Gavin Newsom was among the many critics of White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s wild assertion that Democrats are protecting pedophiles.
The California governor’s press office, in a post on X, responded to Leavitt’s comments Monday where she attacked Democrats for criticizing Immigration and Customs Enforcement. She also once again smeared Renee Nicole Good, the Minnesota woman shot and killed by an ICE agent last week under legally dubious circumstances.
Good was “a lunatic who was a part of a group, an organized group to interject and to impede on law enforcement organizations,” Leavitt, 28, asserted. “It’s disgusting what we have seen from the left, and I think it just shows you where the modern-day Democrat [sic] Party stands today, in protecting illegal alien pedophiles and rapists and murderers over law-abiding American citizens and our brave men and women who serve in law enforcement.”
Newsom, 58, honed in on Leavitt’s line about pedophiles, reminding everyone that the Justice Department has only released a fraction of its files on Jeffrey Epstein, the dead sex offender who said he was once Trump’s closest friend, despite the legally mandated deadline of Dec. 19.
“The Trump Administration has still not complied with Congressional law and released the Epstein Files … WHY?” he wrote suggestively, as hundreds of commenters on the Leavitt video expressed a similar sentiment.
“Pedo protector says what now?” the liberal media group Meidas Touch wrote on X, with others also noting the irony.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast about the backlash to Leavitt’s attack.
Throughout 2025, Trump tried to put the Epstein controversy behind him, but even Republicans in Congress—save one—eventually came around and voted to have the files be released last month. Yet less than one percent of them have been produced.
Some lawmakers have responded by floating legal action against Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has been at the center of the fiasco ever since the DOJ and FBI stated last July that no further Epstein files would be released. That move set off a firestorm on the right.
White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, in a Vanity Fair interview last month, said Bondi “whiffed” on handling the Epstein matter. Trump reportedly agreed.
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