Outline:
US President Donald Trump has supported Attorney General Pam Bondi and issued a sharp criticism towards his supporters from the MAGA movement, who have expressed anger following the Justice Department’s statement that there was no proof that the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein maintained a “client list”.
The immediate response from far-right figures against Trump and his supporters came following the Justice Department’s announcement that Epstein’s death in August 2019 while in federal custody was a suicide, along with the statement that it would not release any additional information from the files it has regarding the Epstein sex trafficking case.
It mentioned that this was because of a court ruling safeguarding victims, and that “only a small portion” would have been disclosed to the public if Epstein had gone to trial.
When a journalist tried to question Bondi regarding Epstein during a White House Cabinet meeting on Tuesday, Trump interjected and criticized the reporter, stating: “Are you still discussing Jeffrey Epstein? This individual has been a topic of conversation for years. We have Texas… Are people still talking about this creep? That’s incredible.”
“I can’t believe you’re bringing up Epstein at a moment like this, when we’re experiencing some of our biggest achievements — and also sorrow, with the events in Texas. It feels like an insult,” Trump added.
In response to the questions, Bondi tried to explain her earlier statements, which have been at the heart of the controversy related to the so-called Epstein Files: she was questioned on Fox News in February regarding an Epstein “client list” and stated that such a document was “on [her] desk right now for review”.
Repeating the explanation provided on her behalf on Tuesday by officials from the White House and the Justice Department, Bondi stated that she was referring to the documents related to the Epstein case as a whole, rather than a specific “client list,” which the Justice Department claims does not exist.
The “client list” denotes a persistent conspiracy theory suggesting that the sex offender maintained a record of prominent individuals and celebrities to whom young girls were trafficked, enabling him to extort them.
‘Missing minute’
Bondi was also questioned regarding the video footage released by the Justice Department from within a New York prison, aiming to finally put an end to rumors that Epstein had died while in custody before his sex trafficking trial.
The video that was released seems to experience a glitch as the timer changes from 11:58pm to 11:59pm, jumping forward by a minute to midnight, leading to various conspiracy theories about the “missing minute” in the footage.
The public prosecutor stated that it was due to a long-standing technical aspect of how the prison video recordings are captured.
“There was a specific moment that was not on the counter, and according to what we discovered from the Bureau of Prisons, they re-record that video every night, meaning the video is reset each night, and each night should have the same minute missing,” she stated.
Bondi mentioned that evidence would be made public demonstrating this.
She further explained her earlier statement about the FBI examining “tens of thousands of videos” involving the financier “with children or child pornography” during the press briefing, stating: “Concerning the tens of thousands of videos — they were actually child pornography downloaded by that repulsive Jeffrey Epstein … They will never be released, and they will never come to light.”
The most recent update regarding the Epstein documents seems to have deepened the divide between Bondi and Trump’s far-right supporters, as the case has continued to attract various conspiracy theories over time.
The prosecutor general first upset supporters of the “Make America Great Again” movement when a document release provided to right-wing influencers in February was found to consist largely of information already available to the public and did not include any new findings.