Well, that didn’t take long. In the wee hours of Wednesday morning, under the cover of darkness, a statue depicting President Donald Trump and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein in celebration of their “friendship” was toppled by the U.S. Park Police. The installation was erected on Tuesday by an anonymous group known as Secret Handshake. The group’s leader, who asked to remain anonymous, told HuffPost in an interview Wednesday that the group had a legal permit for the statue until Sunday at 8 p.m. A copy of the permit was reviewed by HuffPost.The statue that depicted President Donald Trump and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein holding hands was destroyed by the National Park Service, according to the group that erected it on the National Mall.The Secret HandshakeA statue of President Donald Trump and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein holding hands lies broken after it was installed on the National Mall by a group known as The Secret Handshake.The Secret HandshakeA statue of President Donald Trump and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein holding hands lies broken after it was installed on the National Mall by a group known as The Secret Handshake.The Secret Handshake“We found out at the end of the day that some people within the Parks Department aka most likely the Trump administration were trying to find ways to say we were not in compliance. We were then told everything is OK and that if the administration decided to remove it we would have 24 hours notice to take it down ourselves,” he said. ”Instead, they showed up in the middle of the night without notice and physically toppled the statue, broke it, and took it away.”The leader of the group told HuffPost that they were “permitted to see photos of our property that the government destroyed.” U.S. Park Police are under federal control and fall under the umbrella of the National Park Service. Requests for comment to the Park Police were not immediately returned to HuffPost on Wednesday. The White House did not respond to a request for comment. A spokesperson for the Department of Interior, which oversees the National Park Service, told HuffPost in an email Wednesday only that “the statue was removed because it was not compliant with the permit issued.”Under the permit’s general terms and conditions, there is a section that notes the permit can be suspended or revoked “without notice if destruction of, loss of, or injury to any park property or resource has occurred, is occurring or appears imminent.” The permit also states that it can be revoked “at any time after providing 24 hours’ written notice to the permittee setting forth the reasons for the revocation.”In a video shared with HuffPost as the statue was about to be toppled, someone who identified themselves as a National Park Service official told two onlookers that they were removing the installation because it was too large. “Requirements of the permit state that it has to be 6 foot by 3.5 foot and this is 9 foot by — and larger than that. So we’re out of compliance here,” the official says in the video. The permit issued to Secret Handshake describes the statue as 6′ by 3.5′. The group described the statue as 12 feet tall when it first went up.The leader of Secret Handshake told HuffPost that they submitted the specs for the installation “correctly” at 12 feet but “the Parks Department, somewhere along the line, forgot to add the base to the permit and only wrote in the 6 feet for the statues.”“We did not realize this until yesterday when we were told there was internal pressure to find a reason to remove this statue,” he said. “We resubmitted the specs and were told that if they decided to revoke our permit we would be given 24 hours’ notice.”“Instead, people showed up in the middle of the night, destroyed it and hauled it away,” the organizer said.As the statue is being removed in the video, onlookers can be heard giggling as the statue crashes into the gravel below it.“Look at all the police … aww, poor baby,” one onlooker says.Trump, who has already been worked into a lather over satirical jabs at him, has tried to avoid talk of Epstein of late — a markedly different position from years past where he would amplify doubts and conspiracy theories about Epstein, his suicide in prison as he awaited sex trafficking charges or the wealthy elites who ran in Epstein’s circles and the need to expose them. But after the Justice Department announced that the much-vaunted “client list” of Epstein’s was not sitting on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s desk as she had proclaimed it was in February, it didn’t take long for Trump’s supporters in and out of Congress to demand answers.And those may be coming soon: A demand to the Justice Department for a full release of the Epstein files led by Reps. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.) and Ro Khanna (D-Calif.) inched somewhat closer to reality on Tuesday night thanks to a special election in Arizona.