A broken promise to release more information about the Jeffrey Epstein case has sparked outrage among some of President Donald Trump’s loyal supporters.
The Justice Department on July 7 asserted that Epstein did not have a list of clients and said no more files related to Epstein’s case would be made public.
A two-page memo that bore the logos of the FBI and Justice Department, but that was not signed by any individual, said the DOJ determined that no “further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted.” It said much of the material was placed under seal by a court to protect victims and “only a fraction” of it “would have been aired publicly had Epstein gone to trial.”
It was a huge retreat from what Bondi and others had previously claimed. And it prompted anger – and more suspicion and conspiracy theories – from the MAGA faithful.
Some MAGA world influencers, including Laura Loomer and Glenn Beck, have explicitly called on Bondi to resign. Former Fox News host Megyn Kelly, who is now a podcaster, called Bondi “either lazy or incompetent.”
As far back as 2019, Trump suggested that Epstein’s death was a cover-up and called for a full investigation.
In retweeting a post by conservative pundit and comedian Terrance K Williams, who suggested that former president Bill Clinton may have been involved, Trump wrote that Epstein “had information on Bill Clinton & now he’s dead.”
When asked about his retweet, Trump said he was merely “demanding” a full investigation, a day after then-Attorney General Bill Barr said there had been “serious irregularities” at the prison where Epstein was being held.
In a 2023 interview, Trump told Carlson he believed that Epstein had committed suicide. But he couched his response, saying it was also “possible” that he had been murdered, a theory he said “many people” believed.
Last year, Trump was asked on Fox News whether he would declassify documents regarding the Septemper 11, 2001, attacks and the 1963 assassination of President John F Kennedy, answering, simply: “Yeah.”
He was then asked about the “Epstein files,” and he said “yeah, yeah, I would,” but then added “I think that less so because you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would.”
In a Cabinet meeting last week, Trump called it “unbelievable” and a “desecration” that people were still talking about “this creep,” given other pressing matters, including the catastrophic flooding in Texas.
In a social media post on Saturday, he expressed support for Bondi.
“What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’” Trump wrote. “They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening.”
Many believe that Jeffrey Epstein was running a blackmail operation funded by a foreign government to control the most powerful people in the United States, an issue that has been close to MAGA loyalists as emblematic of the “deep state” that Trump had for so long rallied against.
US media personality Tucker Carlson on Friday at the Turning Point USA Summit in Tampa claimed that Jeffrey Epstein likely had ties to Israeli intelligence agency Mossad, calling it “extremely obvious” and criticising the media’s refusal to explore the Mossad connection.
Trump’s dismissal of the importance of the Epstein case last week has thus, perhaps for the first time, left many among the MAGA faithful directing their anger and confusion towards Trump himself, seeing it as a betrayal of one of Trump’s core pledges leading up to both his presidencies.