A Fox News reporter held White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt’s feet to the fire on Jeffrey Epstein on Thursday.
A day after President Donald Trump complained on Truth Social that MAGA supporters fixated on the “Jeffrey Epstein hoax” were “buying into bulls--t,” Fox News White House Correspondent Jacqui Heinrich pressed Leavitt to explain.
“Which part of the Epstein hoax is the hoax part?” Heinrich asked.
Leavitt deflected.
“He does not like to see Democrats and the mainstream media covering this like it is the biggest story the American people care about‚” Leavitt said.
Instead, Leavitt said the press should have covered Trump’s other engagements, including his meeting with families who have lost children to fentanyl and the HALT Act into law, which the president signed into law at the White House Wednesday.
“Not a single cable network in this country took the event live and cover that event like they should,” she said. “Those are the issues the president cares about.”
In fact, CNN and NBC covered the signing of the HALT Act, which strengthens prison terms for fentanyl traffickers, and NBC offered a livestream for the ceremony.
Critics have accused several of Fox News’ biggest stars—including Laura Ingraham and Jesse Waters—of remaining silent on Epstein to curry favor with the president. But the backlash has grown so big even the conservative network can’t ignore it.
The MAGA-verse has been in fury over the Epstein case since the Department of Justice and Federal Bureau of Investigation acknowledged earlier this month that Epstein died by suicide while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges in 2019, rather than being murdered, and that no “client list” of co-conspirators existed—the subject of conspiracies among Trump’s base.
Trump pledged during his second presidential campaign that he would release all files related to the disgraced financier, fanning the flames of conspiracies that have now engulfed top members of the administration, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, who claimed in February that the list was “sitting on my desk now” awaiting review.
Trump himself tried to calm the waters in a post on Truth Social Saturday, coming to Bondi’s defense.
“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!” Trump wrote Saturday. “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.”
Trump then told right-wing network Real America’s Voice on Wednesday that Democrats had hijacked and doctored the files to make him look bad.
“But you know, that was run by the Biden administration for four years. I can imagine what they put into files, just like they did with the others,” Trump continued. “I mean, the Steele dossier was a total fake, right? It took two years to figure that out for the people, and all of the things that you mentioned were fake.”
A Reuters/Ipsos poll released Thursday showed that 69 percent of respondents believed that the Trump administration is hiding details about the case.
