What other newspapers are saying: Distrust of government breeds theories
For decades, the CIA downplayed the extent of its knowledge about Lee Harvey Oswald’s activities before he assassinated President John F. Kennedy. Documents newly unearthed by a House task force prove that a case officer with the alias “Howard” — whose real name was George Joannides — managed a Cuban group that interacted with Oswald. The CIA had repeatedly insisted that Howard did not exist.
The Post’s Tom Jackman reported this week that Oswald approached the CIA-backed group that opposed Fidel Castro and secretly offered his help three months before the assassination. Alas, the striking revelations — once dismissed as baseless conspiracy theories — were overshadowed by a public spat between President Donald Trump and his MAGA base over the administration’s announcement that it would not release files about sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
These two stories aren’t entirely unrelated. Government misdirection has contributed to a collapse of public trust in its institutions. So has a decade of relentless attacks by Trump on the “deep state.” Squandered credibility makes it hard for the Justice Department or the intelligence community to persuade skeptical Americans that there’s nothing more to share about Epstein’s dealings with powerful figures, including Trump.
This week exposed the limits of even Trump’s ability to tell his base what to think. The president on Thursday directed the Justice Department to ask a judge to release “all pertinent” grand jury testimony in the Epstein case. But the grand jury testimony — which he knows a judge might not even unseal — would represent a fraction of the evidence that investigators gathered. For example, it probably wouldn’t include Trump’s reported Epstein birthday letter.
Americans are understandably suspicious. A Reuters-Ipsos poll this week found that 69 percent of Americans think the federal government is hiding details about Epstein’s clients. A CNN poll this month found only 3 percent of Americans are satisfied with the information the government put out about the case.
The Justice Department has good reason to refrain from releasing raw investigative information, in the Epstein case or any other. Prosecutors risk smearing people who are incidentally mentioned in files or for whom there was insufficient evidence to charge with crimes. There’s also a public interest in protecting victim privacy.
That is why Trump officials should not have fanned the Epstein conspiracy theories to begin with. Now, they are reaping what they sowed. In 2019, after Epstein’s death in federal custody, which was ruled a suicide, Trump retweeted a claim that Epstein “had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead.” Conservative influencers were given binders during a White House visit this February purporting to be the ” first phrase ” of the Epstein files.
America’s paranoid style of politics is nothing new. Over the decades, elites failed Americans enough times to produce a crisis of faith in government rooted in real-world examples. The Pentagon Papers exposed a pattern of lies about the Vietnam War, during which 58,220 Americans died. Watergate showed a conspiracy that really did go all the way to the top.
When Oswald killed Kennedy, three-quarters of Americans trusted the federal government to do the right thing at least most of the time. Since 2007, that number has never been higher than 30 percent. The U.S. preemptively invaded Iraq based on cherry-picked intelligence about weapons of mass destruction. In 2020, a group of 51 former intelligence officials shredded their credibility by signing a public letter insisting the release of Hunter Biden’s emails “has all the classic earmarks of a Russian information operation.”
Not every paranoid fantasy that gains traction on the internet is true, and the Justice Department should not release investigative files willy-nilly to satisfy the conspiracy theorists. Even if the full Epstein file were opened and revealed nothing of interest to the public, it probably would not deter fabulists from spinning new theories.
But Americans would not be so receptive to such theorizing had elite institutions avoided some of their spectacular stumbles — or if U.S. leaders refrained from amplifying them. The government’s long-term challenge is to rebuild trust with the public. At the moment, too many officials are eroding it further.
— Washington Post