Philip Bump catalogs all of the scandals President Trump has called “the biggest scandal in the history of our country.”

“Honestly, I’m starting to think that the president might be prone to exaggeration.”

William Kristol: “The Epstein affair is a genuine scandal that reaches beyond Trump. It’s the story of a shameful coverup of horrible crimes on behalf of our political, social, and financial elites. The worst sexual predator of recent decades was close to two U.S. presidents—and to countless others in positions of power, wealth, and celebrity.”

“In the face of such corruption and elite self-protection, the principled opposition must favor releasing all the files, exposing all the facts, without regard to who benefits.”

Jonathan Chait: “Imagine you were an elected official who discovered that an old friend had been running a sex-trafficking operation without your knowledge. You’d probably try very hard to make your innocence in the matter clear. You’d demand full transparency and answer any questions about your own involvement straightforwardly.”

“Donald Trump’s behavior regarding the Jeffrey Epstein case is… not that…”

“Perhaps Trump is simply so habituated to lying that he has no playbook for handling a matter in which he has nothing to hide. Or maybe, as seems more plausible by the day, he is acting guilty because he is.”

Sen. Thom Tillis (R-NC) said the Trump administration should “release the damn” Jeffrey Epstein files as the best way to put the whole issue in the rear view, Axios reports.

Said Tillis: “It makes no sense to me. Either it’s a nothing burger… or it’s something really disturbing, and that’s actually even a more compelling reason to release it.”

“President Donald Trump is angry. His team is exasperated. The Republican-controlled House is in near rebellion,” Politico reports.

“Trump and his closest allies thought they’d spend the summer taking a well-earned victory lap, having coaxed Congress into passing the megabill, bullied foreign governments into a slew of new trade arrangements, convinced NATO allies to spend billions more on collective defense and pressed world leaders to bow to various other demands from Doha to The Hague.”

“Instead, questions surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender, who was found dead in his jail cell by suicide nearly six years ago, are overshadowing almost everything else.”

Said one person close to the White House: “POTUS is clearly furious. It’s the first time I’ve seen them sort of paralyzed.”