The Bloomingdale precedent is the Reagan-era episode John Kiriakou uses as his template for how a president should answer an embarrassing friendship — raised in September 2025 as the counter-example to Donald Trump’s handling of the Epstein birthday book.
The scandal
Kiriakou had raised the case weeks earlier and returned to it. “There was a guy uh Bloomingdale, I forget his first name, but he was Ronald Reagan’s best friend and he was part of the the Reagan kitchen cabinet and he died. He died on top of his girlfriend who was 50 years younger than he was.”[1]
Offered the observation that there are worse ways to go, Kiriakou allowed it — “indeed” — before noting the obvious complication for the widow.[1][2]
The instinct, and the correction
A later Washington Post article, in Kiriakou’s account, reported what White House insiders had told journalists about the internal debate. “The the knee-jerk re reaction was going to be that Reagan would deny ever being close to to Bloomingdale. Uh he was just a guy, you know. Yeah, sure he was in some of these meetings, but we weren’t really close. It was just one of those things.”[2]
Then somebody stopped it: “Wait a minute. Wait a minute. If we lie and say that you weren’t closed, that’s going to be the story.”[2]
What was issued instead
The statement went out under Reagan’s signature and conceded everything. “Bloomingale was one of my best friends. He was a loyal friend for many years. We were close. We, you know, did this together. We did that together. Our wives were close. the circumstances of his passing are unfortunate, but that’s something between him and his God.”[3]
The verdict Kiriakou reports: “You know what? That was the perfect response.”[3][4]
The application
Kiriakou then wrote the statement he thinks Trump should have made: “Look, I was friendly with Epstein. I didn’t know he was a pedophile. And when I found out he was a pedophile, I cut off all contact and I banned him from Mara Lago. So yeah, okay. I I I sent this silly uh whatever this is birthday card, but we were friends at the time. After that, we weren’t friends. Just be honest about it.”[4]
His assessment of the alternative: “Calling it a Democrat hoax just makes him look stupid and it makes him look like he’s covering up.”[4] The pattern he names is “always deny, deny, deny” — “but the problem is that it’s not credible and then you get the drip drip drip which was always the mistake.”[5]