During a Wednesday night appearance on NewsNation, MAGA congressman Tim Burchett floated a wild conspiracy theory that the reason the Trump administration won’t release Jeffrey Epstein’s long-fabled “client list” is that the previous president’s team “destroyed everything” related to the deceased sex offender.
MAGA world has been up in arms over this week’s memo from the Justice Department concluding that there was no evidence that Epstein was blackmailing prominent figures who engaged in sex with underage girls, that the disgraced financier was murdered in 2019 while sitting in jail or that he kept a so-called “client list.”
While the anger from right-wing pundits and politicians – who have fantasized about Epstein-related arrests for years – over the memo has been red hot, much of it has been directed at the leaders of the DOJ and FBI and not at the president himself.
For instance, Attorney General Pam Bondi has explicitly been criticized for her previous claims that she had the “client list” on her desk ready for review, only to now claim it doesn’t exist at all, prompting MAGA luminaries such as Laura Loomer to call for her resignation or termination.
As conservatives take aim at the attorney general and the FBI’s Kash Patel and Dan Bongino – former right-wing podcasters who trafficked in Epstein conspiracies before leading the federal law enforcement bureau – for the memo, they’ve also attempted to find ways to either absolve the president from the Epstein flop or justify the lack of prosecution on his behalf.
Outkick founder Clay Travis, for example, suggested this week that Esptein’s “behavior would’ve actually been legal” in some states because of age of consent laws. Disgraced Fox News host Bill O’Reilly, meanwhile, claimed that Trump told him earlier this year that there are “a lot of names associated with Epstein that had nothing to do with Epstein’s conduct,” adding that if the release of the files exposed those people, they’d be “destroyed.”
Prior to welcoming Burchett onto his program Wednesday night, NewsNation anchor Leland Vittert noted that the Tennessee lawmaker had told the network in February that he didn’t believe the public would ever see the purported Epstein files. That was shortly after Bondi had repeatedly teased the bombshell release of classified documents on Epstein’s case, only to hand out binders of already-public information to conservative influencers, sparking backlash among MAGA supporters.
“The confident smile of a man who can say I told you so is what I see on your face, sir,” Vittert said to Burchett after airing a clip of his February comments.
“I don’t take any pleasure in it,” the conservative representative responded. “I want to bury those dirtbags, but I’m afraid I was right.”
Burchett, of Tennessee, went on to explain that by “dirtbags, he was referring to “second- and third-level tier people that are in a lot of these departments that we never get to” and “staffers on Capitol Hill that leak things to stop important pieces of legislation.” He then claimed, without presenting any proof, that the Biden administration deleted vast swaths of evidence related to the Epstein case.
“I guess I’ll write about it in my book if I live to see that day, but I think the files existed at one time,” Burchett declared. “I think they were destroyed by the previous administration.”
The congressman, echoing other right-wing commentators such as Tucker Carlson, dismissed the notion that there was any information incriminating about Trump, who had a lengthy friendship with Epstein throughout the 1990s and early 2000s before the two had a falling out.
“I think if they had anything on Trump, it would have been out Day One under the Biden administration,” Burchett said, adding: “I think there’s some very prominent Hollywood people – there’s world leaders, too. And would it have caused economic destruction around the globe? Maybe. But I don’t really care.”
Asked about the theory that O’Reilly had floated recently, Burchett pivoted to longtime Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell’s prison sentence before once again blaming Joe Biden for supposedly shredding the “client list” of the deceased sex trafficker.
“Again, under the previous administration, we’re not going to get that,” the congressman stated. “Dead men tell no tales. He’s dead.”
Asked by Vittert to clarify if he was directly accusing the Biden administration of document destruction, Burchett answered in the affirmative. “I think they destroyed everything,” he asserted.
As for why Bondi wouldn’t point this out if that were the case, Burchett literally shrugged and noted: “She doesn’t have any proof of it. I’m just telling you what I think. I’ve been around this town enough.”
While the president’s most ardent loyalists try to thread the needle to point the blame away from Trump himself, those outside of the MAGA media bubble have accused the president of gaslighting the public about the Epstein files – especially as Trump attempts to now pivot and dodge from the issue.
Noting that former “first buddy” turned Trump adversary Elon Musk wondered “how can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won‘t release the Epstein files,” CNN anchor Jake Tapper explained how Trump and his acolytes ginned up the controversy over Epstein before suddenly reversing course.
“So while there may not be an official client list to be released, as the administration is now saying, there’s a lot of extra information that is not being made public despite Trump’s Justice Department basically now saying case closed,” he concluded. “This isn’t going to go away. The public – you – you’re being played for fools here.”
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