US President Donald Trump has defended Attorney General Pam Bondi and delivered a caustic rebuke to his MAGA base, who have voiced outrage after the Justice Department said there was no evidence that the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein kept a "client list".
The backlash from far-right influencers against Trump and his allies was swift after the Justice Department confirmed that Epstein's death in August 2019 in federal custody was by suicide, while also saying that it would be publishing no further details from the documents it holds on the Epstein sex trafficking case.
It noted that this was due to a court order protecting victims and that "only a fraction" of it would have been publicly aired had Epstein faced trial.
When a reporter attempted to ask Bondi about Epstein at a White House Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Trump jumped in and criticised the journalist, saying: "Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years. We have Texas ... Are people still talking about this creep? That is unbelievable."
"I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein at a time like this, where we're having some of the greatest success — and also tragedy, with what happened in Texas. It just seems like a desecration," Trump added.
Responding to the questions, Bondi attempted to clarify her previous comments, which have proved central to much of the uproar surrounding the so-called Epstein Files: she was asked on Fox News in February about an Epstein "client list" and responded that such a document was "sitting on [her] desk right now to review".
Reiterating the explanation given on her behalf on Tuesday by White House and Justice Department staff, Bondi said she had been referring to the documents pertaining to the Epstein case overall, rather than a specific "client list", which the Justice Department says does not exist.
The "client list" refers to a long-running conspiracy theory alleging that the sex offender kept a list of public figures and celebrities to whom underage girls were trafficked so that he could blackmail them.
'Missing minute'
Bondi was also asked about the footage that the Justice Department released from inside a New York jail in the hope of finally quashing rumours that Epstein had been killed when he died in custody awaiting his sex trafficking trial.
The video released appears to glitch as the timer turns from 11:58pm to 11:59pm, skipping a minute ahead to midnight, and conspiracy theories have swirled around the "missing minute" in the tape.
The attorney general said it was the result of a long-running technical feature of how the prison camera footage is recorded.
"There was a minute that was off the counter, and what we learned from the Bureau of Prisons is every night they redo that video, so every night the video is reset, and every night should have the same minute missing," she said.
Bondi said evidence would be released showing that to be the case.
She also clarified her previous comment that the FBI was reviewing "tens of thousands of videos" of the financier "with children or child porn" during the press conference, saying: "[Regarding] the tens of thousands of videos — they turned out to be child porn downloaded by that disgusting Jeffrey Epstein ... Never going to be released, never going to see the light of day."
The latest development in the Epstein documents appears to have further widened the rift between Bondi and Trump's far-right base, with the case proving magnetic for conspiracy theories over the years.
The attorney general initially angered MAGA activists when a document disclosure handed to far-right influencers in February turned out to be mostly made up of information already in the public domain and containing no new revelations.
