Why can’t Donald Trump shake off the Epstein Files?

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0:27BBC Sounds. Music, radio, podcasts. The Jeffrey Epstein problem is getting bigger for Donald Trump. It is getting bigger almost every day. This week, a leading Republican has broken away from the president, the House Speaker, Mike Johnson, calling for transparency. We should put everything out there, which is, of course, what the Trump administration has said doesn't now need to happen. So Donald Trump is having to talk about Jeffrey Epstein. He's calling for the release of any credible files. What does that mean? Can he put a stopper on all of this? What does it mean for his presidency? Welcome to AmeriCast.

1:07AmeriCast. AmeriCast from BBC News. God spared my life for a reason. Only when it is dark enough can you see the stars. A star is born, Elon. I'm not just MAGA, I'm dark, Gothic MAGA. This is what happens when the machine comes after you. I'm terrified for this country and I'm so hurt that America let this happen. I think that we just witnessed the greatest political comeback in the history of the United States of America.

1:46Hello, it's Anthony in the Washington, D.C. Bureau of BBC News. And it's Justin in the worldwide headquarters of AmeriCast in London, England. and it's just the two of us. And I should say right at the beginning, because events move so fast, don't they, that it's 10 to 3 in the afternoon on Wednesday here in London. And not only do things move fast in the big worldwide world, they also move fast, of course, in politics, don't they, Anthony? We've got this phrase in Britain, a week is a long time in politics. A previous British Prime Minister came up with it. It's certainly a long time in American politics at the moment and specifically with regard to Jeffrey Epstein.

2:23So this is what Donald Trump said to a reporter last week who tried to ask Pam Bondi, Pam Bondi being the attorney general, a question about the Epstein files. Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy's been talked about for years. And are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable. Do you want to waste the time? Do you feel like answering? I don't mind answering. I mean, I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein 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.

3:03Well, all right. This, though, is what he said to reporters on Tuesday of this week on the grounds of the White House. I would say that, you know, these files were made up by Comey. They were made up by Obama. They were made up by the Biden, you know. And we went through years of that with the Russia, Russia, Russia hoax, with all of the different things that we had to go through. We've gone through years of it, but she's handled it very well. And it's going to be up to her. Whatever she thinks is credible, she should release. Yeah, she should release. She being Pam Bondi. And then later on that same day, he reverted back to questioning why anyone should care at all about Jeffrey Epstein.

3:47REP. REP. PRESIDENT BIDEN, I KNOW YOU HAVE URGED PEOPLE TO MOVE ON, BUT I'M CURIOUS, WHY DO YOU THINK YOUR SUPPORTERS IN PARTICULAR HAVE BEEN SO INTERESTED IN THE EPSTEIN STORY AND SO UPSET ABOUT HOW IT'S BEEN HANDLED? I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHY THEY WOULD BE SO INTERESTED. HE'S DEAD FOR A LONG TIME. HE WAS NEVER A BIG FACTOR IN TERMS OF LIFE. I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT THE INTEREST OR WHAT THE FASCINATION IS. I REALLY DON'T. AND THE CREDIBLE INFORMATION HAS BEEN GIVEN. Don't forget, we went through years of the Mueller witch hunt and all of the different things, the Steele dossier, which was all fake.

4:23All that information was fake. But I don't understand why the Jeffrey Epstein case would be of interest to anybody. It's pretty boring stuff. It's sorted, but it's boring. And I don't understand why it keeps going. I think really only pretty bad people, including fake news, want to keep something like that going. Anthony, your take. Well, obviously, Donald Trump's trying to change the subject, and he's not doing a very good job of it. We talk about how Donald Trump can drive the news cycle, and that that's one of his superpowers. But here he's telling people there's nothing to see here, move on, and they're not moving on.

5:03And it's because this is something that Donald Trump's base has been fixated on for years, and that Donald Trump and those around him have promised there'd be some sort of a big revelation. And now they've come out and said, actually, there's nothing there. Let's move on. And I think that's why it's been such a challenge for Trump. And clearly he is getting frustrated. And significant people in the party are not letting him get away with it, are they? And not just on the kind of extremes of the party. So Marjorie Taylor Greene, you might expect to be in that camp, the very kind of wild-eyed congresswoman, if that's a reasonable description of her.

