Mother Jones illustration; Davidoff Studios/Getty
“We’re on one Team, MAGA,” Donald Trump wrote on TruthSocial over the weekend, “and I don’t like what’s happening.”
“We have a PERFECT Administration,” he added, “THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein. For years, it’s Epstein, over and over again.”
Dead billionaire pedophile Jeffrey Epstein has indeed been experiencing a remarkable moment of renewed relevance. An unsigned memo from the FBI and Department of Justice, first reported by Axios on July 6, said the government concluded Epstein was not blackmailing powerful people, did not maintain a “client list,” and was not murdered. Chaos and outrage ensued, and now, thanks to continued missteps by Trump and his administration, will continue more or less forever.
“Time is running out. And the president who promised to ‘demolish the Deep State’ is watching from the White House.”
The MAGA base, especially its more QAnon-y quadrants, feel deeply betrayed and increasingly suspicious by what they see as an unforgivable level of inaction and obfuscation on Epstein from the Trump administration. “Please understand the EPSTEIN AFFAIR is not going away,” General Michael Flynn tweeted recently at Trump. (While Flynn has denied being a QAnon believer, he was an early promoter of elements of the conspiracy theory before disavowing it; he continues to make claims about a secretive group of evildoers engaged in child trafficking and sexual abuse.) “You’re going to lose 10 percent of the MAGA movement,” warned former Trump adviser Steve Bannon. At the Turning Point USA conference in Florida over the weekend, much of the crowd booed when asked if they were satisfied with Trump’s handling of the Epstein case.
All of this could have been avoided, had Trump officials not committed themselves to a spectacular series of own-goals. The mess began when Epstein died by suicide on August 9, 2019 after understaffed, overworked, and negligent Bureau of Prisons staff, even after a previous suicide attempt, left Epstein alone for long periods of time in a cell well-stocked with bed linen.
Yet the fact that both his death and arrest on federal charges occurred during Trump’s first presidency did not prevent Trump and his allies from confidently declaring that when Trump took office again, he would expose the real truth behind both Epstein’s death and his crimes. They also helped set into motion the narrative that powerful people didn’t want his supposed “client list” released—a list that journalists covering the case for years, like investigative reporter Julie K. Brown, have said they do not believe exists. (Epstein’s address book, meanwhile, has been public since Gawker published portions of it in 2015. Writer and filmmaker Leland Nally called everyone in it and wrote about the results for Mother Jones in 2020; this didn’t always mean chatting up the world elite: “Sometimes I would have delightful conversations with normal people who had cleaned a car or given Epstein a facial, and only shared in my distaste for Epstein and his circle.”)
Trump’s own family got in on the game, pushing the idea of a conspiracy of silence: in January 2024 Donald Trump Jr. tweeted, “I keep hearing about some of the Jeffrey Epstein clients’ names being released today. But I’d be willing to bet that something happens between now and then that prevents those names from ever coming out. You just know that’s coming, though I hope to be proven wrong.” So did future administration officials, like FBI Director Kash Patel, who claimed in 2023 that the Epstein client list hadn’t been released yet “because of who’s on that list,” adding, “You don’t think that Bill Gates is lobbying Congress night and day to prevent the disclosure of that list?”
(While Gates did have a long friendship with Epstein that continued even after his then-wife reportedly expressed discomfort, he has said that spending time with Epstein was a “mistake” and called conspiracy theories about his own conduct “crazy.” He has never been accused of a crime.)
The MAGA base bought wholly into the notion that Trump was the only person who could expose Epstein—even with the awkward fact that Trump knew both Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, Epstein’s ex-girlfriend and procurer, who’s now serving 20 years in prison for sex trafficking. The two men interacted socially for decades, with Trump describing Epstein as a “great guy” to New York magazine in 2002. He also flew on Epstein’s plane several times in the 1990s. (Now-HHS secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. has said he took it twice.) Trump and Epstein are believed to have had a falling out, possibly over a failed business deal.
