JD Vance’s foul-mouthed effort to dispute the authenticity of Donald Trump’s bawdy birthday letter to Jeffrey Epstein has boomeranged.
A copy of Trump’s illustrated and signed 2003 message to his one-time pal was received by the House Oversight Committee on Monday.
The letter, which the president has denied writing, features imagined dialogue between the two men, written in the drawn outline of a woman’s silhouette. It is signed “Donald” below the woman’s waist.
When The Wall Street Journal first reported on the letter’s contents in July, Vance exploded on X, writing, “Forgive my language but this story is complete and utter bulls--t. The WSJ should be ashamed for publishing it.”
The vice president asked, “Where is this letter? Would you be shocked to learn they never showed it to us before publishing it? Does anyone honestly believe this sounds like Donald Trump?”
The Trump administration’s biggest troll, California Gov. Gavin Newsom, was quick to mock Vance after the letter was revealed on Monday, writing dryly, “This aged nicely.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to Vance’s office for comment.
Trump has denied writing the letter and filed a $10 billion lawsuit against The Journal and its owner, Rupert Murdoch. Trump claimed in his lawsuit that he personally warned Murdoch not to publish the story, seemingly contradicting Vance’s claim that the paper had “never showed it to us.”
White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt on Monday again denied that Trump had written or signed the letter and said his legal team would continue to “aggressively pursue litigation.”
As further evidence emerged in July that the letter and its accompanying birthday book exist, Vance doubled down on his attacks on the paper.
“I have no idea if the book exists--WSJ won’t show it to us. I have no idea if the letter exists--WSJ won’t show it to us. What I find absurd is the idea that Donald Trump was writing poems to Epstein, and I find it equally absurd that a major American paper would attack the President of the United States without revealing the basis for the attack,” he wrote in a lengthy X post on July 24.
“We all know what’s going to happen. They’re going to dribble little details out for days or weeks in an effort to assassinate the president’s character,” he continued. “They won’t show us this book or allow us to refute it until they’ve wrung every bit of fake news out of the story. And everyone will just move on from the fact that the WSJ is acting like a Democrat SuperPAC. It’s disgraceful, and it’s why the president sued.”
The Democratic Party’s official X account responded to Vance’s comments following the release of the letter on Monday, writing, “Found the letter for you, @JDVance.”
Meanwhile, Democratic congressman Ro Khanna, who sits on the House Oversight Committee and has pushed for a vote to force the release of the Epstein files, called on Vance to take back his remarks.
“Vice President Vance should be asked to retract what he said, defaming the Wall Street Journal reporter,” Khanna told CNN’s Erin Burnett. “He said it was fake. Now we have the letter.”
The release of the letter failed to sway Vance, however, as he joined Leavitt in attacking Democrats without offering an explanation for the document.
“The Democrats don’t care about Epstein,” he wrote on X Monday evening. “They don’t even care about his victims. That’s why they were silent about it for years. The only thing they care about is concocting another fake scandal like Russiagate to smear President Trump with lies. No one is falling for this BS.”
