Jeffrey Epstein is boring, according to President Donald Trump. Not for the first time, the US leader has suggested there are more important things to pay attention to. He may be right, but nobody is listening - they can not take their eyes off this trainwreck.
His Attorney General agrees: Pam Bondi told her ugly, bad-tempered oversight session with the House Judiciary Committee that we should be talking about the US stock market, which hit an all time high recently "thanks to President Trump".
"The Dow is over 50,000 right now, the S&P at almost 7000, and the Nasdaq smashing record," the Attorney General said, "That's what we should be talking about".
But most of the elected members wanted to talk about Epstein.
And not just to Ms Bondi, Commerce Secretary Howard Lutnick had to confirm at his hearing that he had indeed been to Epstein's Island - along with his wife and children, and another couple and their children in 2013.
So what? - they were next door neighbours in Manhattan, and the then boss of stockbrokers Cantor Fitzgerald happened to be in the vicinity of the Island cruising his yacht. A lunchtime drop in to see the next-door neighbour? Not a biggie.
Except Mr Lutnick had told a video podcast last November that he had cut ties with Epstein eight years earlier, in 2005, and was most emphatic about it.
This made Mr Lutnick fodder for TV comedy shows and cartoonists. He was literally a laughing stock and there were calls for his resignation.
The Secretary of Commerce was laughing himself back in the summer, 16 July to be exact.
That is when the President made his "boring" comment, in an effort to tamp down MAGA rage about an FBI statement saying that there was no Epstein client list in the Epstein Files, and that the former financier and convicted sex offender had taken his own life in jail in New York whilst awaiting trial.
These statements greatly upset those who subscribed to the conspiracy theories that Epstein kept a list of clients for a sex trafficking operation, and that he had been killed in prison to stop him spilling the beans on those clients.
Speaking to reporters before boarding Air Force One, the President said "I don't understand why the Epstein case would be of interest to anybody."
"It's pretty boring stuff. It's sordid, but it's boring, and I don't understand why it keeps going. I think really only pretty bad people, including fake news, want to keep something like that going," he added.
Standing beside the President was Mr Lutnick, who started laughing at the mention of the "fake news".
But the story refused to go away.
The House Oversight Committee was investigating, and was bounced into releasing its trove of documents forwarded by the Epstein Estate, including the so-called ‘Birthday Book’, a scrapbook of tributes from friends of the financier compiled for his 50th birthday by Ghislaine Maxwell.
The ‘Epstein Transparency Act’ was passed into law in November, despite a lot of foot-dragging by the Speaker of the House Mike Johnson and a lot of pressure from the White House not to do it.
Such was the pressure from the MAGA base, ordinary Republicans, and the Democratic Party machine that the urge to disclose was overwhelming.
It passed the US Congress, House and Senate, with just a single Representative voting against. In an era of bitter partisan gridlock, it was remarkable.
But it still took four Republican members of the House of Representatives to rebel against the party and the President to break the dam that was holding the Epstein files back from the public.
Nancy Mace, Marjorie Taylor Greene, Lauren Boebert and Thomas Massie, the four musketeers who said enough is enough, and ensured passage of the Epstein Transparency Bill in the House of Representatives.
All the rest scrambled to be seen to be on the right side of this one and produce that almost unanimous vote.
Mr Massie, Ms Taylor Greene and Ms Mace have all been targeted by the White House by being challenged in Republican primaries.
Ms Taylor Greene has already thrown in the towel.
Because of the way constituency maps get drawn in America, there are remarkably few really competitive seats in elections to Congress.
For most members, once you have won and manage to avoid facing a primary challenger - especially if backed by the party leader, in this case the President - then it is a relatively safe existence.
But if the big boss turns against you, it can all come crashing down long before election day.
That has already happened to Ms Taylor Greene.
Mr Massie is in a tough fight with a Mr Trump-backed primary challenger in Kentucky (he had disagreed with the President on a number of things, including the Big Beautiful Bill of budget measures), and Mr Trump has endorsed a rival republican challenger to Ms Mace in the South Carolina Governor's election.
Apart from standing firm on the Epstein Transparency Act, Ms Boebert has been pretty quiet of late, but still appears to be favoured by the White House.
Mr Massie sparred with Ms Bondi at the committee hearing during the week, notably for calling out Mr Lutnick over his Island trip, and the failures of the redaction process that led to multiple victims of Epstein being identifiable or not redacted at all in the released documents, while people accused of being co-conspirators with Epstein had their names blacked out.
