The Jeffrey Epstein mess at the Department of Justice calls to mind Herman Wouk’s World War II novel “The Caine Mutiny.” The paranoid Captain Queeg — later portrayed by Humphrey Bogart on film — turns his ship upside-down in a manic search for a stolen quart of strawberries. Queeg orders fruitless cabin searches and crew interrogations until, finally relieved of duty, he mutters, “Ahh, but the strawberries, that’s where I had them. They laughed at me, but they were only trying to protect some fellow officers.”

Hundreds of employees at the Justice Department and the FBI conducted a similarly obsessive search, this time for Epstein’s mythical “client list” for sex-trafficking. The searchers combed through offices, cabinets, closets and hard drives, reviewing over 100,000 pages of documents. The effort consumed law enforcement resources but yielded nothing. Captain Queeg would have been proud.

The frantic search left the Justice Department with no choice but to contradict Attorney General Pam Bondi’s earlier claim that the client list was “sitting on my desk,” and admit that it possesses no such list. (Bondi has walked her claim back.)

To appease Trump’s enraged MAGA base, the department announced the diversion of even more crime-fighting resources to another pointless quest for missing strawberries — a........

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