When the Justice Department launched a primary batch of Jeffrey Epstein recordsdata on Friday that included images of former President Bill Clinton, White House officers raced to amplify the significance of the brand new documents.
But days later, amid a second trove that accommodates a number of references to President Donald Trump, the White House is pushing a special view: Don’t consider all the things you see.
Trump officers on Tuesday downplayed the latest disclosure of more than 30,000 files associated to Epstein, dismissing the importance of the supplies and suggesting that some that talked about Trump had been unverified and even outright fabricated. Even as the remainder of Washington pored over data displaying Trump repeatedly flew on Epstein’s airplane, White House aides sought to spotlight different issues the president is extra keen to speak about.
The messaging shift — the latest in a largely unsuccessful effort by the administration to grab management of the story — has spawned frustration in Trump’s orbit and components of the White House, the place some noticed the scrambled response over the previous couple of days as simply the latest stumble in a yr of Epstein-related blunders and baffling communications mishaps.
“It’s just been confusing and compounding,” Matthew Barlett, a GOP strategist and former first-term Trump appointee, stated of the administration’s contradictory messaging. “It’s perpetuated this news cycle, continues to give the White House and administration a massive headache of their own making, and I don’t see any remedy any time soon.”
The new data renewed debate over the comprehensiveness of the DOJ disclosures and the extent to which the administration has complied with the regulation demanding their launch. The Justice Department appeared to attempt to get forward of any unflattering revelations for Trump, issuing a name for skepticism in analyzing the brand new supplies — a minimum of when it got here to claims about the president.
“Some of these documents contain untrue and sensationalist claims made against President Trump that were submitted to the FBI right before the 2020 election,” the Justice Department stated, including that “if they had a shred of credibility, they certainly would have been weaponized against President Trump already.”
A White House official declined to remark past the DOJ’s assertion. As for Trump himself, the voluble president spent half the day on the golf course earlier than making a quiet return to Mar-a-Lago. By 2 p.m. ET, officers had declared a lid, which means Trump wouldn’t be seen or heard from for the remainder of the day.
The near-total silence from Trumpworld represented a stark distinction in comparison with just some days in the past, when aides and allies rushed to flow into the quite a few images of Clinton in the Epstein recordsdata as a part of a bid to place contemporary stress on Democrats.
And it underscored the White House’s ongoing wrestle to handle a saga that has annoyed Trump and his prime aides and wounded him politically — at the same time as his MAGA base stays deeply invested in the Epstein case, and the controversy exhibits no indicators of going away.
“This is horrifying. Trump called me a traitor for fighting him to release the Epstein files and standing with women who were raped, jailed in stalls, and trafficked to men,” GOP Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene posted on X Tuesday, referring to a picture from the latest doc dump. “Only evil people would hide this and protect those who participated. I pray for these women.” Once a powerful Trump ally, Greene has damaged with the president in current months, in half over the Epstein case.
After the administration spent Friday and far of the weekend highlighting Clinton’s appearances in the recordsdata, Trump on Monday undercut the marketing campaign by expressing sympathy for the previous Democratic president and criticizing those that had pushed for the recordsdata’ launch.
“I don’t like the pictures of Bill Clinton being shown. I don’t like the pictures of other people being shown,” Trump stated. “I think it’s a terrible thing.”
Neither Trump nor Clinton has been accused of any legal wrongdoing in reference to Epstein and each have insisted they’ve performed no mistaken. A Clinton consultant referred to as for the Justice Department to launch all recordsdata associated to the previous president.
The White House has shifted its place on the Epstein recordsdata repeatedly over the past 11 months, dogged by some administration officers’ insistence once they had been exterior of presidency that the supplies wanted to be made public to reveal high-profile wrongdoers. Since returning to workplace, Trump waged an prolonged marketing campaign in opposition to releasing the documents that alienated shut allies and put him at odds together with his base, solely to succumb to overwhelming stress from Congress and signal into regulation a measure demanding the Justice Department make public all its supplies.
The operating battle not solely price Trump credibility with those that care deeply about the matter, advisers stated, however now continues to distract from a variety of extra crucial points that the administration might have in any other case centered on.
“I get it — it matters on Twitter and TikTok and Facebook. But it’s not where most people are right now,” one Trump adviser stated of the eye surrounding Epstein. “Donald Trump needs to go out there every day and talk about how he’s making people’s lives more affordable.”
On Tuesday, White House officers tried to make use of that recommendation, focusing their public efforts on touting new indicators of financial development and selling a variety of Trump’s coverage priorities. By the afternoon, for instance, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt had posted or reposted on X greater than three dozen occasions, largely on financial issues. And late in the day, the White House started livestreaming an animated video depicting Trump studying over “Santa’s naughty list,” with the phrases: “No coal. Just deportation.”
Still, at one level, even Leavitt waded briefly into the Epstein concern, amplifying a DOJ assertion that asserted a purported letter signed ‘J. Epstein’ and addressed to convicted sex offender Larry Nassar was a fake. The letter made an obvious reference to Trump, although it didn’t determine him by title, with a lurid declare: “Our President also shares our love of young, nubile girls.”
“Just because a document is released by the Department of Justice does not make the allegations or claims within the document factual,” the DOJ stated. “Nevertheless, the DOJ will continue to release all material required by law.”