Mr Massie (and co-sponsor of the Transparency Act, Democrat Ro Khanna) had visited the special reading room in the Department of Justice, where four terminals had been set up for members of Congress to view the unredacted Epstein files.
Mr Massie highlighted two cases - the recipient of an email in which Epstein wrote "loved the torture video", and a person named as a co-conspirator in an FBI document.
Read more: Top Goldman Sachs lawyer Ruemmler resigns after Epstein disclosures
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said on posts on X that the individuals were now named.
They were Leslie Wexner, the founder of lingerie chain Victoria's Secret and several other retail clothing chains, who denied any knowledge of Epstein's sex crimes, and Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, the Chairman and Chief Executive of Dubai-based DP world, a major shipping port owner and operator.
Yesterday, Mr Bin Sulayem resigned from DP world. Mr Wexner is one of five people the House Oversight committee announced it will be calling in for depositions between now and mid-March.
The others are Bill and Hilary Clinton, Darren Indyke, Epstein's former lawyer, and Richard Kahn, his former accountant.
Representative Ms Mace has also been turning up the heat on the investigation, and declaring her full blooded commitment to transparency and accountability.
On Thursday, she posted on X, "We are prepared to go full blown scorched earth for the victims of Jeffrey Epstein and his friends. With no regard to our personal, or professional detriment. This is about moral clarity.
"We will burn every bridge, fight every battle, and expose every name necessary to get justice for survivors. NO compromise. No backing down. HOLD THE LINE," she added.
Yesterday, she posted, "I appreciate the urgency of those telling me to name names or ‘STFU,’ and believe me, I share it. But I'm doing this the responsible way by thoroughly vetting every individual before naming them publicly.
"Not everyone on my list is an alleged predator. Some are witnesses. Some are survivors whose names I need to ensure are protected, not exposed. I’m just one person with a very small staff. Telling a fellow survivor to rush this process won't make it move any faster," she added.
"But I promise you, very soon. Here's where things stand: Letter sent to the DOJ yesterday about missing documents pulled down from their website SDNY Monday since their documents are still redacted particularly for the names of co-conspirators CIA Tuesday The CIA is in possession of information I believe the public has every right to see. I also want to be clear: I love life," she said.
Curiously, Congressman Massie also posted yesterday, "I am not suicidal. I eat healthy food. The brakes on my car and truck are in good shape. I practice good trigger discipline and never point a gun at anyone, including myself.
"There are no deep pools of water on my farm and I’m a pretty good swimmer," he said.
Ms Taylor Greene replied to his post, saying, "These are not the type of public statements that any of us should have to make but I’ll back this up as his friend. Thomas is one of the happiest people I know".
Earlier, Ms Taylor Greene, now describing herself as "former Congresswoman", was doing the rounds of conservative podcasts and being very critical of the Trump administration from a MAGA point of view.
On the ‘Home of the Brave’ video-podcast on Wednesday, she said: "The reality is the Trump administration is not releasing the information.
"And I got yelled at by the president over this. This is why he called me a traitor. He called me a traitor because I would not take my name off the discharge petition (to call the vote on the Epstein Transparency Act), because I stood firmly and said, ‘No, we are going to release the Epstein files.’"
"I'm not standing with the government. I don't support the cover-up of all of this stuff, whatever it may be," she added.
Ms Boebert was also on the electronic media during the week, appearing on conservative channel ‘Newsmax’ after viewing the unredacted Epstein files at the Department of Justice, and appearing to support the growing band of conspiracy theorists who believe that multiple references to pizza and jerky in the files are code words for something else.
"I saw more emails about torture, and these coded conversations still have a very clear topic, that torture was big. It was a big driver for them. And these were sick people doing very, very sick things," she said.
These four members of the Republican party have staked their reputations on defying the President and driving hard to expose as much of the Epstein files as they can.
It is costing most of them politically, and they are undoubtedly in a very uncomfortable personal space right now. So uncomfortable that two of them feel obliged to state that they are not suicidal.
Meanwhile, more and more American politicians and news organisations are taking note of the unfolding list of resignations and investigations that are taking place abroad - in Britain, in France, in Norway, in Dubai - and contrasting it with the lack of consequences or action here in the United States.
