The House Oversight Committee’s move to release a tranche of newly unearthed Jeffrey Epstein emails discussing President Donald Trump left the White House to fight the fire when it had expected to be celebrating the end of the government shutdown.
The emails found Epstein calling the future president “the dog that hasn’t barked” in exchanges with his accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell and alleging that Trump “knew about the girls” and had spent “hours” in Epstein’s house in the company of one of his victims, also referring to his Palm Beach neighbor as “evil beyond belief” and offering pictures of him with girls in bikinis to a journalist.
Trump has not been accused of any wrongdoing and has distanced himself from Epstein, whom he has called a “creep” and said the pair fell out in the early 2000s, before his conviction.
The sudden release created a problem for conservative media outlets loyal to the president, keen to hail Republicans in the House of Representatives for passing a continuing resolution to fund the federal bureaucracy until the end of January.
On Fox News, Sean Hannity’s guest was progressive radio host Stephanie Miller, who wasted no time in declaring: “You know the funniest thing about this story – is Trump’s all over the Epstein files and I wonder if they’re going to release that after the big bombshell! I didn’t see anything about that on Fox News today.”
Attempting to sidestep her observation, Hannity tried to ask Miller when she first noticed former president Joe Biden’s “cognitive decline,” urging her not to “change the subject and deflect.”
“Well, I think it was through all of the times that Donald Trump has fallen asleep in public and talked about magnets getting wet in the last few…,” Miller answered before being interrupted by the host, nevertheless finding space to allege that Trump was suffering from cognitive decline.
Applauded by Hannity for “a very good deflection,” Miller continued: “You know what else is great about Biden’s decline is that Trump is all over the Epstein files, and I’m wondering if they’re going to release those, are you covering that?”
On the same network, Jesse Watters attacked Democrats for what he called a “sleazy leak,” more bothered by the publication of the emails than their content.
“Democrats are in such a free-for-all, all they could do to distract from the Schumer shutdown cover-up is leak Epstein emails,” he complained. “But they're going to force a vote to release everything the government has on Jeffrey Epstein.” House Speaker Mike Johnson has since announced that the House floor vote in question will take place next week.
“Democrats redacted a woman’s name and called her ‘victim,’ but the victim's dead. Her name is Virginia and she already testified under oath that Trump did nothing wrong.” That victim is the late Virginia Giuffre, according to White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt, who revealed as much at a heated briefing with reporters on Wednesday.
“What a sleazy leak, while they’re shutting down the government to give illegal aliens healthcare,” Watters continued, pushing a false claim.
“They’re all getting paid. They’re all allowed to insider trade. These are the kinds of swampy tactics that make us lose all respect for these freaks. They create a crisis so no one gets paid, people can’t eat, and no one can fly. And now, they’re like here’s a fake Epstein email. What a joke.”
On her eponymous SiriusXM show, Megyn Kelly was much more critical of the president, saying of the emails: “They don’t sound good. If I were a Democrat, I could easily make some hay with these, which they will… To me, this is a self-inflicted wound by the Trump administration and it was unnecessary.”
Kelly, who has previously blamed Attorney General Pam Bondi for the administration’s botched handling of repeated calls to release the Justice Department’s files on Epstein, later said of Trump to her guest, NewsNation host Batya Ungar-Sargon: “Why didn’t he just release these? Just release them! Now he’s in a position of being singled out as the only one, allegedly, as opposed to one of a slew of names.”
The conspiracy theory site InfoWars offered perhaps the most defiant headline of the day by running a piece by Alex Jones with the headline: “Congress Releases Cherry-Picked Emails From Epstein Files To Falsely Incriminate Trump In Sexual Abuse Of Young Girls!”
Also firmly on the president’s side was The New York Post, which headlined its frontpage: “Dirty Clicks: Laptop Lapdog Media Falls For Another Dem Mud-Slinging Trump Hoax.”
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