White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt was put on the spot Monday morning by a reporter sitting in the press briefing room’s “new media” seat.
Liam Cosgrove, a journalist at the blog Zero Hedge, whose users’ racist comments led to it being briefly banned by the Google Ads platform, pressed Leavitt to disclose when additional details about Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 suicide would be released. It took Cosgrove a while to get there, though.
Before asking about Epstein, Cosgrove brought up the “Clinton body count” conspiracy, which alleges that former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and former President Bill Clinton covertly murdered some of their political opponents. Cosgrove then suggested, without providing evidence, that the Clinton family and U.S. intelligence agencies may have been connected to Epstein’s death in New York City’s Metropolitan Correctional Center.
“That’s just a lead-in to my question about the most famous Clinton-related suicide, which is that of Jeffrey Epstein,” Cosgrove said. “There is still a lot of questions around that case. You’ve released phase one of the Epstein files. What was missing from that is any connection to his ties to intelligence agencies, and that’s really the whole story—not just trafficking young girls, but doing it on behalf of intelligence agencies, and even potentially as part of a blackmail ring with potential ties to the Israeli government. So, for phase two, when can we expect it? Will it have information pertaining to those aspects of the Epstein case?”
Leavitt’s response was not nearly as long-winded. She referred Cosgrove to the Justice Department for a timeline and said she is confident Attorney General Pam Bondi will make good on her promise to release more details about Epstein. FBI Director Kash Patel and his deputy, the former MAGA podcaster Dan Bongino, said over the weekend that they are confident Epstein killed himself and that the bureau has no information to back up online conspiracies.
Leavitt did not address Cosgrove’s other claims, and she did not call on him again during the briefing.
Cosgrove made the most of his time when cameras were on him. In the first half of his question, he read a snippet of a three-year-old news article about the suicide of an ex-aide to Bill Clinton. He also held up a printed-out Washington Post article that debunked details recently reshared by President Donald Trump regarding the Clinton body count conspiracy.
“So, over the weekend, President Trump posted to Truth Social a video highlighting what most people call the ‘Clinton body count,’ which is the strange number of suicides that seem to happen in Clinton circles,” he began. “I have a headline here from The Washington Post that said ‘Trump peddles false conspiracy theories tying Clintons to several deaths.’”
Leavitt appeared to smirk at the mention of one of Trump’s staunchest political foes.
Cosgrove continued, “So I just wanted to highlight real quick, this wasn’t in Trump’s video, but this is from the Arkansas Times, and it’s the death of Mark Middleton, who was a former Clinton White House aide who was found dead on a Clinton Foundation property. And I’ll just quote from the Arkansas Times: ‘Middleton apparently shot himself in the chest with a shotgun and also hung himself from a tree with an extension cord.’ So, I have no idea how somebody commits suicide that way, but if The Washington Post is here, maybe you can enlighten us as to how that was actually a suicide.”
Monday was not the first time Cosgrove grabbed headlines for his antics during an official press briefing. Last year, he criticized U.S. foreign policy spokesperson Matt Miller over the Biden administration’s support of Israel in its war with Hamas. He told Miller bluntly, “People are sick of the bulls–t in here.”
Cosgrove is not a regular in the White House briefing room. He was given a seat to Leavitt’s right at Monday’s briefing and asked the first question as part of an initiative by the Trump administration to allow new voices—largely conservative ones, like those of Tim Pool and other MAGA influencers—to ask questions of the administration.
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