'Damning' omission in NYT's massive Epstein report flagged by journalist

A veteran national security blogger is calling foul on the New York Times' latest sprawling Epstein dive over one curious omission.

The name "Melania" does not appear anywhere in Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan's roughly 8,000-word piece detailing the White House's panicked response to the Epstein files, longtime legal commentator Marcy Wheeler pointed out on her Emptywheel blog on Thursday.

Wheeler argued the absence was "especially damning" because Haberman herself co-wrote a July 2019 NYT story noting that Epstein had bragged since Trump's election that he was the one who introduced the future president to his third wife. The 2019 piece, co-bylined by Annie Karni and Haberman, plainly mentioned Epstein's claim.

"Instead, Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan give us t---, a bulls-- claim that the White House was panicked about the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files primarily because a woman had claimed Trump abused a girl’s nipples until they hurt," wrote Wheeler.

The Melania question has since become a legal battle.

Earlier this year, an FBI document from a 2019 witness interview stated that "Epstein introduced Melania Trump to Donald Trump," an accusation Melania aggressively pushed back against, insisting in an April news conference that she met Trump "by chance" at a 1998 party. The first lady has threatened multi-billion-dollar defamation suits against journalists and authors who repeat the Epstein connection, including biographer Michael Wolff and Hunter Biden.

Wheeler argued The Times piece pursued other detail-rich angles, such as a passage on the strategy of having acting Attorney General Todd Blanche interview Ghislaine Maxwell, while leaving the explosive personal Trump-Epstein link untouched.

"With Maggie especially, it’s sometimes hard to tell whether she is deliberately crafting her narrative in service to clients, or whether she is just easily snookered by her sources," Wheeler railed.