Donald Trump’s presidential transition currently underway has by all accounts been a smooth and seamless process. Indeed, just yesterday, Emerson College released a poll that gave the soon-to-be 47th President one of the highest approval ratings in his entire political career. The Emerson poll was matched by a CBS poll, which showed a supermajority of Americans – 65% – approved the transition process so far, a commanding figure that supplements the President’s commanding victory, a political landslide, from a little over three weeks ago.

Because things are moving remarkably smooth – the process has been analogized to a “well-oiled machine” – some of the usual suspects in the flailing, failing legacy news media – i.e., The New York Times and CNN, et al. – have been scampering about, in a nervous frenzy, trying to make mountains out of not even molehills, but what might at best be described as mere specks of dust. And so, the usual culprits in the lying press naturally target the most loyal confidantes – and this week, it was Boris Epshteyn in the media crosshairs. Epshteyn is the President’s long-time trusted legal adviser, who formerly served in the first administration, and has been overseeing significant aspects of the present transition from an exclusive perch at Mar-a-Lago. Epshteyn was a natural target for legacy media: he has been so loyal to President Trump, having served by 47’s side and remaining a ubiquitous presence ever since that fateful descent from the golden escalator nearly a decade ago. This loyalty is so rare in politics – but it’s especially rare among lawyers, particularly in the Trump orbit of the last ten years or so, who have undergone significant turnover in handling the various investigations, witch-hunts, and legal charades that have targeted both President and his fiercest allies alike – in large part because so few were willing to stand by Donald Trump when things got really tough.

And tough things got. Although now seemingly the entire world is – rightly – elated by the President’s historic feat, and duly participating in those celebrations, signing up in droves to work for the incoming Trump administration, two short years ago it was a dramatically different story. Then, there were only a handful of stalwart loyalists who stuck out their necks for the President – and still believed he had another successful run in him – as the rest of the political world wrote him off, condemning the 45th President to political exile for all time.

Boris Epshteyn was one such loyalist who stood by Donald Trump. It was during these dark, uncertain days that Epshteyn proved he was made of sterner stuff. During this time, he helped assemble the legal teams – which now include superstars like Todd Blanche, Trump’s pick for Deputy Attorney General, and Emil Bove, the soon-to-be Principal Associate Deputy Attorney General – that were facing a legal battle for the ages. Epshteyn and the legal team he helped assemble were about to plunge into unprecedented waters, one whose prospects of victory were at the time exceedingly bleak. It’s easy in hindsight, with victory now in tow, to forget just how grim the times were even just two short years ago when the President was basically forced into announcing a third presidential run with the looming prospect of political persecution hanging over his head. It’s not like he had much of a choice, and the choice he did have was quite stark: become president again, or face maybe the rest of his life behind bars. For his lawyers, the prospects weren’t much better: any would-be loss came with not just the threat of a legal defeat but possibly even prison for defending the greatest enemy of the Biden regime. To put things mildly, there wasn’t much room for error!

The unprecedented nature of not only the political landscape, but the legal landscape, would have made even the most seasoned attorneys with decades of litigation experience under their belts tremble in their boots. These extraordinarily high stakes were raised even further by what rode on the shoulders of President Trump’s intrepid legal team. A victory in the courts was essential to not only ensuring President Trump’s freedom but maybe even more significantly, the prospect of fair and impartial justice ever being possible in the United States again. If Donald Trump had not proven successful, both legally and politically, America would have descended into full-fledged communism: radical leftist judges and prosecutors in New York, Washington, and Georgia were eager to use their offices to exact political revenge against the next President of the United States. That is no exaggeration. These vindictive operators within the justice system knew they had full protection from the Biden administration, whose Justice Department not only greenlit the prosecutions but even spearheaded them with the Jack Smith investigations and subsequent indictments. These charges were always based on groundless evidence and makeshift theories, merely devised for the purposes of interfering with an election and sabotaging the greatest threat to the deep state: Donald Trump.

Epshteyn and a few other lawyers, like Blanche and Bove, were thus tasked with a formidable assignment – it was essentially them against an entire system, mostly rigged to their disadvantage by the powers that be who were out for blood. All of these dark ruminations are easy to forget in the light of victory – and with that victory, the dismissals, one by one like dominoes, of each of the phony, bogus cases against Donald Trump. Soon after Trump won earlier this month, Judge Juan Merchan of New York – who oversaw the Alvin Bragg criminal case that resulted in thirty-four fake felony counts against 47 – announced that the sentencing for that case has been indefinitely postponed. Shortly thereafter, Jack Smith – the illegitimate Special Counsel appointed to launch an unprecedented political hatchet job against a former and future President – dropped both his cases, the first about the stolen 2020 election, and the second about the classified documents – on Monday, representing another seismic victory for President Trump and his legal team. Finally, the Georgia election case, which has been a disaster for Fani Willis and Nathan Wade ever since it got revealed that the two were involved in an unethical romantic tryst, is effectively frozen due to the obscene blunders – and likely crimes – committed by the prosecutors in that case. Boris Epshteyn, legal strategist extraordinaire, deserves a great deal of credit for each of those legal victories. All throughout he called plays and stood at the center of a legal operation that navigated the complex matrix of state and federal law with unflinching resolve and ease. No small feat.

