What did Donald Trump do today?

He learned the hard way about the Streisand effect.

Yesterday, Fox News reported that the Trump administration was redacting information about "politically exposed individuals" from its partial release of documents related to the Jeffrey Epstein investigation. Trump, whose deep and intimate friendship with Epstein over the course of decades is already public knowledge, appeared only a handful of times in thousands of documents posted online yesterday.

But Trump appeared in one photograph where he might have been missed at first glance by the DOJ employees tasked with reviewing them: an image of a desk or dresser, with its drawers open. In the central drawer there is a photograph of Trump posing with, among other people, Epstein's main co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell. In front of it is another picture, also identifiably of Trump, posed with four scantily clad young women.

 

The image, which was labeled EFTA00000468 in the DOJ's catalog of the images, doesn't directly implicate Trump in Epstein's trafficking ring any more deeply than he already has been, but the optics of a picture of Trump surrounded by young, sexualized women and Epstein's partner in crime being kept in Epstein's desk aren't good.

Today, image EFTA00000468 was removed without explanation from the DOJ's archive.

The law requiring the Epstein files to be published specifically forbids withholding release on the basis of "embarrassment, reputational harm, or political sensitivity… to any government official, public figure, or foreign dignitary." 

It's not clear what Trump hopes to gain by removing the image from the DOJ archive, since doing so only draws further attention to it. And while the sight of Trump with his arm around young women or girls in skimpy bikinis is damning, it's not worse than what is already out there, like the doodle of a small-breasted female figure Trump drew for Epstein for his 50th "birthday book," or the reports of a deluxe "party" full of young women in the modeling industry where Trump and Epstein were the only male guests.

Trump did not appear in public or in front of reporters today.

Why does this matter?

• Concealing evidence doesn't mean it never existed. 

• An innocent person with an innocent explanation would just say what it was.