President Donald Trump may have found a novel method to block the release of the Epstein files without taking responsibility for the decision, legal experts have warned, even after an apparent reversal in his long-held stance that they should remain hidden.
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After months of insisting that the Epstein files were a “hoax” and his Department of Justice (DOJ) closing its investigation into the case, Trump ordered a new probe last week into several of his political opponents for their links to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
The President also appeared to reverse his opposition to the files being made public, telling Republicans on Sunday to vote in favor of their release in an upcoming House vote, “because we have nothing to hide.”
Read More: Inside Trump and Epstein’s Long, Complicated Relationship
But legal experts and some key figures pushing for the release of the files have questioned the sudden about-turn, suggesting that Trump may be using the new DOJ investigation to block any further releases.
Republican Rep. Thomas Massie, the key driver behind the push to force a vote in the House of Representatives to release the files, suggested the investigation may be a “smokescreen” and a “last-ditch effort to prevent the release of the Epstein files.”
“If they have ongoing investigations in certain areas, those documents can’t be released,” Massie said Sunday.
‘A strategic effort’
Several legal experts interviewed by TIME, including a former federal prosecutor and a DOJ deputy attorney general, have also backed that theory.
“My cynical view of this announcement is that it is a strategic effort to block the release of further documents in the Epstein case,” Barbara McQuade, former U.S. Attorney for the Eastern District of Michigan from 2010 to 2017, and a Michigan Law professor, tells TIME. “If there is a pending investigation, the DOJ can assert executive privilege and try to prevent any more documents from being released.”
Stephen Saltzburg, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Criminal Division of the DOJ and professor of law at George Washington University, believes Trump is “desperate right now that he’s been unable to shake Epstein,” and that he may indeed cite the investigation as a reason for not releasing any more files.
“I think by having Pam Bondi immediately choose this prosecutor to begin the investigation, that the possibility is there,” he says.
“I don’t think they’ve made a final decision that they are going to say, ‘we can’t release anything.’ But I think that that’s going to be one of the options, and just see how that plays,” he says. “If it plays well, I think it’ll delay further disclosures. If there’s a huge backlash among the MAGA people, then I think all bets are off,” he adds.
Bruce Green, a former federal prosecutor in the Southern District of New York and current director of the Louis Stein Center for Law and Ethics at Fordham University School of Law, doesn’t believe Trump will use the investigation to block the release of files directly, but thinks that it “can be used as an excuse by Republican members of Congress to oppose the release of the files, on the ostensible ground that doing so would interfere with an ongoing federal investigation.”
“I don’t envision President Trump invoking executive privilege in response to a law or order directing DOJ to release the files, because that would place responsibility for withholding their disclosure squarely on his shoulders,” he says. “Likewise, I don’t envision him wanting to have to veto legislation. He’d rather see Congress kill this in its cradle.”
Green describes the DOJ investigation as “illegitimate,” in any case.
“The federal prosecutors already conducted an investigation, based in part on the documents it amassed, and it saw no justification for additional indictments — whether of Democrats or anyone else,” he says.
“Even if this were a legitimate investigation, there would be no good reason to think that releasing the Epstein files would interfere with it, particularly given how much has been released already,” he adds.
TIME has reached out to the White House for comment.
‘I wasn’t a fan’
The announcement of the DOJ investigation comes ahead of a crucial House vote expected on Tuesday on whether to release the Epstein files. The vote is expected to pass. The discharge petition forcing the House to take up the measure was signed by all House Democrats and four Republicans: Reps. Thomas Massie, Lauren Boebert, Nancy Mace and Marjorie Taylor Greene. Other Republicans have signaled they will vote to release the files.
Trump, who has faced questions about his relationship with Epstein over the years, has for months been fiercely lobbying against the release of thousands of documents and seized materials relating to the various investigations into Epstein.
The President has repeatedly denied all knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and maintained that his ties to Epstein were limited to social interactions common in Palm Beach, Florida, where both men owned property in the 1990s. Epstein’s mansion sat just down the road from Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate, and the financier was reportedly a regular for several years at the club.
“Well, I knew him like everybody in Palm Beach knew him. I mean, people in Palm Beach knew him. He was a fixture in Palm Beach,” Trump said in 2019, soon after Epstein was charged. “I had a falling out with him a long time ago. I don’t think I’ve spoken to him for 15 years. I wasn’t a fan.”
Those questions have grown louder as his Administration has worked to prevent the release of the files during his second term, and since Ghislaine Maxwell, a longtime associate of Epstein currently serving a 20-year sentence for child sex trafficking and related offenses, was moved to a minimum security prison usually reserved for people who have been convicted of financial crimes following questioning by Trump’s Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
The relationship has once again been thrown into the spotlight this week following the release of new emails sent by the late financier in which he allegedly writes that Trump knew “about the girls” and that one of his alleged victims “spent hours” at his house with him.