5:42She might not accept it, but there we go. Speaker Mike Johnson, though, who's not wild-eyed at all, very much a Trump supporter, but very much someone who marshals the wider party, certainly the wider congressional party. They've both called for transparency, haven't they? This word transparency in separate interviews with the commentator Benny Johnson. And that's something Marjorie Taylor Greene repeated to CNN, to CNN's Manu Raju yesterday. This is something that's been talked about by many people serving in the administration, myself and many others on the right and the left, of there needing to be transparency of the rich and powerful elites that were in his circle while he was just one of the worst serial abusers of young women.

6:31It has been a very serious situation for the administration and a lot of people in MAGA. They really want to know more information about the people that were involved with Jeffrey Epstein. And is there a blackmail list? And are there foreign countries' governments involved? And I think that's the challenge here for Donald Trump is that as you hear from Marjorie Taylor Greene there, this cuts against one of the central messages of Donald Trump's political identity. And that is that the rich and powerful are taking advantage of this country, that they're looking out for themselves. and it is Donald Trump who is on the side of the little guy, the outsiders, the people who aren't rich and powerful, the people who aren't part of the elite, and he's pulling back the curtain and revealing their excesses, and he's fighting for the little guy.

7:20And here is a case now where it looks at least to some people that Donald Trump isn't pulling back the curtain. He's part of the cover-up, and he has something to hide. And while, you know, there's not any kind of substance that we've seen that ties Donald Trump to Epstein or that there is an Epstein client list and any indication that if there were, Donald Trump was on it. It's still it's difficult for Trump to dispel. And it also puts him in the unfortunate or the difficult position of trying to convince his supporters that they're rich and powerful in this case don't have anything to hide. Yeah.

8:00And when you say his supporters, I think the really interesting point is that it is not just the kind of classic conspiracy theorists. It's not just people who think that the moon landings were faked or that Covid didn't exist or whatever. It's a wider group of people. And we've had a fascinating question about that, which I want to get to now from Andy in Eastbourne. Let's let's play it. You seem to imply that Trump being involved with anything Epstein-related is a conspiracy theory, rather like the JFK being killed or the moon landing hoax. I'm not generally a conspiracy theory believer, but I think there's a lot more smoke or fact around the fact that Trump is likely to be named somewhere in the Epstein recordings than not.

8:40And the reason I think Andy is dead right is not necessarily what he says about Donald Trump, but I absolutely agree with his implication, which is that you do not have to be an out-and-out conspiracy theorist in order to believe that there is something very fishy about the whole Epstein business and what happened to him and all the details of the case. remember the court case against it which never came to anything because there wasn't a court case against him because he was found dead in prison apparently by suicide so that there is there is this kind of interesting it seems to me difference and really politically relevant difference between the kind of crazed conspiracy theorists and a much wider group of people and anthony you see this don't you in the kind of coalition of people who are uneasy now about it all being put to bed and the subject being changed.

9:33You look at some of the podcasters, kind of Trump-adjacent podcasters, not necessarily in with him, but people who've been interested in him in the past, kind of saying, we didn't go for this. We didn't vote for this. We thought when you said you were going to open up, you know, the deep state and you were going to do all the things that you were going to do and be transparent about government, we kind of took you at your word. And we're pretty disappointed now that you don't seem to be doing that. And I don't know what you think, Anthony. It just seems to me that the political danger for Trump, it's not from the wild extremes.

10:08It's from people, you know, even probably who regard themselves actually as independents and liked him and now feel pretty hacked off. Yeah, there's a poll that came out today and 80 percent of the public said that there needed to be more revelations, needed to be full disclosure of any documents on Epstein that the federal government has. And I mean, if you can get 80 percent of the American public to agree on anything, that is a pretty remarkable feat. And a frightening one for the Trump people. Yeah, I mean, it should be frightening. And, you know, we also should say that, you know, while there is no evidence linking Donald Trump to any of these allegations surrounding Jeffrey Epstein, there is evidence linking the two men.

10:52I mean, they both were from Palm Beach, South Florida. They both traveled in the same social circles. There's a famous photograph that gets circulated all the time now of Donald Trump and Epstein kind of standing shoulder to shoulder, smiling. There's a video of the two men together. And Michael Wolff, who's an American journalist, who some people say is a sensationalist, and they've questioned some of his reporting. But he had lengthy conversations with Jeffrey Epstein in 2018, I think it was, where Epstein told him on recordings about what he said was a close relationship he had with Donald Trump dating back to the 1980s.