One can easily put two and two together: the legal victories announced this week occurred alongside allegations that Mr. Epshteyn had been engaged in a so-called “pay-to-play scheme” implicating would-be Trump cabinet nominees. The New York Times report, always sparse on meat-and-potatoes facts, sources, and truth, relied on hearsay and torturously pieced together “evidence,” the apparent modus operandi of Maggie Haberman, to contrive what so clearly was intended as a hit piece. Rather than speak to the subjects directly, the “Newspaper of Record” and related outlets in cable news, like CNN, prefer to run wild on unsubstantiated innuendo. If these outlets had done even an iota of due diligence, they would have quickly discovered that any tensions which might have existed (if at all) between the reported subjects were long dead and buried. In fact, on the same day, the Daily Mail reported that Donald Trump had called Epshteyn “to congratulate him and thank him for his work” in helping topple the dominoes of lawfare that sent the entire nation into a tailspin these harrowing last two years. If any of the Times “reporters” (an extremely generous descriptor) had done but a morsel of research, they would have quickly come to the conclusion that no such “story” existed. If any contretemps were made, they were blown —egregiously — out of proportion. In other words, this was a fake news story that was made into something for the purposes of drama and stimulating the Times’ (and several other legacy news outlets) dying readership’s appetite for intrigue, which is about all they have left given their newspaper’s failing reputation in the eyes of both the public and national press.

For his part, Donald Trump excoriated Haberman’s slipshod reporting – pretty much on par with Fani Willi’s lawyering – in an explosive Truth Social Post: “Magot Hagerman, a third-rate writer and fourth-rate intellect, writes story after story, always terrible, and yet I almost never speak to her. [The NY Times] do no fact checking, because facts don’t matter to them.” The New York Times – and accompanying outlets in the dying legacy media – have been grasping at straws all week long, attempting to sow discord in a transition team that has been an incredible operation, with really all hands on deck, each of its main players – from Elon Musk to Susie Wiles to Howard Lutnick to Boris Epshteyn, and many others – contributing their individual talents in a way that best elevates and enhances the whole product. Epshteyn was the week’s target because of the positive news about the collapse of most of the lawfare against Donald Trump. Those within the inner circle, especially, who have garnered stellar reputations for both loyalty and competence — over years of unrelenting service to the President — are routinely perceived as the greatest threats of all, because these are precisely the types who are committed to the mission – and will do everything to make Donald Trump’s dream of putting America First a reality – no matter how tall the odds, or how stacked the deck.

Boris Epshteyn who played a major role in an exceptional legal enterprise that accomplished something that nobody thought was possible even just a year ago thus made for a convenient — and maybe likeliest — scapegoat considering his longstanding tenure, as a centerpiece of the legal machinery. As with any political operation, especially one of the scale and mandate of this transition team, there will be occasional disagreements between its leaders. That is the nature of the business. But that should never detract from the shared vision of the mission at large. Communications director Steven Cheung vindicated this goal by signaling that the team had resolved any issues by stating, “We are now moving ahead together as a team to help President Trump Make America Great Again.”

Epshteyn, who has been an integral component of that team since day one, having ascended into the position of leadership and respect he now rightly commands over many years of hard work, dedication, and loyalty, deserves the prestige he has obtained and the benefit of any doubt. Without a doubt, he will continue to be an indispensable piece in the President’s mission for years to come. Epshteyn has the pedigree of an adept legal steward who navigated the ship out of some of the most treacherous waters — four indictments and countless made-up charges — seen by any team of lawyers of any political candidate in American history.

Epshteyn not only survived but thrived when many of his peers in the profession — facing near-insurmountable odds — would have choked. The experience he gathered defending Donald Trump will remain ever relevant in now pivoting to help the team clean up a justice system that has been corrupted by petty and self-serving actors, once and for all. For that, Boris Epshteyn deserves not just the praise of the transition team and legal profession, but from all American patriots — who owe a debt of gratitude to the trailblazing efforts of that legendary legal apparatus he orchestrated which allowed the pulse of liberty and the rule of law to beat on another day in America.

Paul Ingrassia is a Constitutional Scholar; Communications Director of the NCLU; a two-time Claremont Fellow, and is on the Board of Advisors of the New York Young Republican Club and the Italian American Civil Rights League. He writes a widely read Substack that is regularly posted on Truth Social by President Trump. Follow him on X @PaulIngrassia, Substack, Truth Social, Instagram, and Rumble.

The opinions expressed by columnists are their own and do not necessarily represent the views of AMAC or AMAC Action.