US President Donald Trump has urged Attorney General Pam Bondi should reveal “whatever she thinks is credible” on sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as he faces a rare pushback from supporters for attempting to close the investigation. Bondi has been chastised by some of Trump’s political supporters for claiming last week that there was no evidence that Epstein had a “client list” or blackmailed important persons. Over the weekend, Trump advised supporters not to “waste time and energy” on the topic. However, the president’s loyalists, like House Speaker Mike Johnson, are pushing for “transparency”. Epstein died in a US prison in 2019 while awaiting a federal trial, which was declared a suicide.
However, many members of Trump’s Make America Great Again (MAGA) movement believe that facts about the well-connected convicted paedophile’s crimes have been concealed in order to protect prominent persons or intelligence agencies. On Tuesday, Trump applauded his attorney general’s handling of the situation, saying, “She’s handled it very well, and it will be up to her. Whatever she considers credible, she should release.” When a journalist enquired if the attorney general had notified Trump whether his name featured in any of the records, he replied, “No, no.” Later on Tuesday, the president asked for the revelation of “credible” material, but he questioned the Epstein case’s persistent fascination, calling it “sordid but boring”.
“Only really bad people, including the fake news, want to keep something like this going,” Trump claimed. Who was Jeff Epstein? Last week, Obama expressed dissatisfaction in the Oval Office with the focus on Epstein and pushed everyone to move on. However, some of the president’s Republican backers refuse to let go of the issue. In an interview with US conservative pundit Benny Johnson on Tuesday, Speaker Johnson stated that he believed President Trump and his team and that the White House knew information about which he was unaware. However, he stated that Bondi “needs to come forward and explain it to everybody”.
“We should put everything out there and let the people decide,” Johnson said in an interview.
Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene told Benny Johnson in a separate interview on Tuesday: “I fully support transparency on this issue.”
She praised Bondi’s work as attorney general, but said that leaders and elected officials should keep their promises to voters.
Another conservative Republican, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, stated that if more Epstein files are not produced, a special counsel should be appointed to examine the financier’s misdeeds. Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana stated that citizens expect more responsibility. “I think it’s perfectly understandable that the American people would like to know who he [Epstein] trafficked those women to and why they weren’t prosecuted,” Kennedy told the television network NBC. Other prominent Republicans, including Senator John Thune and Congressman Jim Jordan, deferred to President Trump on the issue.
Bondi dismissed questions about the incident during an unrelated fentanyl news conference on Tuesday. “Nothing about Epstein,” she informed reporters. “I’m not going to talk about Epstein.” She said last week’s memo by the Department of Justice, jointly released with the FBI, denying to release any further files on Epstein and confirming his suicide, “speaks for itself”. Bondi said Fox News in February that a list of Epstein clients was on her desk for review, but her spokesman clarified last week that she was referring to the case’s overall files.
According to the document, the agency made its findings after evaluating over 300 gigabytes of data. On Tuesday, House Democrats attempted unsuccessfully to force a vote on disclosing the Epstein files. Republicans pointed out that President Joe Biden’s administration, which is Democrat, had access to the data but did not release them.
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