11:32So there are data points that show that these these two people had contact and that when you start drawing conclusions and people making service, surmising the relationships and extrapolating from that, then you get to where these these conspiracy theories start to pop up. But certainly anything that Donald Trump has done over the past week hasn't been successful in downplaying that relationship. If anything, it's raised new questions. Yeah. And the questions, of course, about Donald Trump, but also more widely questions. And this kind of goes, doesn't it, to the whole politics of MAGA. It's questions about a whole group of people, including senior Democrats, they believe, who have kind of lauded it over the nation and been able to get away with stuff, including horrible stuff, criminal stuff, that they, the ordinary people, have not had any kind of way of stopping.

12:29or window on. And it's that kind of sense, isn't it? That sense of the outsiders taking control of Washington that was so much of the power behind Trump. And if they then get told, oh, it's nothing to see here, you can understand why politically it doesn't work for him, does it? Yeah, there was someone who had three possible explanations for how Trump handled this. And the first one is that they came into this knowing that there wasn't anything to this, to the Epstein files, and they were lying about it in order to gain political advantage. Two, that they came into this thinking that there was something to the Epstein files, but once they got into government and looked into it, there was nothing there.

13:20or they came into this taking advantage of the hubbub surrounding Epstein. They got into power, found out that there was something there, and they're covering all of this up. And all three of those scenarios aren't exactly good for Donald Trump. I mean, even the best case scenario, they were misleading people, and now they were kind of trafficking in conspiracy theories, and now they found out that there's nothing to them and trying to explain that. That's the most innocent explanation for this, And it's still not one that is politically beneficial to Trump. No, I mean, it's staggeringly politically inept, isn't it, to march people up a hill and then to have nothing when you get to the top of it.

13:58And then you get to people like the FBI director, Kash Patel, the deputy director, this guy, Dan Bongino, who we were understanding was maybe going to resign because they had been absolutely in the forefront of all of this stuff. And they kind of drove them into the FBI. eye and suddenly they're there and pan bondi's saying there's nothing to see and their supporters are saying how much second you're i guys what's what's going on it has left them in really difficult positions even if they don't resign yeah and pan bondi definitely mishandled this i mean she said at one point uh to the gathered press that she had the files on her desk um it was was reviewing them implying even that she had epstein's client list on her desk and she later had to walk that back and she meant just the FBI report and she was looking into, you know, all of the report on what they had and didn't have.

14:49But when she said that before the cameras, it sounded pretty definitive, like there was going to be a big revelation soon. And of course, when there wasn't, that's when you had people on the outside, people in kind of the right wing ecosystems up in arms. And you had people in the FBI who, as you mentioned, Dan but Gino and Kash Patel, who have trafficked in conspiracy theories, who do think that there's an elite cabal that is running this country and is out to get people, had them running foursquare into Pam Bondi and creating this kind of a conflict between Donald Trump's own Justice Department and the FBI, which is an agency underneath the Justice Department and answerable Pam Bondi.

15:33If they stay in post, okay, and if they do kind of successfully push it all off the news agenda, and Donald Trump is very good at that, as we know, to our cost, something else could well come up by the time people are listening to this episode. If they manage to do all of that, does it then die a death politically? Or does it kind of go into abeyance and come back to bite them in the midterms and indeed in the gubernatorial elections later this year in this sense that a lot of MAGA people just think, oh, what the heck? We don't care anymore. We're not going to be that interested in voting. We thought we were going to get something out of it.

16:12We're not going to get something out of it. The deep state's still there. We're just not going to bother. And that, in a way, obviously doesn't affect Donald Trump personally. He's never going to be up for election again, but it would affect Republican candidates and potentially I would have thought quite badly if it suppresses turnout. Yeah, it might. And there's questions about whether Donald Trump's base will turn out when Donald Trump isn't on the ballot anyway. I mean, we saw in 2018 in the midterm elections and Donald Trump's first term, Democrats did really well because with the exception of Florida, Donald Trump's base didn't turn out at all.

