ interview notes with witnesses, some of whom were Epstein’s victims. While many of the claims made in the notes were not corroborated evidence, releasing them was, for most of the president’s advisers, a nonstarter.

官员们心知肚明，FBI探员询问证人的笔录记录中提到了包括特朗普在内的多位知名人士，其中一些证人正是爱泼斯坦的受害者。尽管笔录中的许多说法并未得到确凿证据的支持，但对于总统的大多数顾问而言，公布这些内容是绝对不可接受的。

The president wanted the whole thing buried.

总统想把整件事压住。

Trump made clear to his aides that he had no interest in releasing anything related to Epstein. He snapped at anyone who raised the issue, and his staff mostly learned to avoid the subject in front of him. They were left to worry and plan among themselves. The president’s refusal to acknowledge that a crisis existed, let alone that it was growing, complicated every path his team wanted to take.

特朗普向助手明确表示，他对公布任何与爱泼斯坦有关的材料毫无兴趣。谁要是提起这事，他就会厉声呵斥；幕僚们大多学会了在他面前避而不谈这个话题。他们只能私下担忧和谋划。总统拒不承认危机存在，更不用说危机正在加剧，这导致他的团队想采取任何应对措施都十分困难。

As The Wall Street Journal prepared a damaging article about his relationship with Epstein, the president tried to kill it. He called News Corp.’s chief executive; its owner, Rupert Murdoch; and the paper’s editor in chief, Emma Tucker. The president, practically shouting as he threatened to sue, told Tucker, who is British, that she must “hate America.” When his efforts to stop the article failed and his advisers settled on a limited gesture of transparency, the president went along grudgingly.

在《华尔街日报》准备刊登一篇关于他与爱泼斯坦关系的破坏性报道时，总统试图压制报道。他致电新闻集团首席执行官、报社所有人鲁珀特·默多克以及主编艾玛·塔克。总统几乎是吼着威胁要起诉，并对那位英国籍主编说，她肯定是“憎恨美国”。阻止报道的努力失败后，顾问们决定采取一种有限的公开透明姿态，总统才勉强同意。

Vice President JD Vance wanted to release all the files — even the unsubstantiated material about Trump.

副总统JD·万斯主张公布所有文件——哪怕是那些未经证实的涉特朗普材料。

Within the White House itself, no one was more vocal about releasing the Epstein material than the vice president. “This is a huge problem,” Vance told colleagues in the Situation Room. Others thought he appeared panicked about how the issue was splintering the MAGA coalition. Wiles would later describe the vice president to associates as an Epstein conspiracy theorist.

在白宫内部，没有人比副总统更直言不讳地要求公布爱泼斯坦的材料。“这是个巨大的麻烦，”万斯在战情室里对同僚说。其他人则认为他看起来是慌了，担心这个问题会导致MAGA联盟分裂。怀尔斯后来向同事形容副总统是个爱泼斯坦阴谋论者。

Vance pressed repeatedly for the administration to release everything — even unsubstantiated material about Trump — arguing that Congress would force the issue eventually and that getting ahead of it would earn the White House credit for transparency.

万斯反复敦促政府公布一切——哪怕是关于特朗普的未经证实的材料——他认为国会最终会逼他们就范，先行一步能为白宫赢得公开透明的声誉。

He floated the idea of enlisting Tucker Carlson to interview Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and co-conspirator, in prison, and fretted to colleagues about how the crisis was alienating the young, low-propensity voters who had backed the Trump-Vance ticket in 2024. But the vice president’s suggestions were far from popular with the core Trump team, and most of them went unheeded.

他甚至提议借助塔克·卡尔森去监狱采访爱泼斯坦的长期女友、共谋者吉斯莱恩·麦克斯韦，并向同事抱怨这场危机正在疏远一些在2024年支持了特朗普-万斯组合的年轻选民，这些选民平常缺乏投票意愿。但副总统的建议在特朗普核心团队中并不受欢迎，大多数被置之不理。

Expletive-laden blowups fractured the top of the Justice Department.

