President Donald Trump’s former aide says she’s watched in astonishment as her ex-boss has refused to bend to MAGA’s will over the “Epstein files.”
“This is the first time I can really remember that Trump is sidestepping his base and not doing what they’re very vocally asking him to do,” Alyssa Farah Griffin, who briefly served as Trump’s director of communications in 2020, told CNN.
“If Donald Trump wants all of the information the government has on Jeffrey Epstein to be released, he can make that available—he can direct the attorney general to release it,” she went on. “So the fact he’s not, I think, raises a lot of questions. And this is an issue this White House is not going to be able to make go away overnight.”
Griffin added that, under ordinary circumstances, it would be unusual to expect the president to intervene in an independent investigation carried out by the Department of Justice (DOJ) but that “that is not how this DOJ and this White House operate.” “Folks are going to expect Trump to weigh in on this,” she added.
Her comments come amid a spiralling civil war among the president’s supporters sparked by a leaked memo from the DOJ and the FBI saying that no “client list” exists in the files of accused sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein and that he died by suicide while awaiting trial in his cell in 2019. Both claims had been the subject of conspiracies among Trump’s MAGA base.
Trump campaigned on releasing all files related to Epstein, and in February, Bondi claimed that the “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now.”
The roster’s failure to materialize has sparked a fierce battle between Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, who reportedly failed to show up to work on Friday and has threatened to resign over the DOJ’s handling of the case. Bongino and Bondi locked horns during a tense exchange at the White House on Wednesday, where Bongino accused Bondi of overpromising and underdelivering in front of FBI Director Kash Patel, White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and Deputy White House Chief of Staff Taylor Budowich.
While the fury of Trump’s supporters may for now be directed toward Bondi and Bongino—with die-hard MAGA influencer Laura Loomer leading calls for the attorney general to resign—Griffin speculated it may only be so long that the White House is able to contain the fallout.
“I would be stunned, just based on the job I held in the first Trump administration, if that DOJ memo from earlier this week went out without White House signoff beforehand,” she told CNN Friday. “The idea that the White House is sort of a bystander in this, that doesn’t have a dog in this fight, I don’t think is accurate.”
“This is one of the real issues with his base that I don’t think he can just hope is going to go away,” she added.
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