President Donald Trump’s team spent a good deal of energy on Monday in unfamiliar territory: on the wrong side of a losing battle against America’s extreme online conspiracy theorists.
Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt was the face of the effort at her daily news briefing. But if Leavitt is looking for who is fueling the speculation around the dead New York financier and sex criminal who appeared on camera yucking it up with her boss, she needs to remember: the call is coming from inside the (White) house.
Epstein died in federal custody in 2019 while awaiting a second prosecution for his long-rumored sex trafficking of underage girls. His death was ruled a suicide.
At Monday’s news briefing, the White House spokeswoman sparred with Fox’s Peter Doocy (another bit of unfamiliar turf for her) over whether Attorney General Pam Bondi had specifically referred to the “Epstein Client List” when she told an interviewer she had “it on my desk” earlier this year.
That remark from Bondi, made during a Fox News interview, has caused headaches for the administration as it published a report stating that Epstein died by suicide and did so without creating a list of names of powerful men directly involved in his sex crimes involving underaged girls.
The FBI and Justice Department released videos the agencies say show nobody from outside entered the common area at the detention facility where Epstein was held in Manhattan over the time frame between when he was locked in his cell for the evening and the next morning.
After Doocy quoted Bondi directly, Leavitt replied, “Yes. She was saying the entirety of all of the paperwork, all of the paper relating to Jeffrey Epstein’s crimes”. Previous court filings have revealed the names of men associated with Epstein, but no definitive proof has emerged linking specific people to crimes, other than Epstein and his convicted “madam”, Ghislaine Maxwell.
This of course did not satisfy the online followers of news about Epstein and the rumors about the powerful figures with whom he was in contact. Intrigue over the arrest and death of Epstein in custody was supercharged by video of him with now-President Donald Trump and his extensive known relationships with a wide range of powerful people and institutions, which he cultivated through his financial largesse. Other figures with known ties to Epstein include former President Bill Clinton, Britain’s Prince Andrew, and the institution of Harvard University, where he maintained an office and visited campus after his 2008 sex crimes conviction.
Elon Musk, during his public falling-out with the president last month, tweeted and then deleted a message accusing Trump of being in “the Epstein Files”, and said it was the reason the list of Epstein’s famous clients was not being released. His opportunistic charge served to keep the story in the minds of many, and forced a denial from Vice President JD Vance. He renewed his efforts to push that connection after the administration’s announcement.
“First of all, absolutely not. Donald Trump didn’t do anything wrong with Jeffrey Epstein,” Vance said on Theo Von’s podcast. “Whatever the Democrats and the media says about him, that’s totally BS.”
On Monday, “Epstein” was the top trend on X/Twitter. Laura Loomer, one of Trump’s occasional White House guests and a semi-adviser responsible for a loyalty purge of the National Security Council (NSC), was in trademark venom-spitting mode as she accused Bondi of “incompetence”.
“@AGPamBondi should resign for lying to the American People,” tweeted Loomer Monday afternoon.
There’s no question: Trumpworld has lost the narrative on this one. But there’s a reason why: this is a beast (in part) of its own making.
While Vance is now in the uncomfortable spot of defending his boss from speculation, he was once one of the cheerleaders of the conspiracy himself, and not just as a one-off: it was during his previous appearance on Von’s podcast that the vice president, then a U.S. senator, told his host: “we need to release the Epstein [client] list”.
And on X, Vance was even more acerbic criticizing the Biden administration over the investigation. In late 2021, just months before he would go on to become the GOP nominee for Senate in Ohio, the Hillbilly Elegy writer retweeted a “Pizzagate” conspiracy theorist who has gone on to become a fixture inside Trumpworld, Jack Posobiec.
“What possible interest would the U.S. government have in keeping Epstein’s clients secret? Oh…” tweeted the nation’s future vice president.
In a second, longer rant aimed at another one of MAGA’s favorite targets, he then added: “If you’re a journalist and you’re not asking questions about this case you should be ashamed of yourself. What purpose do you even serve? I’m sure there’s a middle class teenager somewhere who could use some harassing right now but maybe try to do your job once in a while.”
There’s two lessons to take here: one, that not even the MAGA-fied White House can wrangle a conspiracy once the right-wing latches on to it; and second, that Vance made a serious judgement error when, in October of 2024, one week and six days before Election Day, he was presented with the choice of whether or not to fan the flames of a conspiracy involving his own running mate.
Vance, then a U.S. senator, knew better. Instead of definitively confirming the supposed existence of the “Epstein Client List” — of which his team is now denying the existence — he could have refused to speculate. Or he could have taken the DoJ at its word, given how likely it was at the time that he’d be defending that word in the future.
But at the time, it was still a problem for Joe Biden’s Justice Department and Kamala Harris’s legacy as the “prosecutor in the White House”.
Now, that lack of foresight is coming back to bite him.
