After pledging to 'declassify the files', Trump's Epstein U-turn has angered the Maga faithful

ONE OF DONALD Trump’s campaign promises ahead of his election victory last year was to release classified documents related to a number of topics surrounded by conspiracy theories, including the crimes and death of his one-time friend Jeffrey Epstein. 

In a June 2024 interview on Fox News’ Fox and Friends, Trump said he would release information related to 9/11 and the assassination of JFK.

Trump was also asked by host Rachel Campos-Duffy if he would “declassify the Epstein files”.

“Yeah, I would,” Trump told the three Fox journalists, one of whom was Pete Hegseth, his current secretary of defence. 

That was where the interview segment ended, but Trump’s full answer was later aired on a Fox News radio show.

“I guess I would,” Trump continued. 

“I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives with phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would.”

In July 2019, Jeffrey Epstein was charged with the sex trafficking of minors and conspiracy to commit sex trafficking of minors. He later died in a New York prison while awaiting trial in what a medical examiner deemed a suicide. 

Epstein was known to have social relationships with many powerful people, including Trump, former US president Bill Clinton and the UK’s Prince Andrew. 

Trump has denied ever visiting Epstein’s private island, where prosecutors said he trafficked underage girls for sex. 

“Terrific guy,” Trump, who was Epstein’s neighbour in both Florida and New York, said in an early 2000s profile of the financier.

“He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”

Disappointing the base

Trump is no stranger to promoting conspiracy theories, and his hiring of Kash Patel to lead the FBI alongside deputy director Dan Bongino was celebrated by the conspiracist corner of his base. 

In the last two weeks, though, that segment of the Maga movement has been up in arms over Trump’s Justice Department and FBI publishing a joint memo that said Epstein did die by suicide. The memo also insisted that Epstein did not have a “client list”. 

“There was also no credible evidence found that Epstein blackmailed prominent individuals as part of his actions,” the memo said. 

Epstein’s former assistant, Ghislaine Maxwell, is the only former associate of his who has been criminally charged in connection with his activities. She is currently serving a 20-year prison sentence. 

The joint memo echoed statements made by Patel and Bongino (both prominent promoters of theories about Epstein before taking office) in a joint interview with Fox News.

“He killed himself,” Bongino said, disappointing many of his followers and prompting them to speculate about the reasons for his and Patel’s abrupt about-face. 

While Patel and Bongino have drawn some of the ire, it is attorney general Pam Bondi who has received most of the Maga backlash since the release of the joint memo, because she was singing a very different tune just a few months ago.

“It’s sitting on my desk right now to review,” attorney general Bondi told Fox News in February when asked about documents related to Epstein. 

In May, Bondi released what she called the “first phase” of files detailing “Epstein’s extensive network”. 

That collection of documents, copies of which were given to right-wing influencers in a publicised stunt at the White House, ended up containing nothing significant that was not already publicly available. 

Backlash

Now Bongino is reportedly threatening to quit if Bondi is not fired.   

Others in the Maga movement are publicly calling for Bondi to resign, including far-right activist Laura Loomer, who has the president’s ear.

“President Trump should fire Blondi [Bondi] for lying to his base and creating a liability for his administration,” far-right influencer Laura Loomer posted on X on 8 July. 

“She is an embarrassment and she doesn’t do anything to help Trump.”

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After the release of the memo, Elon Musk, a former member of Trump’s cabinet, accused the president of being in the “Epstein files” after the pair had a falling out over the government’s recently passed spending bill. 

He later deleted his posts but has since returned to posting about Epstein and the Trump administration. 

Retired general and QAnon promoter Michael Flynn, who served as Trump’s national security advisor in his last term, urged the president to “understand the EPSTEIN AFFAIR is not going away” in a post on X on Saturday. 

“If the administration doesn’t address the massive number of unanswered questions about Epstein, especially the ABUSE OF CHILDREN BY ELITES (it is very clear that abuse occurred), then moving forward on so many other monumental challenges our nation is facing becomes much harder,” Flynn wrote. 

Trump’s response 

Trump has been put on the back foot as the scandal over his administration’s confused messaging regarding the “Epstein files” has created fissures among his supporters. 

He has at times appeared to admonish those in his base who have been critical of Bondi and the two men leading the FBI. 

The president appeared exasperated when he was asked by a reporter about Epstein at a cabinet meeting last Tuesday.

“Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?… Are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable,” Trump said.

“At a time like this, where we’re having some of the greatest success and also tragedy with what happened in Texas, it just seems like a desecration.

If Trump was hoping to wave away the criticism of Bondi with those comments, he was unsuccessful. 

Over the weekend, he posted a lengthy message on his Truth Social platform, once again defending Bondi and seeking to divert attention away from her. 

He also introduced a new wrinkle and contradicted the joint memo’s assertion that there was no “client list”. 

Trump questioned why people were “giving publicity to Files written by Obama, Crooked Hillary, Comey, Brennan, and the Losers and Criminals of the Biden administration.” 

“They created the Epstein Files, just like they created the FAKE Hillary Clinton/Christopher Steele Dossier that they used on me, and now my so-called ‘friends’ are playing right into their hands,” Trump wrote.

“Why didn’t these Radical Left Lunatics release the Epstein Files? If there was ANYTHING in there that could have hurt the Maga Movement, why didn’t they use it?”

“LET PAM BONDI DO HER JOB – SHE’S GREAT! The 2020 Election was Rigged and Stolen, and they tried to do the same thing in 2024 – That’s what she is looking into as AG, and much more,” he wrote.

“One year ago our Country was DEAD, now it’s the ‘HOTTEST’ Country anywhere in the World. Let’s keep it that way, and not waste Time and Energy on Jeffrey Epstein, somebody that nobody cares about.”

It’s worth noting that Epstein was prosecuted during the Trump administration, after Obama and Clinton had left office. 

Trump has always had a tenuous relationship with the truth, something demonstrated by his hiring of conspiracy theorists like Patel, Bongino and his health secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr.

Those appointments were always risky though, because they led his supporters to expect new revelations about their pet theories. 

So far, Trump has disappointed them, first with the release of the JFK assassination files, which unearthed nothing of consequence, and now with the U-turn on Epstein documents. 

In his first term, when his cabinet was not fully stocked with loyalists, Trump supporters were able to rationalise the lack of explosive disclosures by blaming obstruction by shadowy forces working against him from within.

Now that the conspiracy theorists are in the White House, the problem for Trump and his officials is there is no “deep state” to blame for obscuring the truth. 

They are the “deep state” now, and it doesn’t seem to suit them. 

With reporting from AFP

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