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Days after Attorney General Pam Bondi tried to put an end to the Justice Department’s revelations about Jeffrey Epstein, captains of the legal resistance gathered by Zoom. Norm Eisen, a former attorney for Barack Obama’s White House, had convened lawyers, Democratic communications strategists, a neoconservative Trump critic, and a former chair of the Michigan Democratic Party. This one was big, Eisen said from his parked car in Baltimore, where he had traveled for a lawsuit to overturn President Donald Trump’s cuts to AmeriCorps. They should move quickly.

“The Trump-Epstein story is the story of the Trump administration—corruption benefiting his rich and powerful cronies at the expense of vulnerable people,” Eisen explained as I lurked on the July call with everyone’s permission.

The plan was to file a Hail Mary lawsuit to force the Department of Justice to release any documents in its possession that tie Epstein, a convicted child sex offender, to Trump. Eisen’s team had already filed the request for anything that connects the two men, under the Freedom of Information Act. The FOIA is normally a weak tool for unlocking investigative records gathered for criminal investigations, but Eisen had a legal theory: Because the DOJ had argued under pressure after Bondi’s announcement that the extraordinary public interest in the Epstein case required the unsealing of grand-jury testimony, they could argue the same thing. And that was just the beginning.

Eisen, who has pursued more than 100 legal matters against Trump since his second inauguration, explained that he wanted to try the case in the court of law and the court of public opinion. He asked for an update on an op-ed he had written raising questions about “a potential cover up” of Trump’s dealings with Epstein. He wanted a plan from Lavora Barnes, the former Michigan party chair, about how they would get elected leaders to discuss the Epstein records. He wanted a press plan to publicize the requests they had already filed, and the lawsuit they would file a few weeks later. A discussion followed about whether they should also try to intervene in the Justice Department’s effort to unseal grand-jury testimony, how many of the Epstein records they should demand to release, and how the Epstein issue fit with other arguments against Trump. “We have an extremely strong horse right now. Let’s just ride that,” said Bill Kristol, the resident neoconservative. “We want to know what’s going on with the Epstein files.”

The first seven months of Trump’s Oval Office do-over have been, with occasional exception, a tale of ruthless d