16:45In 2020, we saw Trump's base turn out and he nearly came from behind to beat Joe Biden. And then 2022, Donald Trump not on the ballot and Democrats actually overperformed expectations. So, I mean, there is already this existing trend that it's hard to motivate Trump supporters when he's not on the ballot. Now add in the fact that they could be disaffected, that they could be frustrated with what's happening. And this is one of the data points that kind of lends those frustrations. I think Republicans, you know, very much have to be worried. Now, whether anything comes of this, we have to look at what Republicans are saying and what Republicans are doing.

17:21And while we're hearing from Mike Johnson, the Speaker of the House, calling for full disclosure and that these files need to come out, what Johnson is doing behind the scenes is pushing down any kind of an uprising within his own ranks, squelching Democratic attempts to force Epstein files, whatever is left of them, to be revealed. And Republicans, by and large, with a few notable exceptions, are falling in line behind him. So So while they're talking about how this needs to come out of the public domain, this needs to be revealed, they're not voting that way. They're voting to protect Donald Trump, and they are still in a variety of other instances voting with Donald Trump.

18:02We're not seeing the kind of big break that you would suspect if Donald Trump's political influence, at least within the Republican Party and at least within Republicans in Congress, was starting to wane. Yeah. It's worth saying, isn't it? They have released something. So there was 11 hours of surveillance footage from the camera that was near Epstein's Manhattan jail cell. This is the jail cell where he was found dead. And that was meant to address some of the theories about whether or not he killed himself, whether perhaps he was murdered. But, Anthony, that didn't go according to plan either.

18:39Even that raised more questions than it answered. and there was a missing minute apparently right at midnight. And the way Pam Bondi explained is that that's when the video resets. And so there's always a missing minute. I haven't seen whether they've substantiated that by showing other night's tapes in a missing minute. But also Wired Magazine has done some research, some investigation of the metadata behind the tape that the Justice Department released and found that it had been manipulated in some way and maybe manipulated in an innocent sort of way where things were kind of resplaced together in order to form one video file instead of multiple video files.

19:18But still, I mean, that, again, raises concerns. And they're actually said that maybe there's more than a minute of missing time. Maybe there's a couple of minutes of missing time because of what they're analyzing from this video file. So you would think that they would know that all of this would be scrutinized very closely and that any kind of changes would raise suspicions among people who are already suspecting of some kind of a cover up. And yet here they go throwing this out there in a way that is just going to stoke the fires. You were saying, Anthony, Congress at the moment still pliant and still very much in the Trump orbit, at least Republicans in the House particularly.

19:56particularly. You do wonder, don't you, what happens after the midterms if the Democrats, as is pretty widely expected, manage to get back into the majority into the House and call hearings, etc. Want to keep pressing this on. And we've had an email, another very good question, I thought, from Don, who writes, given Musk's comments on Trump being in the Epstein file, surely the president now needs to release them to prove his innocence. If he doesn't, is there a mechanism for Congress, etc., to have them released? Surely it's in the public interest to know how involved Trump is in any wrongdoing at the time.

20:37I mean, they could hold hearings, couldn't they, Anthony? And presumably they could subpoena all sorts of people. I mean, it could be quite a nuisance if only that for the Republicans. It could definitely be. And as we're seeing already, Democrats are spelling an opportunity here and they don't have the power right now to really do anything. But, you know, come a year from January, if the story is still bouncing around, or even if it's not, they want to dust it off and use it again, because clearly it makes Donald Trump uncomfortable. They could do that and they could subpoena all of these different files and get into legal battles over what the Justice Department will and will not release.

21:12They could subpoena Jelaine Maxwell, well, the partner of Jeffrey Epstein, and force her to testify, which, you know, could be very embarrassing if she starts talking about what she knows and her relationships with Donald Trump, because, again, she was one of the people in that photograph with Jeffrey Epstein that we see bouncing around and Donald Trump that we see bouncing around all over the place. They could dig further and see where it leads. I mean, a lot of these times it's not what's right there on the surface that proves embarrassing in one of these kind of open-ended investigations. It's what they find by digging a little bit or the kind of denials that turn into cover-ups that become the big scandal, as you know.

