MSNBC’s flagship morning show has rolled a damning montage of just some of the countless times Donald Trump and his allies bashed Democrats for their handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case and promised to release full details of the financier’s crimes.
“Yes, yes I would, I guess I would,” the president told Fox News himself in June 2024 when asked whether he would declassify Justice Department and FBI findings on Epstein’s operations if he were elected, as he later was, in November of that year.
“You don’t want to affect people’s lives if there’s phony stuff in there, because there’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole… world,” he went on. “But I think I would.”
Other clips in Morning Joe’s montage feature FBI Director Kash Patel raging at House Republicans in Dec. 2023 to use their majority to “put on your big boy pants and let us know who the pedophiles are,” as well as the bureau’s Deputy Director Dan Bongino later that May describing the Epstein story as “a big deal,” and begging his podcast followers “please, do not let that story go.”
The reel also includes perhaps now the most notorious of any Trump official’s prior statements on the matter, with Attorney General Pam Bondi telling Fox in February of this year that the convicted sex traffickers long-rumored “client list” of wealthy co-conspirators was simply “sitting on my desk” awaiting review prior to public release.
“Everything’s going to come out to the public. The public has the right to know,” as she added at a subsequent sit-down with the network later in March.
Less than five months later, however, Bondi’s Justice Department and the FBI under Patel and Bongino have now issued a memo finding that contrary to rumors long-cherished by diehard MAGA conspiracy theorists, Epstein’s 2019 death in police custody was almost certainly a suicide and that the disgraced investor kept no roster of uber-influential accomplices to his crimes.
Those determinations have since sparked a far-right political firestorm that has all but engulfed the second Trump administration, despite the president’s best efforts to quell the ensuing carnage with outbursts at a Cabinet meeting last Tuesday and a futile Truth Social post Saturday.
“We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening,” Trump wrote over the weekend, further begging his supporters to let the issue go because apparently, despite the unprecedented and rapidly mounting backlash against the White House, Epstein remains “somebody that nobody cares about.”
