MAGA could care less about the latest document dump on disgraced financier and convicted sexual abuser Jeffrey Epstein.
On Wednesday, the House Oversight Committee released 20,000 documents from Epstein’s estate, a number of which directly reference president Donald Trump. The cache of documents contain messages from Epstein, where the sex offender says he knows “how dirty Donald is,” and that the president had spent hours in Epstein’s own home with one of his victims. In one message from Epstein to author Michael Wolff, Epstein writes: “Of course he knew about the girls.”
The White House has dismissed the revelations as nothing but a partisan attempt to smear Trump, a narrative MAGA world has been more than happy to get behind, even though the same people spent years calling for further investigations into Epstein’s associates. In February, the White House gave a dozen right-wing influencers including conservative commentator Liz Wheeler and Chaya Raichik, the woman who runs the notorious LibsofTikTok account, access to a number of Epstein-related documents. They walked out of the White House waving white binders labeled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” and “The Most Transparent Administration in History,” though the administration later admitted many of the documents were already in the public domain.
But this week, following the drop of new documentation, the influencers have been silent.
MAGA influencers are either ignoring the new information or reframing it not as an indictment of Trump, but as part of a Democratic Party effort the president himself called “a hoax.” In many cases, MAGA influencers online focused instead on references to other people in the document dump, including a former New York Times journalist, a lawyer who worked as a White House counsel during the Obama administration, and Wolff, an author who has written several books about Trump.
“Why was anti-Trump author Michael Wolff advising convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein?,” Rogan O’Handley, a right-wing commentator known online as DC Draino, wrote on X.
O’Handley, an influencer who was also given the Epstein binders in February, echoed the White House’s claim that the document release was an attempt to “smear” Trump. O’Handley called for the release of all the Epstein files, though he failed to mention that it was Trump’s own administration who has prevented that from happening.
Posobiec, another member of the February influencer group, also flagged Wolff’s prominence in the release. “Michael Wolff was seemingly helping Epstein work to lie about Trump,” Posobiec wrote on X. “Never once asked him about the truth.”
Many right-wing figures on social media dismissed the entire document release as a hoax because of a single email from Epstein to Ghislaine Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year sentence for sex trafficking. “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is Trump.. [VICTIM] spent hours at my house with him,” Epstein wrote, before adding that Trump “has never once been mentioned” including by a “police chief.”
Maxwell responded: “I have been thinking about that.”
The victim’s name was redacted in the email initially released by the Democrats on the committee on Wednesday morning, but was unredacted in the wider release by Republicans later on Wednesday. That document shows the name “Virginia” which the White House says refers to Virginia Guiffre, who accused Epstein of abusing her for years before dying by suicide earlier this year.
MAGA figures claimed that because Guiffre herself has said she was not aware of any wrongdoing on Trump’s part, this redaction was evidence of the Democrats trying to falsify smears against the president.
“Today’s Epstein emails showed members of regime media colluding with Jeffrey Epstein to create hoaxes about Trump,” right-wing commentator Mike Cernovich wrote on X, with Posobiec adding: “This release blew up in Dems’ faces.”
Congresswoman Melanie Stansbury, a member of the House Oversight committee, told CNN that the document came to them from the Epstein estate already redacted.
Megyn Kelly, a former Fox News anchor, did talk about the Epstein case on her show on Wednesday. But rather than addressing the Trump allegations, she tried to claim Epstein, according to someone she said was close to the case, was not a pedophile.
“Jeffrey Epstein, in this person’s view, was not a pedophile,” Kelly said. “He was into the barely legal type. Like, he liked 15-year-old girls. And I realized this is disgusting. I’m definitely not trying to make an excuse for this. I’m just giving you facts, that he wasn’t into, like, 8-year-olds. But he liked the very young teen types that could pass for even younger than they were, but would look legal to a passerby.”
Trump whisperer Laura Loomer also largely ignored the Epstein story on Wednesday, though she did use it as a way of once again posting deeply islamophobic content:
“You can’t be outraged by the Epstein saga and simultaneously not be outraged by the fact that we have Muslims serving in Congress,” Loomer wrote on X. “Their ‘prophet’ was an infamous pedophile! Nobody wants to talk about that.”
While the vast majority of right-wing figures have dismissed the documents as irrelevant, there are a small number who are calling out the revelations. In a clip shared on X, conservative podcaster Candace Owens said “the Trump administration seems to have been hiding these emails. They’re not good, OK, they are completely indefensible.”
Nick Fuentes, the antisemitic far-right podcaster who recently ignited a civil war within the Republican Party after appearing on Tucker Carlson’s show, said Trump campaigned on a promise of transparency in relation to the Epstein files, before working with his administration to try and prevent their publication.
“This is a crisis of Trump’s own making, you have no one to blame but yourself,” Fuentes said on his own show Thursday night. “You can’t blame your own base for asking you to do what you promised to do. You can’t say your base doesn’t see the bigger picture or they’re conspiracy theorists if you played into that for years, which you did. The chickens have come home to roost now.”
The post All MAGA Wanted Was the Epstein Files. Now They’re Ignoring Them appeared first on Wired.
