Vice President J.D. Vance tore into the corporate media on Monday for “not giving a damn” about the case surrounding sex offender Jeffrey Epstein until President Donald Trump took office.
Vance said during a speech in Canton, Ohio, that the media completely turned a blind eye to the Epstein case for nearly two decades and that journalists are only concerned with criticizing the handling of the case under the Trump administration. He vowed that the administration will not mimic former Presidents George W. Bush, Barack Obama and Joe Biden’s administrations, who he said went “easy” on Epstein.
“I got to make an observation that there is an interesting thing about this case that the American media tends to ignore. For four years under [former President] Joe Biden’s Department of Justice, the media didn’t give a damn about the Epstein files or the Epstein case,” Vance said. “For literally 20 years, the story about this scumbag, and he is a scumbag pedophile, Jeffrey Epstein … For 20 years, you had Obama and George W. Bush’s Department of Justice go easy on this guy, they didn’t fully investigate the case, they didn’t show any curiosity about the case and now Donald J. Trump is asking his Department of Justice to show full transparency and somehow that’s a criticism of Donald J. Trump and not Barack Obama or George W. Bush.”
“If you want to criticize the people who aren’t showing full transparency, you ought to go after the administrations that went easy on Jeffrey Epstein, the administrations that concealed this case for 20 years and the administrations that failed to show full transparency,” the vice president continued.
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The DOJ and the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) concluded on July 6 that there is no evidence that an outside force killed Epstein or that he possessed a so-called “client list,” prompting the American public and several members of Congress to demand for the full release of the files. Trump stated in a July 17 Truth Social post that he instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to release “all pertinent grand jury testimony” relating to Epstein that is subject to court approval.
Bondi alluded that she had the “client list” on her desk during a February interview with Fox News, though the DOJ and the White House later stated that she referred to several documents that related to a variety of investigations.
The White House has disputed reports that Trump is among the hundreds of people named in the files. Trump told reporters during a joint press conference on Monday alongside British Prime Minister Keir Starmer that any incriminating evidence against him would have already been released by Biden’s administration to help boost Democrats’ chances in the 2024 election.
“They ran the files, I was running against somebody who ran the files. If they had something, they would’ve released [them] … Those files were run by these people, they were run by my enemy. If there was anything in there, they would’ve used them for the election,” Trump said.
The Wall Street Journal (WSJ) alleged in a July 17 story that Trump sent Epstein a suggestive letter and a drawing of a naked stick-figured woman in honor of the disgraced financier’s 50th birthday in 2003. The president sued The WSJ, the two reporters who wrote the piece, Rupert Murdoch, Dow Jones & Company Inc. and News Corporation for publishing the story, which he stated is completely false.
Authorities arrested Epstein for the first time in 2006 and charged him with felony solicitation of prostitution. In 2008, then-federal prosecutor Alex Acosta, who later served as the U.S. labor secretary, made a deal with Epstein that he would only serve 13 months in a work-release program if he pleaded guilty to state charges.
Federal prosecutors in Manhattan brought nearly identical charges against Epstein in 2019, though he died in his cell on Aug. 10 of that year. Dr. Michael Baden, a forensic pathologist hired by Epstein’s brother, told “Fox & Friends” in October 2019 that Epstein’s autopsy was more consistent with homicidal strangulation than suicidal hanging.
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