Trump Had Bananas Excuse for Why Epstein Wasn’t Actually a Big Deal

Jeffrey Epstein’s self-described “pal” Donald Trump apparently can’t grasp why the pedophile’s crimes are so upsetting for the American public.

Trump complained to aides about the intense public scrutiny of his failure to produce Epstein’s so-called client list, claiming that “Palm Beach in the 90s was a different time,” The Wall Street Journal reported late Wednesday.

After longtime allies whipped up a furor over the dismal Epstein files rollout on the second day of a Turning Point USA Conference in Tampa, Trump wanted to know, “Why is everyone so fixated on the issue?” the Journal said, asking influential allies, “What would make it die down?”

Trump claimed he cut off contact with Epstein after the financier was convicted for soliciting underage prostitutes, referring to Epstein as a “creep.” But the pair of Manhattan socialites have shared a long and cozy history together.

Prior to his death, Epstein described himself as one of Trump’s “closest friends.” The duo were named and photographed together on several occassions—including at Trump’s second wedding. The socialites were caught shepherding underage girls into casinos together, and Trump reportedly flew on Epstein’s jets between Palm Beach and New York at least seven times. Trump penned a salacious letter to Epstein for the sex trafficker’s 50th birthday, and was quoted in a 2002 New York Magazine profile as saying that he had, at that point, known Epstein for 15 years, referring to him as a “terrific guy.”

Much to Trump’s chagrin, the botched rollout of the Epstein files has continued to plague his administration. Instead of simply disclosing the contents of the files, the Trump administration has expended vast resources to reportedly strip the president’s name from the documents. The White House also tapped Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell to produce a new list of the deceased financier’s associates, which undoubtedly already exists in the Epstein files. The plot granted Maxwell improved living conditions, moving her to a minimum-security prison camp in Texas, and gave her time on the national stage to ask Trump for a pardon.

The Epstein story has remained an anomaly in Trump’s political career. For the better part of a decade, the MAGA leader became adjusted to an undyingly loyal base that rarely skews from or challenges his political vision. But Trump’s proximity to Epstein and his heinous crimes has been an outlier, prompting doubts that have undercut Trump’s influence with large swaths of his followers.

Ty Cobb, a former Trump White House attorney, told the Journal that the federal fiasco surrounding the Epstein scandal was “the worst managed PR event in history.” Its handling was unorganized and chaotic, with the Justice Department and the FBI regularly pointing fingers at one another.

At one point, Attorney General Pam Bondi complained that FBI leadership was “trying to destroy her,” according to the Journal.

President Donald Trump’s administration has upped the stakes of a potential government shutdown by threatening mass firings in federal agencies if the shutdown were to occur.

Whereas usually federal workers would be furloughed in the event of a shutdown and rehired once Congress reopens the government, this order from the White House budget office—first reported Wednesday night by Politico—instructs agencies to permanently eliminate jobs that aren’t consistent with the president’s priorities if the government shuts down.

The Trump administration decision to use the threat of firings as leverage ups the ante in negotiations with congressional Democrats over government funding.

Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer called the move an “attempt at intimidation” but didn’t seem swayed by the threat. He said earlier this month, when talking about shutdown negotiations, that the Trump administration’s attacks on federal agencies “will get worse with or without [a shutdown], because Trump is lawless.”

Schumer also believes that the firings likely aren’t as permanent as they seem—that they’ll be overturned in court or that the administration will just end up hiring workers back, as they’re aiming to do with employees fired during DOGE cuts.

“Donald Trump has been firing federal workers since day one—not to govern, but to scare. This is nothing new and has nothing to do with funding the government,” Schumer said in a statement.

President Trump was so frustrated by the growing scrutiny around his ties to deceased sexual predator Jeffrey Epstein that he personally tried to kill The Wall Street Journal’s Epstein birthday book story.

The Journal has reported that when Trump first heard about its plans to cover his strange, sultry 50th birthday letter to Epstein, he told aides that it didn’t exist, never happened, and called News Corp chair emeritus Rupert Murdoch personally from Air Force One to get the story pulled. After the story was published anyway, he denied that the letter existed and sued Dow Jones, the Journal’s publisher. (The letter was later released.)

Trump’s attempt to kill that story—and the Epstein saga in general—has been a massive failure, rife with miscommunication and missteps that shocked even Trump staffers, the Journal revealed. When Attorney General Pam Bondi told America that she had the Epstein list sitting on her desk, the White House staff had no idea what she was talking about. And the FBI was caught completely off guard when she brought that gaggle of right-wing grifters into the White House and gave them a photo shoot with those “Epstein Files: Phase 1” binders.

The administration also notably tried to make the Epstein issue go away by having the FBI declare in July that “no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted” on the Epstein case. That, of course, had the opposite effect.

“It was like a bomb went off after that statement went out,” a White House official told the Journal.

