CNN’s Chief Washington Correspondent Jake Tapper has accused the Trump administration of playing the public for fools by effectively closing the case on late child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“This isn’t going to go away,” Tapper warned on his weekday show Tuesday, just hours after President Donald Trump abruptly cut off questions about Epstein during a Cabinet meeting by snapping, “Are you still talking about Jeffery Epstein?”
The FBI and Justice Department issued a memo Tuesday concluding that Epstein—who had a longstanding relationship with Trump that reportedly ended in the early 2000s—did not maintain a “client list” and was not murdered in his jail cell in 2019.
Noting the Trump administration had essentially declared “case closed” after fueling speculation about the Epstein files for months, Tapper wondered, “What’s really going on? I mean what’s really going on?”
“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,” he said.
Pointing to 22 FBI files containing thousands of heavily redacted pages on the Epstein case publicly available in the FBI “Vault,” Tapper said, “There’s a trove of information that the Trump administration right now is refusing to share. Information that could well point to the powerful folks who availed themselves of the sex-trafficking victims of Jeffrey Epstein.”
The 56-year-old journalist, who recently put out a controversial book detailing the alleged coverup of Joe Biden’s supposed physical and mental decline while in office, proposed, “Why not make the victim and witness testimonies public?”
Gesturing towards the camera, he declared, “The public—you—are being played for fools here.”
He noted that many members of the Trump administration had been “the ones ginning up the controversy” about the Epstein case, playing a clip of Trump advisor and acting U.S. District Attorney for New Jersey Alina Habba saying in February, “We have flight logs, we have information, names, that will come out,” and claiming the revelations would be “shocking.”
“I’m shocked that none of that’s been released,” Tapper quipped.
Tapper finds himself on common ground with a group of MAGA supporters who are loudly voicing their frustration over the lack of revelations, having expected Trump’s return to power to unveil explosive secrets about Epstein and other influential figures.
