Late-night hosts reacted to the latest batch of Epstein files, which failed to redact several victims’ names and photos while still protecting Donald Trump.
Jon Stewart
Jon Stewart returned to his Monday night desk at the Daily Show fuming at the lack of consequences for the men named in the files related to the convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein – which still have not been fully released, though the justice department published another somewhat redacted batch on Friday.
There have been consequences for “none of these dudes”, he said. “They’ve been on the plane. They’ve been on the island. They’ve been to his house. They’ve given him creepy cards with pubic hair. They’ve been accused by a multitude of women of a multitude of wrongdoings, and nothing has happened to any of them,” Stewart says. “I gotta be honest, I’m just not sure anybody is going to be held accountable for any of this.
“Oh, except Prince Andrew,” he added dismissively. “Oh, Prince Andrew, stripped of the title prince. Ooh, such a penalty.”
Stewart was not surprised to see Trump mentioned thousands of times in the new batch of files, but claimed the redactions and slow releases were protecting him from any accountability. “Look, man, we always knew that the people at DoJ releasing these documents weren’t on a fact-finding mission, they were running interference,” he said. “And the guy they’re running interference for seems very satisfied with these results.”
He concluded his monologue with clips of Republicans complaining about a “two-tiered” legal system in the US. Such people, including Lindsey Graham, were using the term to criticize so-called sanctuary cities, but Stewart had a better application.
“After watching the politically well-connected skirt any form of legal accountability for horrible fucking crimes, it seems pretty clear to me that there is a sanctuary city in this country,” he said. “The real sanctuary city is where money and power protect you from the consequences of sex trafficking, or influence peddling, or taking half a billion dollars and giving away America’s AI infrastructure.
“That’s the real sanctuary city,” he said next to a Photoshopped picture of Trump, Elon Musk and the several other figures named in the files. “And these are the motherfuckers who live there.”
Jimmy Kimmel
On Jimmy Kimmel Live!, the host also blasted the justice department’s handling of the Epstein files. “They claimed they needed time to redact the names of the victims, but whether intentionally or as a result of incompetence or a combination of both”, they released thousands of files that did not redact the names or photos of the victims. “But they did do a pretty decent job of redacting the names of the victimizers.”
Kimmel summarized the findings: mentions of known Epstein associates such as Trump and Bill Gates. “It would seem that some other famous people, including Elon Musk and Howard Lutnick, the commerce secretary, may not have been telling the whole truth about their interactions with Jeffrey Epstein,” he said. “It is clear that Prince Andrew is royally fucked, which is a term you hear a lot but rarely when it is literally true.
“And most of all, it is so bananas that the guy who is in charge of releasing all these files and redacting all this evidence is Donald Trump’s own personal defense attorney,” Todd Blanche. “And then there’s all this other stuff going on – busting into the election headquarters in Georgia, arresting journalists like Don Lemon,” who was a guest on Kimmel’s show. “Suddenly shutting down the Kennedy Center for two years, calling for nationalized elections, Trump suing the government he runs for $10bn.
“My head is spinning, but I guess that’s the point,” he concluded. “Remember when Trump was threatening to invade Greenland? That was not even two weeks ago! We’re living in dog years now. And it’s only going to get nuttier. Now that the new batch of Epstein files is out, the Distract-o-matic is cranked all the way up.”
Stephen Colbert
The latest batch of Epstein files contained “3m pages of just terrible stuff”, said Stephen Colbert, thanking his Late Show researchers. “Folks out there are still slogging through the files, but they implicate a who’s who of powerful men,” from tech titans to Wall Street figures. Colbert referenced a New York Times investigation, which found 5,300 files that referenced Trump and more than 38,000 references to him, his wife Melania or his residence at Mar-a-Lago. “Obviously this is the biggest story imaginable, but for some reason it isn’t,” he noted.
The White House has, of course, denied all allegations, including that Trump forced an underage girl to perform oral sex and hosted orgy parties for young girls at one of his golf courses. “Even if these particular parts of the files, which the justice department released and are denied by the White House as not being proven, what is detailed in those 3m pages are allegations of some of the cruelest, most depraved crimes against women and kids, involving some of the most powerful men on planet Earth,” said Colbert.
“With this document dump, we now have even more evidence that there is indeed a cabal of rich men who traffic young women and girls across state and international lines for their pleasure,” he added. But Blanche, the US deputy attorney general and formerly Trump’s personal lawyer in the Stormy Daniels hush-money case, said the justice department was not considering any additional charges related to Epstein, because “there was nothing in there that allowed us to prosecute anybody.”
“You have millions of pages,” Colbert fumed. “And you don’t want to investigate any further, and possibly bring any of these men to justice?”
Seth Meyers
And on Late Night, Seth Meyers zeroed in on one particular detail from the Epstein files: a 2012 email from Musk to Epstein, asking: “What day/night will be the wildest party on your island?”
That “line of poetry”, Meyers cracked, “is not a question you should ask anyone, but especially not a guy who at that point was already a registered sex offender”.
“You’re being about as slick as Tulsi Gabbard at an FBI raid,” he added, referring to the Trump administration’s raid on an election facility in Georgia this past weekend.
Between that and the Epstein files and everything else, “we’re living in Maga’s warped world where everything is upside down and nothing matters except who has power and who does not,” said Meyers.
“They hail violent January 6 rioters as heroes and call peaceful protesters ‘domestic terrorists’,” he continued. “The government rounds up children and families and citizens and claims they’re going after the worst of the worst, while at the same time they cover up for wealthy and powerful elites named in the emails of a guy who was actually the worst of the worst. All they’ve done has proven once again that they care about nothing other than power.
“Our elites and institutions have lost all credibility. Their only consistent principle is that they are,” to quote JD Vance, “full of shit.”
