While its cable news competitors immediately jumped on the bombshell release of emails showing Jeffrey Epstein repeatedly mentioning Donald Trump’s name, Fox News was unsurprisingly slow to join the fray.
By the time CNN and MSNBC had mentioned the email exchanges dozens of times on their airwaves on Wednesday morning, the conservative cable giant – which has largely turned a blind eye to the Epstein files uproar in recent months – continued to steer clear of the story.
And when the network finally broached the subject, it was done so vaguely and quickly that Fox News viewers likely had no idea it was related to the blockbuster story that had gripped the rest of the political media universe.
As part of a huge tranche of documents obtained from Epstein’s estate, House Oversight Committee Democrats released three emails that showed the late pedophile mentioning the president’s name. Trump, who had a lengthy friendship with Epstein before a falling out in the 2000s, has not been accused of wrongdoing in the Epstein case and has denied any involvement in the deceased financier’s crimes.
Roughly three hours after the Democrats released the email exchanges, and after MSNBC and CNN had already devoted nearly an hour apiece to the story, Fox News correspondent Mark Meredith delivered a report centered mainly on the House reconvening after nearly two months to vote to reopen the government.
Towards the end of his on-air dispatch, Meredith told anchor Harris Faulkner that “we expect more of the Jeffrey Epstein controversy to make its way back up here to Capitol Hill.” He then pointed out that Adelita Grijalva would finally be sworn into Congress and is “expected to sign on to a discharge petition” that could force the Justice Department to release all of the Epstein files.
“It’s a story that will continue to bubble here on Capitol Hill, including some new developments today from the House Oversight Committee,” Meredith added before tossing it back to Faulkner.
Meredith, however, never revealed what those “new developments” were, and Faulkner didn’t follow up with him for any details or provide additional context to her viewers elsewhere in her program.
Meanwhile, in an email exchange with his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell in 2011, Epstein claimed that Trump “spent hours at my house” with an unnamed victim, adding that the president was one “dog that hasn’t barked.” Maxwell, who is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence for sex crimes committed alongside Epstein, replied: “I’ve been thinking about that.”
The emails, according to CNN’s Aaron Blake, severely undercut Maxwell’s attempts to distance the president from her former partner in recent interviews with Trump’s Justice Department. She would later be transferred to a minimum-security prison camp and is seeking clemency from Trump.
“And sure enough, Maxwell said things that were helpful to the president. She basically said she had no knowledge of any Trump wrongdoing and downplayed his relationship with Epstein,” Blake noted. “But the new emails call her claims into question.”
Republicans would later reveal that the redacted victim who supposedly spent time with Trump was Virginia Giuffre, a prominent Epstein survivor who died by suicide in April. Giuffre, as White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt noted on Wednesday, has never accused Trump of any criminal behavior and wrote that he “couldn’t have been friendlier” towards her.
In a 2015 email, Epstein asked author Michael Wolff for advice on how Trump might handle questions about their past relationship. “I think you should let him hang himself,” Wolff wrote Epstein. “If he says he hasn’t been on the plane or to the house, then that gives you a valuable PR and political currency.”
And in a 2019 exchange with Wolff, Epstein appeared to reference Trump asking Maxwell to stop recruiting young women from Mar-a-Lago, stating that “of course” Trump “knew about the girls” because of Maxwell’s actions.
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Later in the afternoon and just ahead of the White House press briefing, Fox News correspondent Peter Doocy finally gave some details about the email releases – with a decidedly pro-Trump spin.
“Of course, we think we’ll get the latest White House reaction to what officials are calling selectively leaked emails concerning Jeffrey Epstein and Michael Wolff talking to each other about President Trump before he was the president,” Doocy said during the midday news program America Reports. “White House officials have listed a ton of different things that discredit Michael Wolff and different ways they think this was selectively released. Expect to hear that off the top.”
Since the president essentially ordered his supporters to stop talking about the Epstein saga amid MAGA complaints about the DOJ’s handling of the case, Fox News has followed Trump’s lead.
Trump confidant Sean Hannity, for example, boasted in August that he would not ask either Attorney General Pam Bondi or FBI Director Kash Patel any questions about Epstein in scheduled interviews with the pair. He stayed true to his word.
“If I hear that name one more time, my head's going to explode,” he declared at the time.
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