The right's meltdown over Jeffrey Epstein, explained

Vox

3 days ago

is a senior politics correspondent at Vox, covering the White House, elections, and political scandals and investigations. He's worked at Vox since the site's launch in 2014, and before that, he worked as a research assistant at the New Yorker's Washington, DC, bureau.
Amid all the controversies of President Donald Trump's second term so far, the one that may be causing him the biggest problems among his right-wing base is about a man who died six years ago: Jeffrey Epstein.
Epstein, the well-connected financier who was indicted for sex trafficking underage girls and died in prison in 2019, has been an obsession on the right ever since. Online MAGA influencers and Fox commentators have speculated for years that Epstein might have been murdered, that he was blackmailing powerful people, and that the US government is hiding information that would reveal what really happened.
In 2024 and the initial months of 2025, Trump allies like Pam Bondi and Kash Patel — the current attorney general and FBI director, respectively — played to the base and egged on these theories, promising to release the 'Epstein Files.'
But now they can't — or won't — deliver.
On Monday, the Justice Department and FBI released a memo saying, basically, that they've got nothing. The memo says that, after a review, they found no Epstein 'client list' and no 'credible evidence' that he blackmailed people. The memo also restated the FBI's conclusion that Epstein killed himself.
Key right-wing influencers reacted with fury, despair, or contempt – refusing to accept the administration's assurances that there's nothing to see here.
Trump was deeply annoyed to be asked about this by a reporter on Tuesday. 'Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?' he snapped. Insisting there were much more important things in the news, he continued: 'That is unbelievable. I can't believe you're asking a question on Epstein.'
Of course, Epstein has long been an awkward topic for Trump, considering that they were friendly, that they've been photographed together, and that Trump told a reporter Epstein was a 'terrific guy' who liked women 'on the younger side' all the way back in 2002. (These connections have been resolutely ignored by online right influencers.)
Adding to the awkwardness, when Elon Musk fell out with Trump last month, Musk claimed that Trump was 'in the Epstein Files' and that 'that is the real reason they have not been made public.' (Ordinarily, the accusation from a top presidential adviser that the president was implicated in sex trafficking underage girls would be a gigantic scandal, but Musk does tend to make things up.)
Related The real reasons Musk is feuding with Trump
The idea that Trump could be covering up his own Epstein-related crimes makes the right feel so uncomfortable that they've largely dismissed it. Many prefer to speculate that Epstein has ties to intelligence agencies — either in the US or Israel — that the government doesn't want to disclose.
But if you're a right-winger deeply bought into the belief that there must be more to the story, there are really only two possibilities: Either Trump, Bondi, and Patel are dupes getting snowed by the deep state, or they're knowing participants in the cover-up.
Why the right is so fixated on Jeffrey Epstein
Epstein was a very wealthy financier who had a lot of famous friends, whom he often flew on his planes to his private island. He was also repeatedly accused, in criminal and civil proceedings, of sex trafficking and sexually abusing underage girls, including some as young as 14. A brush with the law over this in the mid-2000s ended in what was later derided as a sweetheart plea deal, but in July 2019, Epstein was arrested again — and then found dead in his cell the following month, in what authorities said was a suicide.
The documented story of Epstein is bizarre and damning as it is. But on both the left and the right, many have insisted the conspiracy must go far deeper. Did Epstein have secret sexual blackmail material on powerful and influential people — politicians, celebrities — who were also involved in abusing underage girls? How did he make his money? Was he working with US or foreign intelligence services? Was he actually murdered in a shadowy conspiracy to prevent him from telling what he knew?
In particular, the online right has fixated on what they refer to as the 'Epstein list' — an imagined document supposedly listing famous people who were co-conspirators in his sex crimes. The online right hoped this would be the promised smoking gun that will indisputably reveal that their political enemies are perverted criminals, disgracing them forever and likely leading them to be arrested.
As such, it's the latest variation of the 'QAnon' theory, which argued that proof of a deep-state conspiracy to protect Democratic pedophiles was imminent. (Democrats' hopes for a Trump 'pee tape' could be said to serve a similar role.)
Dark allusions to this theory are a proven strategy for aspiring MAGA influencers seeking online engagement. When JD Vance launched his political career in 2021, he tweeted: 'Remember when we learned that our wealthiest and most powerful people were connected to a guy who ran a literal child sex trafficking ring? And then that guy died mysteriously in a jail? And now we just don't talk about it.'
Why Trump's team keeps screwing this up
Epstein first became a problem for Trump this year back in February, when Bondi hyped an imminent release of Epstein-related information. When a Fox host asked her if she'd release 'the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients,' Bondi answered, 'It is sitting on my desk right now, to review.'
Bondi then invited right-wing influencers to the White House and gave them binders marked 'The Epstein Files: Phase 1' — but the files turned out to contain no new or relevant information, and certainly no client list. Widespread bipartisan mockery ensued on social media.
As part of Bondi's damage control, her team put out a letter to Patel, in which Bondi claimed she'd asked for all the Epstein documents, but had been belatedly tipped off that the FBI's New York field office was withholding thousands of pages. Bondi demanded they be handed over, and ordered Patel 'to conduct an immediate investigation into why my order to the FBI wasn't followed.'
Months later, it's clear that this, too, was BS.
And now, Bondi's DOJ and Patel's FBI have claimed they don't have any such client list. When Bondi was asked Tuesday about her old claim on Fox that the list was 'on her desk,' she said she was just referring to the Epstein Files generally, and not a client list specifically.
The simplest and most boring explanation for what happened here is that they really do have nothing. That the government is not sitting on bombshell intel as part of a massive cover-up of some secret Epstein conspiracy. That, when Bondi and Patel implied otherwise, they were pandering to the base, genuinely misinformed, or both.
'When you're a podcast guest or a podcast host, you can make a bunch of wild claims that you think are probably true, whatever, it's just content,' conservative activist Will Chamberlain posted on X. 'When you're a high-ranking official in the FBI, it's not so simple.'