Now the Trump administration insists that it’s been fully transparent and done everything it could do to make the Epstein files public. That is not at all the case, as Representative Thomas Massie’s discharge petition argues.

“I told Director Kash Patel that the FBI has names of 20 men to whom Jeffrey Epstein trafficked women and girls. This basic fact seemed to surprise him. Why?” Massie said last Saturday. “Is the FBI withholding those names to protect the president’s rich and powerful friends? Release the Epstein files.”

This story won’t be going away anytime soon, no matter who Trump calls. From Massie to Epstein’s victims, to the base’s obsession, there is too much momentum to simply bottle it up and forget about it. And most of this is self-inflicted from the administration.

“This may be the worst managed PR event in history,” said former Trump legal team member Ty Cobb. “You’ve got multiple mouthpieces, and they’re all covering their own ass now.”

Trump’s newly appointed U.S. attorney for the Eastern District of Virginia has been made well aware that her case against former FBI Director James Comey is a dud. But as the president applies pressure to prosecute his political rivals, she’ll reportedly be moving forward with it nonetheless.

The new interim attorney, Lindsey Halligan, has no prior prosecutorial experience. A former Trump personal attorney and longtime Trump loyalist, her most recent claim to fame was serving as the president’s lead Smithsonian censor, as she sought to expose and correct an “overemphasis on slavery” in the museums.

Now she’s been appointed to her new post with the expectation that she will do what her predecessor, Erik Siebert, failed to: aggressively indict the president’s foes, namely, New York Attorney General Letitia James and Comey—evidence be damned.

But while Halligan reportedly plans to ask a grand jury to indict Comey, she faces a glaring issue: The case is so flimsy that, ABC News reports, prosecutors this week, citing insufficient evidence, advised Halligan in a memo to decline to move forward with perjury and obstruction charges against him.

“A monthslong investigation into Comey by DOJ prosecutors failed to establish probable cause of a crime,” ABC News’s sources said, “meaning that not only would they be unable to secure a conviction of Comey by proving the claims beyond a reasonable doubt, but that they couldn’t reach a significantly lower standard to secure an indictment.”

Halligan has had her own qualms about the case, according to ABC News, as has Attorney General Pam Bondi, per The Wall Street Journal.

But Trump has been applying pressure, even publicly, for the cases against his enemies to proceed. The deadline to indict Comey is this Tuesday, when the five-year statute of limitations expires for accusations that he lied to Congress during his 2020 testimony regarding Russian interference in the 2016 election. In a Saturday Truth Social post addressed to Bondi—which praised Halligan—the president called for urgent action on prosecuting the weak cases against Comey, James, and Senator Adam Schiff, lest the administration kill its “reputation and credibility.”

One day after Alex Jones publicly unveiled the Justice Department’s intent to investigate retired FBI Special Agent William Aldenberg, the lawsuit is no more.

Jones presented the inquiry Tuesday as evidence that Trump’s DOJ was willing to go to bat for him. In a letter dated September 15, U.S. Pardon Attorney Ed Martin accused Aldenberg—one of the first responders to the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School—of personally benefiting from the defamation case brought against the InfoWars host by the victims’ families. But by Wednesday, Martin had changed his tune.

“At this time, I write to inform you that there is no investigation of you or your client,” Martin wrote in his new letter to attorney Chris Mattei, who represented Aldenberg as well as the families of Sandy Hook victims, and who was the recipient of Martin’s original letter. “Because of this, I hereby withdraw my request for information from you or your former client.”

The Sandy Hook trial effectively bankrupted Jones, with the conspiracist ordered to cough up $1.3 billion to the victims of the tragedy he branded as a “hoax.” As part of that decision, the court ordered Jones to pay Aldenberg $90 million.

In his original letter, Martin had pressed Mattei’s office for information relating to Aldenberg’s former employment at the FBI, the framing of his testimony in Jones’s defamation case, and whether Aldenberg had a relationship with communications firm Berlin Rosen for purposes related to “newsjacking,” which the letter did not define.

“Less than 18 hours after calling out Alex Jones and Ed Martin for their corrupt use of the Department of Justice to harass Sandy Hook families and the heroic FBI agent who ran into that school to save any children he could, I am happy to learn that this so-called inquiry has now been withdrawn, if it ever existed at all,” Mattei told The New Republic in a statement.

“Let this be a reminder: This is not a moment to cower in silence, but to stand up to bullying, lawless misconduct,” Mattei said. “This isn’t over.”

Mattei had previously scorned Martin’s participation in Jones’s ongoing harassment campaign against Aldenberg as “corrupt complicity.”

Jones made his name and living by casting doubt on the reality of the Sandy Hook shooting, which killed 26 people. His supporters, fueled by Jones’s rhetoric, harassed and intimidated the family members of the shooting victims, including an instance in which they urinated on and desecrated 7-year-old Daniel Braden’s grave, according to court testimony.

Jones still has yet to pay the $1.3 billion he owes the victims’ families.