Former CNN White House Correspondent Jim Acosta says President Donald Trump is shaking in his boots amid fallout over the infamous “Epstein files.”
“You know, I’ve been around Donald Trump. I’ve been up close with him. I think I know when he’s worried, and he is freaking out right now over these Epstein files,” Acosta said on MSNBC Sunday. “He’s twisted himself into a pretzel on this.”
Acosta’s comments follow after news broke late last week that the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) have determined that, contrary to the long-cherished beliefs of MAGA conspiracy theorists, disgraced financial Jeffrey Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019, rather than being murdered, and kept no “client list” of superwealthy co-conspirators.
The news has ignited Trump’s MAGA base, which has called for Attorney General Pam Bondi to resign. Bondi said in February that Epstein’s “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now to review.”
On Wednesday, FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino laid into Bondi over for overpromising and failing to deliver on the Epstein files. He failed to show up to work on Friday and has threatened to resign over the controversy.
Trump tried to calm the waters in a Truth Social post Saturday, writing, “What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’ They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening. We have a PERFECT Administration, THE TALK OF THE WORLD, and ‘selfish people’ are trying to hurt it, all over a guy who never dies, Jeffrey Epstein.”
For Acosta, the key issue fast emerging at the heart of all this is the extent to which the president pushed for the DOJ and FBI to close the case.
“When the Justice Department put out that memo that tried to sweep the whole thing under the rug—did some kind of directive come out of the White House, come from Susie Wiles, Stephen Miller, or Donald Trump to put out that memo?” he said. “The age-old Watergate question is operative here: what did the president know—and when did he know it?”
Trump has called Acosta, who left CNN in January after 18 years when the network tried to push his show to a late-night timeslot, a “major sleazebag.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
