President Donald Trump claimed in 2019 that he was "the most transparent president in history." Throughout his second term, Trump's spokespeople have used that phrase over and over again. The administration has made a big show of opening the archives on old mysteries: the assassination of President John F. Kennedy, the existence of UFOs, and the case of well-connected sex predator Jeffrey Epstein. While the JFK files included some genuinely shocking revelations, the UFO files were thin on substance.
And the Epstein files turned into an infamous boondoggle. The administration handed a group of influencers binders labeled "Phase 1," which turned out to hold heavily redacted copies of already-public documents, then never followed up. After it was leaked to the press that the actual FBI file on Epstein included a sexually suggestive letter from Trump himself, Congress dragged the files out of an embarrassed and defensive administration.