Neither Trump nor Kennedy has been credibly accused of engaging in sex crimes with Epstein, but in 2016, I and other journalists investigated a lawsuit filed against Trump accusing him of raping a 13-year-old at an orgy hosted by Epstein. The man promoting the suit to the media had a record of making unsubstantiated charges against prominent people, and neither I nor the other journalists who investigated the story ever proved that “Katie Johnson,” the pseudonym of the woman who allegedly filed the lawsuit, was a real person. Apart from one odd interview with the Daily Mail, the person claiming to be the plaintiff did not otherwise speak directly to the press before dropping her suit.
Much of the MAGA base’s current anger has settled on Attorney General Pam Bondi, who once promised that the Epstein client list was “on [her] desk” awaiting her review, as well as FBI Director Kash Patel. (Conservative talking head turned FBI deputy director Dan Bongino even reportedly stopped showing up for work over his supposed anger at Bondi over the handling of the list, leading his allies to speculate to Axios that he wasn’t coming back.) Bondi was also part of the failed February stunt in which conservative influencers were given binders of very old and previously released Epstein material that the administration claimed was new.
In the most serious error this time around, alongside last week’s memo the Department of Justice also released what they described as “raw” surveillance footage from outside Epstein’s cell on the night he died. But Wired’s Dhruv Mehrotra found that the footage showed clear signs of being edited, stitched together from several clips and processed by Adobe Premier before being made public. While it’s entirely possible that those signs are simply the result of the footage being formatted to upload to the internet, simply describing the footage as “raw” when it wasn’t has fueled yet more conspiracy theories. It didn’t help that one minute of video was missing; something Bondi defended as normal and something that happens daily.
All of this is excellent content for the many conservative and far-right media figures and talking heads who constantly need something new to feed to their own base—certainly it’s more exciting than talking about the slow controlled demolition of the federal government under Trump or his constant threats to impose large tariffs on America’s closest trading partners. Sometimes, this quest to keep Epstein front and center without any new information can even take darkly comic forms: several fringe far-right and conservative figures claimed over the weekend that Epstein’s client list had been released on the dark web by a hacker called “Island Boy.” One Twitter user with over 100,000 followers tweeted excerpts from the alleged list—many of them were simply people in Epstein’s long-released address book; the graphic the person included was the art that Mother Jones made for our 2020 story delving into Epstein’s wide ranging contacts.
Plenty of longtime Trump allies are now delicately scrambling to condemn the handling of the Epstein affair without condemning Trump himself. Often, this has led to even weirder conspiracy theories about what the Epstein files “really” reveal: Tucker Carlson, for instance, is among those on the right who have baselessly suggested that Jeffrey Epstein had “direct connections to a foreign government,” as he put it, and that “no one is allowed to say that foreign government is Israel.”
Grumbling about the Trump’s administration’s record on Epstein began before the release of the memo. Conservative legal organization Judicial Watch, for instance, whose president Tom Fitton and Donald Trump have long been mutual admirers, filed a FOIA lawsuit in April demanding Epstein-related files from the DOJ. Judicial Watch has suggested that the Epstein affair is but one element contributing to broader dissatisfaction over a lack of transparency under Trump. As Micah Morrison, an investigator for the group, wrote after the memo closing the Epstein case, FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino are “hostages,” as he put it, to a Deep State impeding disclosure, and that the two men and Bondi need to make good on Trump’s promises.
“Conservatives still wish them well,” he wrote, “but time is running out. And the president who promised to ‘demolish the Deep State‘ is watching from the White House. They will not be forgiven for bungling a historic opportunity.”
By Monday, eight days after the memo first made news, there were clear signs that the Trump administration had simply decided to cave to the outrage and claim that there actually were still revelations forthcoming and that they would reopen an investigation into Epstein’s alleged associates—even after saying definitively that such an investigation has already concluded. Conservative talking head and former Buzzfeed plagiarist Benny Johnson, who has close ties with the administration, hosted Lara Trump on his podcast Monday afternoon. In her appearance, the president’s daughter-in-law told Johnson that “he is going to want to set things right. I believe there will be more coming and anything they are able to release they will try to get out.”
Johnson himself then claimed on Monday evening that he’d been speaking to a “top federal law enforcement contact,” adding, “The change in approach to Epstein has been dramatic. Expect more disclosures.” (While Johnson didn’t disclose who he’d been speaking to, he’s described Bongino as a friend and mentor.)
“In short,” Johnson added, “our voices are being heard, power to the people.”