If you believe J.D. Vance, Donald Trump wants “full transparency” when it comes to the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case. Of course, if that were true, we’d know what the Epstein files say about the president and others who were close with the billionaire who trafficked underage girls.
Instead, the administration — through Vance — is trying to distract Americans from focusing on Trump’s relationship with Epstein and is instead pointing the finger at “left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires.”
“We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires,” Vance said in an interview with Maria Bartiromo that aired Sunday on Fox News, “and now President Trump has demanded full transparency from this, and yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him and not the Biden administration which did nothing for four years.”
Far from demanding “full transparency,” Trump and his administration have evaded calls to release the contents of the files. Although Attorney General Pam Bondi claimed that Epstein’s infamous client list was “sitting on my desk right now to review” in February of this year, last month, the DOJ released a memo stating that after an “exhaustive review,” officials decided there was no evidence of an “incriminating ‘client list.’”
Hence, the administration’s PR policy of distract and deflect.
“Democrat billionaires and Democrat political leaders went to Epstein island all the time,” Vance accused on Fox News. “Who knows what they did.”
It’s true that Epstein had ties to former president Bill Clinton and billionaire Bill Gates as well as former British prime minister Tony Blair and Prince Andrew. In 2019, after Epstein was arrested and indicted for sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors, Clinton said through a press secretary that he “knows nothing about the terrible crimes Jeffrey Epstein pleaded guilty to in Florida some years ago, or those with which he has recently [been] charged in New York.”
One Epstein victim testified that, according to Epstein, Clinton liked “young… girls.”
“[Epstein] said one time that Clinton likes them young, referring to girls,” Johanna Sjoberg testified in a 2016 deposition.
But there are no records of Clinton going to Epstein’s private island, despite Trump’s recent allegation that the former president visited the island “28 times.”
Of course, one way to clear all this up would be for Trump’s administration to release the contents of the Epstein files with victims’ identification redacted. But the president might not want to do that, considering his own once close relationship with Epstein and reports that he is named multiple times in the files.
In recorded conversations with author Michael Wolff, Epstein once called himself “Donald’s closest friend for 10 years.”
Trump also described himself and Epstein as friendly. “I’ve known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with,” Trump told New York Magazine in 2002. “It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
Maria Farmer, a former Epstein employee, even said she warned law enforcement in 1996 and 2006 about Trump and Epstein’s relationship.
But by 2019 — after Epstein was arrested by the FBI — Trump claimed, “I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you,” and said they had not been friends for 15 years.
Americans thus far are mostly not fooled by the Trump administration’s ham-handed attempts to distract them from the issue. A recent UMass Amherst poll revealed that 70 percent of respondents believe Trump is not handling the Epstein case well, and 63 percent said that the Trump administration “is hiding important information” about the case.
