When the heat at home becomes unbearable, many politicians start a fire somewhere else. Donald Trump was facing headaches brought on Epstein files, tariff policies and civil liberties lawsuits, he launched US-Israeli airstrikes on Iran.
New York Democrat Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez has now accused Trump of “risking world war” to distract from the Epstein scandal. She also noted that military escalation and file-related revelations have a habit of arriving together. Then, Republican Rep. Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene agree on what has come to be a very obvious pattern.
The strikes came a few days after the Supreme Court struck down Trump’s global tariff policy, and there was more scrutiny over the DOJ’s handling of the Epstein files. While Attorney General Pam Bondi had promised “maximum transparency,” she only released 33,000 documents that largely consisted of material the public had already seen. When asked why a new Epstein investigation was launched after the DOJ had already completed the review, Bondi offered this explanation:
🚨MAJOR: AG Pam Bondi now says there is “new information, additional information” on Epstein, directly contradicting DOJ’s claim that no further investigation was needed.
The goalposts are moving. Someone’s protecting someone. pic.twitter.com/6DdL4PTPLQ
— Brian Allen (@allenanalysis) November 19, 2025
Trump signed the Epstein files bill into law, which requires the DOJ to release all relevant records within 30 days. But the fine print, according to CNN, says that the law can withhold anything related to an “active federal investigation.” And surely, a new investigation was announced, which made Rep. Massie publicly worry it could be a “smokescreen.”
Former Trump White House lawyer Ty Cobb said,
“If Trump wanted those documents produced, he could release them tonight.”
Meanwhile, the Iran operation is what foreign policy analyst Christopher Chivvis describes as a “diversionary war” where we see military force for the attention economy. The logic appears to be that if you bomb Iran, a friendlier government will come to be. But if history is anything to go by, wars in places like Libya and Afghanistan suggest this is way too optimistic.
The US military is, as Chivvis notes for The Guardian, not in the business of constructing what it smashes. Trump’s bombing of Tehran plays well with his Republican base. plus The Iranian regime’s treatment of its own citizens has made Democratic resistance less likely. Europe is standing aside, and that makes missiles much louder than questions about Jeffrey Epstein‘s associates.
Trump claimed the right to join Iran in deciding its next leader as the war escalated, with US and Israeli jets hitting areas across the country and Gulf cities coming under renewed bombardment https://t.co/GTG4nZLyhU pic.twitter.com/xEIjsJFHPZ
— Reuters (@Reuters) March 6, 2026
The House Oversight Committee is still investigating, though.
Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick and AG Bondi are being scrutinized. Trump’s name appears in the released documents, though, as of the time of writing, there are no allegations of wrongdoing. But the longer they stay buried under operational security exemptions and active investigations, the more Trump gets suspected.