21:52I mean, it's that Richard Nixon, the line from the Richard Nixon Watergate hearings. It's not the crime, it's the cover-up. And Donald Trump is acting like he's, as I mentioned, acting like he wants to hide something that he doesn't want kind of a full disclosure. And if that's the case, then Democrats could be able to make this a real headache for Trump in 2027 and 2028. But with assistance from from Musk. I mean, in that email from Don, he makes the point is right that Musk has said that Trump is in these Epstein files, which may or may not exist. Just to remind people that post on X, it was some feels like a long time ago.

22:31It was only last month, actually, wasn't it? But time to drop the really big bomb, he said. Donald Trump is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they've not been made public. have a nice day, DJT. Now, since then, they've kind of slightly made up, haven't they? But if the Democrats want to keep going, and if he's sticking his money, Musk sticking his money behind a third party or third party candidates in some key places, and that this is one of the things they're running on, I mean, it's chaos, isn't it? You know, Elon Musk has made accusations of pedophilia, not at Donald Trump, but at other people in the past.

23:09And actually, there is this kind of undercurrent of concern about pedophilia rings. There was that big instance of the pizza parlor here in Washington, D.C., where one conspiracy theorist showed up convinced that there was a basement in this Comet pizza parlor and that Democrats were running a pedophilia ring out of that basement. Of course, there was no basement and no pedophilia ring. But this is kind of an ongoing thread. And so they found an honest to God example of a pedophile who did have connections to rich and powerful people in this country. So I guess it's not surprising that this story isn't going away and that they've latched on to this, even if it does potentially point towards one of their own and Donald Trump, you know, the central figure in their movement.

23:53Yeah. So what do the Democrats do? You mentioned them. Let's hear what they're saying at the moment. This is the House Minority Leader, Hacking Jeffries, weighing in at the beginning of the week. This was Monday. the american people deserve to know the truth the whole truth and nothing but the truth as it relates to this whole sordid jeffrey epstein matter democrats didn't put the jeffrey epstein thing into the public domain this was a conspiracy that donald trump pam bondy and these mega extremists have been fanning the flames of for the last several years and now the chickens are coming home to roost i sense a certain amount of scheidenfreude and that i mean you know we We didn't do this, but, you know, you're making your bed and now you've got to sleep in it.

24:36Yeah, which presumably is the right way to go. And the Democrats will be thinking about this behind the scenes, won't they? The extent to which they push it or the extent they just kind of let the Republicans have their argument without getting involved. And you'd think that quite a few of the Democrats, perhaps the savvier ones, particularly in Congress, would be saying to their pals who want to really go with it. No, just stay out of it. Let this be a Republican fight. Yeah, and I think Donald Trump wants nothing more than to make this a Democrat versus Republican fight, that this is a Democratic conspiracy to get him.

25:13We heard a little bit of that in the clip that we heard earlier, and he actually just posted a message on Truth Social going even farther, saying that it was the radical left Democrats who have hit pay dirt again with the Epstein allegations and then tying it to all of the other hoaxes that he said were perpetrated against him by Democrats, including the Steele dossier, Hunter Biden's laptop, Russia, Russia, Russia, crooked Hillary Clinton's 2016 presidential election. All of that he's kind of lumping together once his supporters and everyone else to view this latest thing as just the latest example of of that hoax that was out to get Donald Trump, because then it rallies his supporters around him.

25:57It's us against them. The Democrats are out to get us. They've done it before in the past. They're doing it again. And whereas the Democrats, I think you're right. If they're smart, they step back. They don't make it their crusade. They let the Republicans kind of tear themselves apart on this. Yeah. And you listen to people like Steve Bannon, the MAGA fan who has his own very kind of direct pathway to the MAGA faithful, his own podcast. And he makes speeches and he's very much a big figure. There is, of course, nothing to do with the White House outside the White House now. But, you know, he doesn't think it's about the Democrats.

26:34He doesn't buy this. These people are not buying it, I suppose. That's the point, Anthony. When the Trump White House tries to say, this is the Democrats, make a great fuss about this, take no notice, they really are not buying it. They really genuinely think that there is something to see here, and it's linked to all the other theories they have about the deep state and the CIA's involvement in a lot of stuff in the past, and, you know, a lot of them still think that the CIA bumped off JFK back in the 60s. And that doesn't come. That's not a political Democratic Party attack on the White House.