Vice President JD Vance thinks the Trump administration dropped the ball when it comes to the release of the Epstein files.
On Wednesday’s episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience,” Vance admitted that his fellow government officials were “guilty” of mishandling last year’s release of thousands (and then millions) of documents pertaining to the Epstein files.
“If people want to say we mishandled the Epstein release, guilty,” he told podcast host Joe Rogan. “We did mishandle it, especially the communications of it.”
“I think we should have just dropped everything at the very beginning and, like I was saying, it takes a little time to review the stuff, to find the stuff, to redact things where you have victims and so forth, but we should have just done it as quickly as possible,” Vance added.
Rogan then pointed out that some of the redaction were not for the victims’ benefit, to which the VP responded: “I’ve looked into this and my understanding of this, having looked at a lot of this but not all of it, is that it is sometimes hard to draw a distinction between victim and co-conspirator.”
Much of the criticism against the administration came from how heavily redacted many of the documents were; and for the contents that were not redacted, very few follow-ups and prosecutions were made. Vance noted that the growing conspiracy theories surrounding the files might even have some weight to them – at least regarding potential high-profile names being blackmailed after showing up in the files – but he doesn’t have the proof to do anything about it.
“There’s a story there and, you know, I will go to my deathbed believing there is a story there, but I can’t prove it,” he explained. “And I promise you there’s not some document, at least that I’m hiding, that allows us to prove exactly what was going on and how.”
Many of the released documents named the president directly, with Trump eventually downplaying the files and the insistence that more be released. That reaction led to a schism with his MAGA movement and people like once-loyal Megyn Kelly, who warned it was too late to pull back on one of the core issues that led to his re-election.
“Trump himself promised full transparency on the Jeffrey Epstein case when he was running for president. This has been a big issue on the Right, my friend Dan Bongino was one of the people who made it a big issue. So did Kash Patel, talking about it over and over and over again,” she recapped last year. “It is just not real for Trump to pretend he’s shocked. This is still an issue. Nothing’s been resolved. Nothing’s been released. He promised transparency, as did his attorney general, and then they release a memo saying, ‘You’re not getting anything. It’s over. Just trust us.’ And that was not real, Trump pretending he’s shocked that people are still interested in it.”
