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MAGA world is melting down over the Justice Department’s recent conclusion that Jeffrey Epstein had no client list or history of blackmail, and that he wasn’t murdered. But the right isn’t alone. Some influential Democrats and left-leaning pundits have latched onto the controversy, too—succumbing to the temptation of suggesting that these findings are part of some grand conspiracy to cover up Donald Trump’s ties to the late pedophile.
Here is the problem: There is no real evidence that Epstein—who died in 2019 while jailed on charges that included sex trafficking of minors—possessed any information incriminating Trump.
Each day offers new and urgent evidence of the president’s expanding record moral and professional failure. He just signed a bill that cuts a trillion dollars in Medicaid and boots millions from their health care. He has swarmed Los Angeles with ICE agents, Border Patrol, and military troops and has sent innocent men to a brutal prison in El Salvador, apparently for having tattoos.
His ever-changing tariffs are screwing up the economy. He tried to steal the 2020 election, pardoned the rioters whose violent attack on the Capitol he incited, and is using the Justice Department to harass political foes. He has leveraged the power of his office to extract gifts and payments for himself and his family, including recently forcing Paramount to pay $16 million to the foundation behind his “future” library to settle a meritless lawsuit as it seeks federal approval for a merger.
That’s a lot of real stuff to fault. But at the same time, unverified speculation on the left that Trump might have been involved in Epstein’s crimes is reaching a crescendo—distracting from Democratic efforts to highlight overt Trump wrongdoing in other matters.
There is no question that Trump and Epstein were friends. There are pictures and video of the men together, along with records of Trump traveling on Epstein’s plane. Trump called him a “terrific guy” in a 2002 profile. Trump even said that Epstein “likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
In 2016, an anonymous woman filed lawsuits alleging that Trump raped her at a party held by Epstein when she was 13. Trump denied this. The first version of that suit was thrown out by a California judge after the court struggled to contact the alleged victim. The woman ultimately withdrew a second version of the suit and did not appear at a press conference scheduled by her lawyer just before Election Day. Journalists, including my colleague Anna Merlan, were left uncertain if the victim’s claims were real. “The facts speak less to a scandal and more, perhaps, to an attempt at a smear,” she wrote in Jezebel at the time.
That same year, another Epstein victim made—and then retracted—allegations about Trump, Bill Clinton, and others in private emails to a New York Post columnist.
No other credible Epstein-related allegations about Trump have emerged. One Epstein victim, Virginia Giuffre, who died in April, leveled accusations against prominent Epstein associates including Prince Andrew (who settled a lawsuit without admitting liability), but not against Trump. In a 2016 deposition, Giuffre stated: “I don’t think Donald Trump participated in anything.”
Still, Trump’s ties to Epstein mean that every time the late pedophile is in the news, social media posts linking the two men go viral. And some Democratic lawmakers want to tap into that.
“One of the highest trending hashtags on Twitter right now is about Trump and Epstein,” Rep. Ted Lieu (D-Calif.) said at a July 2024 press conference, as he explained why he was bringing up the topic.
In those remarks—which came shortly after the release of grand jury transcripts from a 2006 Florida prosecution of Epstein—Lieu brought up Trump in an apparent effort to deflect questions then swirling about Joe Biden’s fitness to run for reelection.
“Something I’ve heard that doesn’t seem to be being covered are the Epstein files,” Lieu said. “Donald Trump is sort of all over this.” That wasn’t true. “Donald Trump’s name never appears anywhere in the transcripts” that had been released the prior week, a Washington Post fact check noted.
In recent weeks, Democrats have been accusing the Trump DOJ of orchestrating a coverup. After Attorney General Pam Bondi announced the department’s conclusions about Epstein, the Democratic National Committee debuted @TrumpEpsteinBot, an account set to post the same message each day.
On Monday, Sen. Ron Wyden of Oregon, the top Democrat on the Senate Finance Committee, suggested Bondi was hiding evidence.