充斥脏话的爆发导致司法部高层决裂。

The lingering distrust between Pam Bondi, then the attorney general, and the F.B.I.’s top two officials — Kash Patel and Dan Bongino, then his deputy — exploded over the Epstein controversy.

时任司法部长帕姆·邦迪与FBI的两位最高官员——卡什·帕特尔和他的副手丹·邦吉诺——之间积攒已久的不信任在爱泼斯坦争议中彻底爆发。

The day the Justice Department released a memo intended to put the Epstein matter to rest, Bongino marched into a daily meeting and erupted at Bondi. He and Patel told White House officials that Bondi should resign; at a later meeting, the two said they suspected that she had leaked damaging stories about them. When Wiles accused Bongino of a leak of his own, he stormed out of the Situation Room complex. Bongino privately warned associates that the Epstein crisis would become “President Trump’s Iran-contra.”

司法部发布备忘录试图了结爱泼斯坦事件当天，邦吉诺冲进每日例会，对邦迪大发雷霆。他和帕特尔告诉白宫官员，邦迪应该辞职；在后来的会议上，这两人说他们怀疑邦迪泄露了对他们不利的负面消息。当怀尔斯指责邦吉诺自己泄密时，他愤然冲出了战情室。邦吉诺私下警告同僚，爱泼斯坦危机会变成“特朗普总统的‘伊朗门’”。

Advisers found themselves having a surreal debate over an unverified allegation about Mr. Trump.

顾问们发现自己正在白宫就一项关于特朗普的未经证实的指控进行不可思议的辩论。

At an August meeting in the Situation Room, one of the president’s senior aides raised an uncorroborated and secondhand claim that had been made nearly a decade earlier, about Trump aggressively flicking and sucking a young woman’s nipples until they “looked incredibly painful.”

在8月的一次战情室会议上，总统的一位高级助手提出了一项近十年前提出的未经证实的间接指控，称特朗普曾粗暴地弹拨并吮吸一位年轻女性的乳头，以至于“看上去非常疼”。

The claim about Trump had surfaced in 2024 in unsealed court filings from a civil suit unrelated to him, and when the matter was raised by another official, Vance argued for including this and many other accusations on the Justice Department’s website, saying that it would show maximum transparency and that Trump wouldn’t mind, given that he had been accused of worse. Wiles shut that down, saying the president would not, in fact, be fine with releasing it. One official later said it was “surreal” to be debating the nipple accusation in the White House Situation Room.

这一关于特朗普的说法于2024年在一份与他无关的民事诉讼解封法庭文件中浮出水面。当另一位官员提出此事时，万斯主张在司法部网站上公布这一指控及许多其他指控，称这将展示最大的透明度，而且鉴于特朗普曾被指控更恶劣的事，他不会介意。怀尔斯否决了这一提议，称总统实际上绝不会同意公布这些内容。一位官员后来说，在白宫战情室里辩论关于乳头的指控，感觉“太不可思议了”。

More than a year later, the files were still damaging the president.

一年多过去了，这些文件仍在拖累总统。

In late March 2026 — a full year into the White House efforts to manage the fiasco — a confidential memo from Trump’s pollster, Tony Fabrizio, summarized responses from focus groups conducted with voters earlier that month, in which the Epstein files ranked as the sixth most important political issue, ahead of crime, the military and being pro-working class. The memo flagged the Epstein issue as “a real negative with some of these voters.”

2026年3月下旬——距离白宫努力应对这场闹剧已整整一年，特朗普的民调专家托尼·法布里齐奥的一份机密备忘录总结了当月早些时候对选民进行的焦点小组访谈反馈，其中爱泼斯坦文件被列为第六大重要政治议题，排在犯罪、军事和有利劳工阶层的政策之前。备忘录将爱泼斯坦问题标记为“在这部分选民中真实存在的负面因素”。