Right-wing media had a similar first response to new emails tying President Trump to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein: thunderous silence.
For hours, Fox News made nary a mention of the tranche, whose contents suggested, among other things, that the president knew more about the abuses perpetrated by Mr. Epstein, a former friend, than he had admitted.
Prominent podcasters like Ben Shapiro and Megyn Kelly focused on H-1B visas, the government shutdown and a proposal for 50-year mortgages on their shows and social media.
And the online troll account known as Catturd, which posts dozens of times every day to its nearly four million followers on X, spent the morning attacking Michelle Obama, Gov. Gavin Newsom of California and James Comey, the former director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.
But as time wore on, right-wing media figures began coalescing around another approach: focusing on a single redacted name in the emails.
They argued that Democrats on the House Oversight Committee — who had released three emails early on Wednesday — had created a false narrative by hiding the name of one of Mr. Epstein’s victims in one of the messages. The redaction, the theory went, was meant to cover up that the victim, Virginia Giuffre, previously said she had never witnessed Mr. Trump involved in sexual abuse of minors.
“This was done intentionally,” Rob Schmitt, a Newsmax anchor, wrote in an early-afternoon post on X that quickly spread widely. He followed up with a selfie-style video in a gym. “This is how sick and twisted these people are,” Mr. Schmitt said in the video, which he shared on Rumble. “They are vile creatures. This is what we’re up against.”
In the dependably administration-friendly world of conservative media, the question of how to address the president’s relationship with Mr. Epstein has proved particularly thorny. It has pitted abiding loyalty to Mr. Trump against growing demands from the MAGA base that the federal government release all its files related to the notorious predator.
But the unified response to this week’s disclosures shows how closely aligned right-wing media voices are with elected Republicans and the degree to which the two share story lines — and provide each other political cover. Indeed, the core message that ended up emanating from conservative media this week originated within the Oversight Committee itself, which jumped on the redaction question less than an hour after the three emails dropped.
“Why did Democrats cover up the name?” Republicans on the committee asked on X, adding: “Democrats are trying to create a fake narrative to slander President Trump.”
The White House also jumped into the conversation. “The ‘unnamed victim’ referenced in these emails is the late Virginia Giuffre, who repeatedly said President Trump was not involved in any wrongdoing whatsoever,” Karoline Leavitt said in a statement midday Wednesday. She called the redactions an effort to “smear President Trump.”
Although the committee also released some 23,000 pages of additional correspondence from Mr. Epstein on Wednesday, including dozens of messages discussing the president in sometimes unflattering terms, pro-Trump outlets accordingly fixated on that one redacted email.
“So far, they have proved NOTHING NEGATIVE against President Trump,” wrote David Freeman, an influencer who posts on X under the account name Gunther Eagleman and has 1.6 million followers.
According to House Democrats, there is no conspiracy: They redacted the name because of a standing practice on the committee not to name victims of sexual abuse. In August, Representative James R. Comer of Kentucky, the Republican chairman of the committee, said in a statement that he would release documents related to the Justice Department’s investigation only after ensuring that “the identification of victims and any child sexual abuse material are redacted.”
Later that month, the committee subpoenaed Mr. Epstein’s estate and since then has released multiple batches of documents, totaling tens of thousands of pages, with redactions. The large dump on Wednesday was no different, peppered by blacked-out sections presumably hiding names and other identifying information.
But after Ms. Leavitt’s remarks on Wednesday, Republicans on the committee released an unredacted copy of the email that the Democrats had put out, in apparent violation of the committee’s policy. It confirmed that Ms. Giuffre was the person named by Mr. Epstein in the 2011 email.
Ms. Giuffre died in April; her family said it was by suicide. In a 2016 deposition, she testified that while Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein were good friends, she didn’t “think Donald Trump had participated in anything.” In her memoir, released after her death this year, she said that “Trump couldn’t have been friendlier,” and never publicly accused him of wrongdoing.
House Democrats have stood firm on the question of redactions.
“We don’t confirm or deny the names of victims,” said Sara Guerrero, a spokeswoman for Democrats on the Oversight Committee. She added that they “have promised all survivors and their families that we will keep their identities private out of respect for them, and our commitment is that we redact all of their names from these documents.”
But right-wing outlets have continued to make their argument that Democrats had deliberately cooked up a controversy and that there was, they said, nothing to see here.
“Democrats tried to frame Donald Trump and got caught the same day, and it is insane,” Tim Pool, a podcaster, said on his show Thursday morning.
He, like many other conservative commenters, also latched on to the fact that in a number of the emails, the journalist Michael Wolff gave advice to Mr. Epstein about Mr. Trump. Mr. Pool called it “evidence of collusion” to damage the president’s reputation.
“Trump never did anything wrong,” Mr. Pool said, without addressing any of the thousands of other emails released this week.
Benny Johnson, a right-wing podcaster and staunch supporter of the president, framed it in starker terms. “They should be sued for this,” he said of congressional Democrats on his podcast on Thursday. “They didn’t expose President Trump.”
Ken Bensinger covers media and politics for The Times.
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