The two faces of JD: Once a Jeffrey Epstein truther, Veep Vance becomes Trump and Bondi’s latest spin doctor
Vice President J.D. Vance hit the campaign trail in Ohio on Monday, as he sought to help his boss and the GOP that is lined up behind him sell the “big, beautiful” budget reconciliation package to midterm voters.
Instead, the president’s Twitter-happy running mate found himself answering questions about Jeffrey Epstein — and in a generally unfamiliar role: battling speculation on the right instead of fueling it.
The vice president, who less than three weeks before the 2024 election declared that “we” should release the “Epstein list,” has a new message, as his colleagues now insist that the list isn’t real: “Donald J. Trump, I’m telling you, he’s got nothing to hide.”
Vance was in a Democratic-held district in Canton, Ohio — about three hours north of his hometown of Middletown — on Monday as the president and his party try and turn their focus towards next year’s midterms.
But they’re the only ones whose attention has shifted — DC’s focus remains firmly on Jeffrey Epstein and the growing uproar around the White House’s handling of the so-called “client list” or “Epstein files.” And if Monday’s road trip is any indicator, so has much of America’s.
After he concluded his remarks, the vice president hosted a press conference in front of his supporters, who watched up close as Vance evolved from conspiracy theorist to spin doctor in real time.
“The president has directed the attorney general to release all credible information and, frankly, to go and find additional credible information related to the Jeffrey Epstein case. He’s been incredibly transparent about that stuff, but some of that stuff takes time,” said Vance, who went on to accuse the media of being uninterested in the story during the Biden administration.
There are a few problems here. For one, that it isn’t true.
Vance’s reference to Trump directing Attorney General Pam Bondi to “release all credible information” is just a flat-out falsehood. The Justice Department stated explicitly — and continues to state — that it won’t release further documents from its own trove at all. The FBI and DOJ’s joint memo was pretty clear: “we found no basis to revisit the disclosure of those materials”.
What Bondi did authorize was a motion in court seeking for a judge to allow the release of grand jury transcripts to the public. Her agency made no attempts to justify the motion beyond satisfying public speculation, and it was denied — a foregone conclusion for a strategy that DOJ attorneys acknowledged in their own filings was a long shot.
Republican leadership, meanwhile, is talking out of both sides of its mouth.
Speaker Mike Johnson, remarking Sunday on NBC’s Meet the Press, positioned himself as pro-transparency while simultaneously coming out against a bipartisan resolution to force the Justice Department to release the files, with redactions for victim information and examples of pornography.
It’s also unclear what Vance meant when he said that the administration’s efforts to make this story go away would “take time.”
Bondi’s motion is already denied; she’s made no indication that her efforts to see grand jury transcripts released will continue. Those transcripts likely also hardly scratch the surface of “all credible information” the government has on the subject of Epstein.
