(Zero Hedge)—During an interview on ABC’s This Week with ABC’s Jonathan Karl on Sunday, Sen. Rand Paul of Kentucky delivered a blunt warning about the administration’s handling of the Epstein records, echoing concerns raised by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), who has been relentless on the issue.

Massie forced the release vote and has accused Attorney General Pam Bondi of violating the law by slow-walking and limiting disclosure.

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Paul did not dispute the core of that argument.

Instead, he went further, laying out exactly why half-measures on Epstein are political poison.

“I’ve supported transparency on the Epstein files from the beginning,” Paul said. “I’ve voted repeatedly to release them. I think it’s a good idea.”

Paul explained why that approach is doomed to fail.

“I think that trust in government is at a low ebb, and that people need to trust that justice is the same whether you’re rich or poor,” he said.

“And people tend to believe that some rich people got off scot-free in this — in the Epstein case, the Epstein files.”

Despite the Democrats’ attempts to weaponize the release of the files against Trump, the fact remains that the Biden administration sat on the files for four years—a decision that former Vice President Kamala Harris defends—despite endless rhetoric about transparency. Trump returned to office promising real transparency, and even Trump’s allies believe the administration has failed to live up to its promise fully.

Paul made clear that the administration’s fundamental mistake came when officials hyped the release and then appeared to back away once the spotlight intensified.

“I think it’s a big mistake,” Paul said.

“Look, the administration has struggled for months and months with something they initially ginned up and then sort of tried to tamp down.”

Paul warned that partial disclosure guarantees prolonged political fallout.

“So, any evidence or any kind of indication that there’s not a full reveal on this, this will just plague them for months and months more,” he said.

He’s right. Democrats have been insinuating for months that the Epstein files would somehow incriminate Trump, despite zero evidence. 

Paul offered simple advice that should not require a Senate seat to understand.

“So, my suggestion would be — give up all the information, release it,” he said.

“What’s going to happen to people if they don’t? That will play out over time. But my suggestion to them is be transparent and release everything the law requires of you.”

When Trump signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, and the documents failed to deliver the left’s long-promised bombshell, Democrats pivoted to conspiracy theories and bureaucratic excuses. For example, Democrats pounced when a photo from the Epstein files was briefly removed from the online cache of Epstein-related material. This led to conspiracy theories that the Department of Justice was trying to protect Trump.

In an appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche discussed the photo and the reason for the redactions in the files.

Blanche explained the removal had “nothing to do with President Trump” and was instead prompted by concerns over victim privacy after officials realized the images contained identifiable women. He stressed that DOJ policy allows victims, their lawyers, or advocacy groups to request that any document or photo identifying them be taken down and reviewed, a process he said explained the temporary disappearance of the materials.

“Well, you can see in that photo, there’s photographs of women,” Blanche said. “And so we learned after releasing that photograph that there were concerns about those, about those women, and the fact that we had put that photo up. So we pulled that photo down.”

Blanche also noted that numerous photos of Trump with Jeffrey Epstein have long been public, and that Trump himself has acknowledged socializing with Epstein in the 1990s and early 2000s before cutting ties with him years before Epstein’s 2006 arrest. Given that history, Blanche dismissed as “laughable” the notion that the department would selectively hide a single image to protect the president when “dozens” of similar photos are already in circulation.

Democrats have failed to produce a promised “smoking gun” linking Trump to Epstein’s crimes despite years of access to the files under the Biden administration, and are now seizing on procedural moves in the document release to sustain conspiracy theories. Nevertheless, if Republicans want to prove they mean what they say, the path forward is obvious. Release everything required by law. Let the facts land where they may. The longer Washington drags its feet, the louder the suspicion grows, and the harder it becomes to argue that this time is different.