President Trump's top aides so feared leaks about their handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files that they held multiple damage-control meetings in the classified confines of the Situation Room, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan write in "Regime Change," their hotly awaited book about Trump's second term.

• In a New York Times Magazine excerpt, posted today ahead of the book's publication on June 23, the two Times reporters describe in cinematic detail how top Trump officials, including Vice President JD Vance and Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, gathered in the Situation Room last summer to debate how to manage the growing scandal.
• The White House is now abuzz over the leak about leak control.

Behind the scenes: Vance had "floated to colleagues an extraordinary P.R. gambit — that the White House enlist Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein's longtime girlfriend and co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison. It might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein," Swan and Haberman report in the excerpt, "Inside the White House Freakout Over the Epstein Files."

• "Vance told the group he believed all the files should be released as soon as possible," the authors write.
• But Trump, they add, wanted "the whole Epstein issue buried, and he was snapping at anyone who mentioned it. His staff largely avoided the subject in their conversations with him, forced to worry among themselves."

The intrigue: Joe Scarborough said on MS NOW's "Morning Joe," just after the excerpt was posted, that "Regime Change" will be "one of the most important books on the Trump presidency."

• Less than an hour later, Trump, known to watch "Morning Joe," posted on Truth Social: "Joe Scarborough's ever shrinking, low rated show, one of the most inaccurate detailers of truthful facts on television, is being crushed in the ratings."
• Scarborough promptly read the post on the air.

Swan and Haberman write that "relationships at the top of the Justice Department were by now beyond dysfunctional."

• Dan Bongino, a top MAGA podcaster who was then Trump's deputy FBI director, seethed about the Epstein snafus: "This is going to be President Trump's Iran-contra."
• "The Epstein crisis," the authors write, "had exposed something that some of Trump's closest advisers spent months refusing to see. The president could break institutions, redirect the federal government against his enemies and bring the world's richest men into the Oval Office bearing tribute. But he could not, it turned out, make Jeffrey Epstein disappear."

In the days before publication of a Wall Street Journal scoop about Trump and Epstein, Trump, in an "effort to quash the story, had called News Corp.'s chief executive, Robert Thomson; News Corp.'s owner, Rupert Murdoch; and The Journal's editor in chief, Emma Tucker. Practically shouting, the president told Tucker, who is British, that she must 'hate America.'"

• Emma Tucker tells Mike: "For the record, I LOVE America!"

The other side: White House spokeswoman Abigail Jackson said in a statement to Axios: "Just as President Trump has said, he's been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein. And by releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee's subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and calling for more investigations into Epstein's Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein's victims than anyone before him."

• Read the excerpt (gift link) ... Preorder the book.