Vice President J.D. Vance hit the campaign trail in Ohio on Monday, as he sought to help his boss and the GOP that is lined up behind him sell the “big, beautiful” budget reconciliation package to midterm voters.
Instead, the president’s Twitter-happy running mate found himself answering questions about Jeffrey Epstein — and in a generally unfamiliar role: battling speculation on the right instead of fueling it.
The vice president, who less than three weeks before the 2024 election declared that “we” should release the “Epstein list,” has a new message, as his colleagues now insist that the list isn’t real: “Donald J. Trump, I'm telling you, he's got nothing to hide.”
Vance was in a Democratic-held district in Canton, Ohio — about three hours north of his hometown of Middletown — on Monday as the president and his party try and turn their focus towards next year’s midterms.
But they’re the only ones whose attention has shifted — DC’s focus remains firmly on Jeffrey Epstein and the growing uproar around the White House’s handling of the so-called “client list” or “Epstein files.” And if Monday’s road trip is any indicator, so has much of America’s.
After he concluded his remarks, the vice president hosted a press conference in front of his supporters, who watched up close as Vance evolved from conspiracy theorist to spin doctor in real time.
“The president has directed the attorney general to release all credible information and, frankly, to go and find additional credible information related to the Jeffrey Epstein case. He’s been incredibly transparent about that stuff, but some of that stuff takes time,” said Vance, who went on to accuse the media of being uninterested in the story during the Biden administration.
There are a few problems here. For one, that it isn’t true.
Vance’s reference to Trump directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to “release all credible information” is just a flat-out falsehood. The Justice Department stated explicitly — and continues to state — that it won’t release further documents from its own trove at all. The FBI and DOJ’s joint memo was pretty clear: “we found no basis to revisit the disclosure of those materials”.
What Bondi did authorize was a motion in court seeking for a judge to allow the release of grand jury transcripts to the public. Her agency made no attempts to justify the motion beyond satisfying public speculation, and it was denied — a foregone conclusion for a strategy that DOJ attorneys acknowledged in their own filings was a long shot.
Republican leadership, meanwhile, is talking out of both sides of its mouth.
Speaker Mike Johnson, remarking Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, positioned himself as pro-transparency while simultaneously coming out against a bipartisan resolution to force the Justice Department to release the files, with redactions for victim information and examples of pornography.
It’s also unclear what Vance meant when he said that the administration’s efforts to make this story go away would “take time.”
Bondi’s motion is already denied; she’s made no indication that her efforts to see grand jury transcripts released will continue. Those transcripts likely also hardly scratch the surface of “all credible information” the government has on the subject of Epstein.
The Justice Department explained in July that further files from the investigation would not be released. The agency also declared that a list of the convicted pedophile’s alleged co-conspirators did not exist, and that investigators "did not uncover evidence that could predicate an investigation against uncharged third parties."
So what is the administration actually still doing? Unclear. Vance wouldn’t say. But he was clear on one thing: they’re doing it!
“Donald J. Trump is asking his Department of Justice to show full transparency, and somehow that’s a criticism of Donald J. Trump and not Barack Obama and George W. Bush,” Vance griped on Monday.
Having now passed the mammoth reconciliation package, the Republican Party is mindful of one political reality: that even with Trump’s success in bullying backbenchers into line, the GOP has used up the bulk of its political capital.
The chances of passing another piece of legislation through the Senate are slim, given the number of Democrats the party would need on their side to break a filibuster. Even a second reconciliation package seems off the table given the level of deficit spending Republicans budget hawks just had to swallow the first time around.
But the vice president and the rest of his party are in a tough spot. Aside from an extension of existing tax cuts, the main provision of the “big, beautiful bill” was a massive surge in funding for Immigration and Customs Enforcement — a tricky sell for the Republican Party given that polling on the issue of immigration is quickly turning against the president thanks to highly public raids on farms and other businesses.
Funding that provision and the extension of the tax cuts is the largest cut to Medicaid spending in history, driven by new work requirements expected to lead many to lose their coverage.
Those Medicaid cuts are Democrats’ favorite topic when discussing the second-term Trump agenda. Vance, as a result, is stuck arguing the nuts and bolts, pushing the GOP line that Democrats opposed extending tax cuts during an affordability crisis.
Attacking Rep. Emilia Sykes, whose district he visited, Vance said on Monday: “You know why she’s not here today? Because she’s not celebrating no taxes on tips. She’s not celebrating no taxes on overtime…she fought us every step of the way.”
As he spoke, however, “Epstein Island” was the No. 1 trending term on Twitter/X, thanks to Trump’s awkward quip Monday morning that he never “had the privilege” of visiting the island where many of Epstein’s crimes involving underaged girls were alleged to have taken place.
It’s hard to say yet how much the Epstein issue will affect the midterms — if at all.
But with Donald Trump personally making the situation worse by throwing things against the wall to see what sticks, it will likely be up to Vance and the president’s other allies to help dig him out of this hole.
