A day after proclaiming that he was “done talking about” Jeffrey Epstein and that he would “trust my friends in the government” amid the MAGA fallout over the Trump administration’s handling of the disgraced financier’s files, Charlie Kirk is now insisting that he merely meant “yesterday” and he would continue to discuss the issue.
The Turning Point USA founder’s walkback comes as Donald Trump has been unable to quell the right-wing firestorm over his Department of Justice’s memo last week that concluded Epstein was not murdered in jail and did not maintain a “client list” in order to blackmail prominent figures who took part in his underage sex trafficking.
Over the weekend, the president ordered his MAGA “boys” and “gals” to move on from the Epstein files, which he wildly suggested were fake and “written by Obama” and “Crooked Hillary.” He also urged his base to fall in line and support Attorney General Pam Bondi, who has been under intense fire for signing off on the memo despite previously boasting that she had the “client list” on her desk.
Trump has also privately doubled down on his support for Bondi, who recently clashed with FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino amid a growing rift between the FBI and DIJ over the fallout from the Epstein memo, prompting Bongino to consider resigning.
With the president pushing his aides to let the Epstein saga die out, he’s also called some of Bondi’s most vocal critics in the MAGAsphere to get them to back off – including Kirk, who has been largely critical of Bondi. Additionally, speakers and attendees at this past weekend’s TPUSA student summit bashed Bondi and the administration for their handling of the Epstein case.
“Plenty was said this last weekend at our event about Epstein,” Kirk declared on his Monday podcast. “Honestly, I'm done talking about Epstein for the time being. I'm gonna trust my friends in the administration, I'm gonna trust my friends in the government to do what needs to be done [and] solve it. Ball's in their hands.”
Adding that “everyone knows my opinion about the Epstein thing,” Kirk concluded on Monday by reiterating that he would “trust my friends” in the administration before telling viewers that he was moving on to other matters.
“I think that there was plenty of, let's say, speeches that were directed towards this topic this last weekend,” he stated. “So we don't need to spend our valuable time on this program relitigating it.”
With Kirk’s comments about moving on from Epstein drawing scrutiny and headlines, especially in light of his phone call with Trump, the right-wing activist took to his Tuesday show to maintain that he had never intended to drop the issue altogether.
Grumbling that he was responding to the “viral fake news” that he was done talking about the deceased sexual predator, Kirk complained about the amount of coverage his comments on Monday received before reading them back in full, claiming he was misconstrued.
“‘Honestly, I'm done talking about Epstein for the time being.’ Nobody, not a single news outlet, said ‘for the time being.’ They did not include that second part of the sentence,” he groused. (For the record, most publications included that part of the quote – including The Independent.)
“Again, no one covered the second part of the statement,” Kirk continued. “No one covered it. This thing has, like, 10 million views on social media. And, unfortunately, too many people on our side fell for this garbage. And I get that it’s heightened — and, by the way, part of this is I'm gonna have some compassion. This is a very hot moment. Very hot.”
He also took issue with the amount of criticism he’s taken for saying that he's going to trust his “friends in the government,” noting that he’s “not trusting the government” but rather individual members of the administration that he knows his viewers admire.
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“You guys are all fans of Dan Bongino and Kash Patel,” he said. “We are trusting that they heard you, they heard me, and they are working to fix this. Let me finish this. But let me say this again — I would love to see the DOJ move to unseal the grand jury testimony.”
After wondering if he “should I have said those five words in the sequence I said,” Kirk continued to bash the media’s coverage of his remarks before asserting that he merely meant he was taking a one-day break from Epstein-gate.
“When I said for the time being, I was talking yesterday,” he huffed. “I was telling the audience, guys, I got a whole deck of stories I gotta cover here. You see, they wanna cover MAGA in disarray, and there is so much going on right now.”
While insisting that he would continue to focus on the Epstein case during his podcast on Tuesday, that wasn’t the case during a Fox News interview the same day. During an appearance on Harris Faulkner’s morning news program to discuss TPUSA’s weekend event, which saw thousands of attendees irate and angry over the Epstein fiasco, Kirk and the Fox anchor completely sidestepped the issue.
Of course, Fox News has heeded the president’s call to stop covering Epstein amid the continued backlash. Starting Monday morning, the conservative cable giant has all but ignored the issue, mentioning the deceased pedophile a total of just eight times the entire day, with zero mentions before the 6 p.m. ET hour.
By comparison, the network’s stars brought up former President Joe Biden 158 times.
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