President Donald Trump’s new gambit to try to use new testimony from convicted Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell to distract or placate his base from the exploding controversy over why he hasn’t released the entirety of the files on the Epstein case is unlikely to work, New York Times reporter Maggie Haberman told CNN’s Kaitlan Collins on Friday evening.

“Maggie, just first on what we heard from Trump when he was landing in Scotland tonight,” said Collins. “Is it clear why he is now saying he wasn’t briefed on his name being in the files after no one denied that when it was reported?”

“I think he is now just reflexively saying no to certain things when he gets asked about it in connection with Epstein to not have additional television footage of him talking about it,” said Haberman. “Honestly, I think that’s the main reason.”

“But I think, Kaitlan, it’s very hard to track a through line on what he’s been saying, what the White House has been saying, what the Justice Department has been doing on this,” she continued. “It has been all over the map, and it just continues to mushroom. And I understand what’s happening right now with Ghislaine Maxwell. They are looking at this as something of an escape hatch in the White House and the Justice Department. I don’t know that it’s going to provide that.”

“In what way do they think it could serve as that?” asked Collins.

“Here’s the theory,” said Haberman. “It will satisfy the people in the president’s base who — to be clear, the administration, the people within the White House, I should say, and some people at DOJ, they all clearly, or many of them clearly, really underestimated how much the base was going to care about this, how they were going to react to this. And these were statements that, you know, the Epstein files were something of a holy grail, that Trump’s own allies, some members of his own administration, have been fanning this idea for years. And so then they seemed sort of surprised that a lot of people believed them and wanted to hear more. So they are hoping that this sort of moves it away from the idea that they are not being transparent.”

“This is so unusual what’s happening here, and what the deputy attorney general-slash-personal lawyer to Donald Trump is doing, that it’s hard to see how this is going to hold well,” she added.

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