Former Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) Deputy Director Dan Bongino on Monday defended President Donald Trump administrationhandling of files about deceased sex offender Jeffrey Epstein on his first episode of “The Dan Bongino Show” since leaving the bureau.
After Axios reported on July 6 that a Department of Justice (DOJ) memo found that Epstein had left no “client list” and that there was no evidence of foul play in his death, many Trump supporters criticized the administration. However, Bongino suggested on his show that the administration could not have handled the Epstein files better.
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“I know a lot of you are concerned also about Epstein … leadership involves frequently being misunderstood and having to make decisions that’s going to piss someone off. That’s just the way it is,” Bongino said. “This case had been handled poorly for a long time … look at the search warrants and how they were scoped. The case that had issues for a really long time. So it obviously was a mess. And this is one of those level 10 decisions where I told you, you’re not going to make everyone happy. There’s a shitty answer and a shittier answer.”
“I love how people in the media acted like this was like new, as if the [former President Joe] Biden team had done anything to get this stuff out. They’d done shit. They’d done nothing. Zero,” he added. “Of course there was going to be some disagreements on what do you do about grand jury material? What do you do about downloaded child pornography that was downloaded off the internet? He didn’t create it, but what do you do about that? What do you do about all this? There was always going to be a disagreement.”
Bongino asserted that the Epstein files did not contain the level of wrongdoing that he anticipated before joining the FBI.
“I want to see the files, folks. I said, don’t let it go. I meant it,” he said. “We got elected. We looked at it. The file was not — what was in there was not what we thought would be in there.”
“I’m not going to spend the next two years talking about it. This administration got you the information. You can all look at it. And a lot of people are using it to divide us from the inside. Those are just the facts,” Bongino said. “That’s just the way it goes. And by the way, the dividing people from the inside thing is not working. A lot of this is bullshit. A lot of it is foreign operations designed to make us divorce ourselves from the inside, current thing, everything. It is a deadly serious case. There is zero doubt about it. Everyone in the administration treated it as such.”
Moreover, Bongino said on “Fox & Friends” in May that the “clear as day” footage the DOJ would release of Epstein’s last night in jail would confirm that he committed suicide and was not murdered. However, CBS News’ analysis of the video released in July found that it did not offer an unobstructed perspective of the entrance to Epstein’s cell block.
The digital clock in the footage the DOJ released also skipped from 11:58:58 p.m. to 12:00 a.m. As the video feed comes back, its aspect ratio is marginally different, CBS News reported.
Experts told CBS News the change suggested the video was edited or reprocessed rather than untouched.
Furthermore, Dr. Michael Baden, a forensic pathologist Epstein’s brother enlisted, suggested on “Fox & Friends” in October 2019 that the autopsy found his death was more likely a homicidal strangulation than suicidal hanging.
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