The U.S. Justice Department and White House have scrambled this week to explain a significant walkback from promises of potentially explosive information involving accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and his alleged clientele.

A Justice Department memo on Epstein, released on Monday, concluded that after reviewing more than 300 gigabytes of data, there was "no incriminating client list" nor was there any evidence that Epstein may have blackmailed prominent people. The memo also confirmed prior findings by the FBI which concluded that Epstein died by suicide in his jail cell while awaiting trial, and not as a result of a criminal act such murder.

Despite the freshness of the officially released information, President Donald Trump castigated a New York Post reporter for asking a question about the memo at the White House on Tuesday.

"Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years," said Trump. "I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein at a time like this … " he added, bringing up the tragedy of the Texas flash floods.

Here's a look at the controversy, starting at the beginning:

The Trump-Epstein relationship

Epstein, a teacher who then became a wealthy investor who attracted high-profile clients to his financial management company, communicated or met with a variety of famous people over the years, including former president Bill Clinton, Britain's Prince Andrew, Microsoft's Bill Gates, magician David Copperfield and academic Noam Chomsky.

Photos and videos dating back to the early 1990s show Trump and Epstein at social events, including at the president's estate in Mar-a-Lago.

Trump told New York magazine in 2002 that his relationship with Epstein stretched back 15 years and that he was a "terrific guy," with a predilection for women "on the younger side."

By July 2019, he told a reporter at the White House that he "had a falling out with him a long time ago."

"I was not a fan," Trump said of Epstein.

Those comments came as a plea deal Epstein reached in Florida years earlier was being newly scrutinized. Epstein made a secret deal to avoid federal prosecution by pleading guilty instead to relatively minor state-level charges of soliciting prostitution, ultimately serving what amounted to 13 months in jail beginning in 2008.

(The Florida prosecutor who signed off on that deal, Alex Acosta, had gone on to become Trump's labour secretary. In February 2019, a federal judge said Acosta had violated Florida laws years earlier by not notifying Epstein's alleged victims about the plea deal.) 

A year later, as Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell was going through legal troubles that would ultimately lead to a lengthy prison sentence, Trump said, "I just wish her well, frankly."

On the campaign trail last year, Trump told a Fox News podcast he was open to declassifying files on 9/11 and the John F. Kennedy assassination, but gave a more qualified answer as it pertained to Epstein files, saying there might have to be redactions as, "you don't want to affect people's lives because there's a lot of phony stuff in there."

The about-face from Trump officials

Attorney General Pam Bondi earlier this year said the Justice Department was poring over a "truckload" of previously withheld evidence 

"It's sitting on my desk right now to review," Bondi told Fox News in February when she was asked if the Justice Department would be releasing Epstein's client list.

On Tuesday at the White House, Bondi walked that comment back, telling reporters that she was referring to the entire Epstein "file" along with other files pertaining to the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King, Jr.

"That's what I meant by that," she said.

She added that many of the videos in the Epstein investigative file "turned out to be child porn." This material, she added, is "never going to be released. Never going to see the light of day."

Last week, Bondi said the FBI was reviewing "tens of thousands of videos" of Epstein "with children or child porn."

The Associated Press at that time spoke with lawyers and law enforcement officials in criminal cases of Epstein and Maxwell who said they hadn't seen and didn't know of a trove of recordings like what Bondi described. 

Bondi on Tuesday also said a one-minute gap in video from the New York prison was attributable to a longstanding technical snafu, and not specific to that particular night.

FBI Director Kash Patel — who reports to Bondi — and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, a former conservative podcaster, both previously made statements before joining the administration about a so-called client list.

"Put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are," Patel said on a YouTube show hosted by Trump supporter Benny Johnson in 2023.

Bongino asked earlier this year on his show before he joined the FBI: "Who's on the Epstein tapes, folks? Who's on those tapes? Who's in those black books? Why have they been hiding it?"

Both Patel and Bongino often suggested that the government was hiding information about Epstein from the American public, including how he died in a cell at Metropolitan Correctional Center in New York City in 2019. But in a joint interview in April, they said they had reviewed all information and that it was clear to them the 66-year-old killed himself.

It's not clear why the officials doubted the word of former attorney general William Barr. Barr told The Associated Press in a 2019 interview that he had personally reviewed security footage that revealed that no one entered the area where Epstein was housed on the night he died. Barr called the suicide "a perfect storm of screw-ups."

What prominent critics are now saying

Tesla and SpaceX founder Elon Musk, a former Trump adviser who is promising to form a rival political party, posted Tuesday on his X platform, "How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won't release the Epstein files?"

Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a Republican and one of the few Congress members to regularly comment on the Epstein case, said she believed there was more available information that Bondi and Patel could release.

"The American people deserve to know truth [about] Epstein, regardless of who it impacts," she posted on X.

Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, in an emotional post on what he characterized as an Epstein coverup, said that the "Trump administration has become part of it; you cannot see it another way."

Tucker Carlson, on the Breaking Points podcast hosted by Saagar Enjeti, said he doubted there was any information incriminating Trump with underaged girls, saying, "I don't think [Trump] likes creepy sex stuff."

Instead, Carlson raised the prospect that "intel services are at the very centre of this story, U.S. and Israeli, and they're being protected."

Jack Posobiec, among a number of MAGA influencers invited to a briefing earlier this year on Epstein, blasted Bondi and said he felt "used."

The influencers in February received curated documents that included flight logs from Epstein's private plane, which have long been available in multiple court cases, and a heavily redacted photocopy of an address book purportedly compiled by Epstein and Maxwell, which has been cited in media accounts for many years.

Posobiec referred to it Tuesday as "this binder full of baloney."