A half-century ago, a piece of conventional political wisdom was born. President Richard Nixon was eventually forced to resign his presidency due to the Watergate scandal -- the first time this had ever happened in America -- and the phrase: "It's not the crime, it's the cover-up" was born. The quote is not ascribed to any individual, it just became a commonplace way of talking about the scandal that engulfed Nixon and his administration. Today, in a sort of meta way, the White House is once again engulfed in a scandal, except this time it is once-more-removed. It's not the crime or the cover-up, it has now become "the cover-up of the cover-up" that bedevils Donald Trump.

To begin with, there was the crime: sex-trafficking underage girls and sexually abusing them, with the possibility that Jeffrey Epstein's rich and powerful friends had participated in the abuse (and were perhaps even being blackmailed as a result). Then there came the cover-up (or, at the very least, the conspiracy theory that there was a cover-up): Epstein's jailhouse suicide was called into question and the whole thing gave rise to a growing demand to "release the Epstein client list." This has been simmering for six whole years now, and the flames of conspiratorial doubt were fanned relentlessly by Trump and all of his minions during his presidential campaign, whipping the MAGA crowd into a fever pitch. If Trump was re-elected (everyone was promised) then all the files would be released. The cover-up would be exposed for all to see!

Then Trump did get re-elected, and the cover-up of the cover-up began. The Department of Justice and the F.B.I. first tried some sleight-of-hand, releasing "Phase One" of the Epstein files in a binder given to all the MAGA hotheaded podcasters and influencers. However, they contained no actual new information -- everything within them had previously been made public. Then right after the 4th of July, they put out a note essentially saying, "Nothing to see here... move along..." which stated that Epstein did kill himself in his jail cell, and there simply was no client list.

This was supposed to calm down the demands for full release of the Epstein files, and it backfired so spectacularly that we are still experiencing the political fallout. Some Republicans are attempting to follow Trump's lead and are now saying "We can't release everything because, you know, there are probably a bunch of totally innocent people in those files!" (the most prominent, of course, being Donald Trump himself, although they never explicitly mention this fact). "And the victims could be harmed by such a full release, too!

"

This is patently ridiculous, since Republicans have never much cared about protecting innocent people when forcing unsubstantiated investigatory documents into the public eye, and throughout this whole saga the actual victims (who reportedly number in the hundreds) have been a complete afterthought, at best. In fact, whenever any of them has been interviewed (that I have seen), they also seem to be on the side of demanding a full release of all the Epstein files.

It also doesn't seem likely to work, politically. The MAGA crowd doesn't want to hear excuses for why the files can't all be released -- as far as they are concerned, that's all they've been getting all along (fake reasons for not releasing the files). This cover-up of the cover-up doesn't seem likely to calm their demands down one whit, in fact.

The Justice Department is now in the midst of trying a "Hail Mary" pass of sorts, as they have latched on to the idea that Epstein's co-conspirator in the sex trafficking and sexual abuse of underage girls is now somehow going to save their bacon. Ghislaine Maxwell was interviewed over the course of two days by the second-highest official in the Justice Department. Maxwell, currently serving a 20-year prison sentence, is (quite obviously) looking for a pardon or commutation. Trump is looking for some magic way out of the mess he has created. If Maxwell can be relied upon to testify before some congressional committee and somehow name only Democratic names, then perhaps that will be enough to stop the MAGA howling about releasing the full client list.

There are two big problems with this scheme, though. The first is that everything that happens is now also subject to the cries to "release the files!" And the second is that Maxwell is not exactly known as a paragon of truth, and can be expected to say anything Trump wants to hear in a bid to get him to give her a "Get Out Of Jail Free" card.

Today, Senator Dick Durbin, the top Democrat on the Senate Judiciary Committee, demanded all recordings and transcripts of last week's conversations with Maxwell:

In a letter to Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, who conducted the interviews, [Senator Richard] Durbin also demanded that the Justice Department commit to offering no pardon or commutation of Ms. Maxwell's sentence in exchange for information, citing "serious questions about the potential for a corrupt bargain between the Trump Administration and Ghislaine Maxwell."

The letter, a copy of which was obtained by The New York Times, was co-signed by Senator Sheldon Whitehouse, Democrat of Rhode Island, who also sits on the Judiciary Committee.

. . .

In the letter, Mr. Durbin noted that the meetings between Mr. Blanche and Ms. Maxwell last week were highly unusual. Such interviews would typically be conducted by line prosecutors more familiar with the details of the case, and more able to determine on the spot if Ms. Maxwell was lying, he noted in the letter.

That Mr. Blanche himself conducted such interviews, Mr. Durbin wrote, led him and Mr. Whitehouse to believe that the meetings were "another tactic to distract from DOJ's failure to fulfill Attorney General [Pam] Bondi's commitment that the American people would see 'the full Epstein files.'"

Mr. Durbin also wrote that there were "serious concerns that Ms. Maxwell may provide false information or selectively withhold information, in return for a pardon or sentence commutation."

In the letter, the senators also demanded the names and titles of everyone present during the two days of interviews with Ms. Maxwell.

And they questioned why the Justice Department believed she would be truthful when the Trump administration previously argued in court about her "willingness to brazenly lie under oath about her conduct."

They also requested the complete terms of an offer of limited immunity made to Ms. Maxwell to secure her cooperation in the interviews. And they demanded the Microsoft SharePoint online collaborative file that Mr. Blanche's office reportedly maintained to log mentions of Mr. Trump in the Epstein-related records that have been reviewed by the Justice Department and the F.B.I.

We've moved from demanding the files covered up by the original cover-up to demanding the files now being generated by the cover-up of the cover-up. Trump's deepest wish at this point is for this to somehow magically all go away. But the more he tries to make that happen, the bigger the cover-up to the cover-up gets.

The Epstein files scandal has now officially gone meta.

-- Chris Weigant

Follow Chris on Twitter: @ChrisWeigant