Wyden spokesperson Ryan Carey said Thursday that the senator is primarily focused on investigating ties between Epstein and billionaire financier Leon Black. Wyden has been examining $170 million in payments Black made to Epstein that Wyden has alleged Epstein used to finance his sex trafficking. In March, Black agreed to a $62 million settlement with the Virgin Islands over the matter.
During their investigation, Finance Committee staffers “reviewed portions of a file at the Treasury Department that contains information on many other issues involving Epstein’s financing and operations,” Carey said, adding that administration is “sitting on the file and doing nothing with it.” Wyden’s assertion of a coverup was a reference to the administration’s refusal to release that material, Carey said.
But Wyden has also included ties between Trump and Epstein in his queries. In a June letter, the senator said he was concerned “that the Trump Administration may be withholding these documents to prevent exposure of President Trump’s own ties to Jeffrey Epstein.”
“If President Trump himself was implicated in Epstein’s network, he must also be held accountable,” Wyden added.
In a letter Tuesday to Bondi, all 19 Democrats on the House Judiciary Committee, led by Rep. Jamie Raskin (D-Md.), also speculatively cited the Epstein matter. The lawmakers demanded that Bondi release Special Counsel Jack Smith’s report dealing with Trump’s 2023 prosecution for refusing to return highly classified documents he removed from the White House—a reasonable ask—“as well as any evidence mentioning or referencing Donald Trump in the Epstein files.”
Consider the contrast between those requests. Smith secured an indictment alleging that Trump for violated the Espionage Act, made false statements, and conspired to obstruct justice in an effort to retain classified material, including by storing many documents in unsecured a bathroom at his club. The charges were dubiously thrown out by a notoriously pro-Trump judge, a decision that was still on appeal when Trump’s election victory forced Smith to end the case. But Smith wrote a lengthy report on the probe—a document that Bondi has refused to release. That’s a legitimate request for a boatload of real evidence of alleged crimes by the president.
What’s the evidence that Epstein material incriminates Trump?
“Earlier last month,” Democrats wrote, “Elon Musk, the former senior advisor to President Trump and head of the Department of Government Efficiency, posted on his social media website, X, that President Trump ‘is in the Epstein files. That is the real reason they have not been made public.’”
Wyden’s June letter also cited Musk’s post, as did a similar letter from Democrats on the House Oversight Committee. “What is Trump hiding?” the DNC tweeted after Musk’s post. “Release the Epstein files.”
But Musk isn’t exactly a reliable source. He previously posted a claim that an intruder who attacked Rep. Nancy Pelosi’s husband Paul in their home with a hammer might have been a male prostitute, a false theory Musk got from a fake news publication. Musk endorsed a claim on that Jews are pushing a “dialectical hatred against whites.” (He later apologized.) He claimed that Social Security and other entitlement fraud adds up to “half a trillion” dollars and that Democrats give these benefits to “illegal immigrants” to buy votes.
Those are false, kooky claims from a serially inaccurate mogul. Democrats presumably don’t believe Musk’s tweets about Jews and Social Security. So they might think twice about approvingly quoting an unsubstantiated allegation Musk made in the middle of spat with Trump, just because this one suits their purposes.
The notion that Trump is incriminated in Epstein material possessed by DOJ is, at best, unsubstantiated speculation. Trump has regularly denied it. And it’s unclear why the Biden administration—which controlled the DOJ for four years—would have participated in this supposed cover up.
A spokesperson for Judiciary Committee Democrats declined to comment on their reasoning for including Epstein in their letter Tuesday. The lawmakers may have hoped the reference would draw more attention to their broader point: The Trump administration, while boasting about its supposed transparency, has “consistently hidden from the American public materials and information that may be damaging to President Trump.”
But mingling a request for real evidence of actual alleged crimes by Trump in the documents case with a speculative ask for references to Trump in the “Epstein files” also risks making the Mar-a-Lago case seem as similarly unsupported, even frivolous—like the kind of opportunistic partisan potshots Democrats fault their GOP peers for.
Indeed, as veteran conspiracy mongers on the right—Laura Loomer, Judicial Watch’s Tom Fitton, Michael Flynn, Glenn Beck, Musk again, Alex Jones, Roger Stone—lose their minds over Bondi and company slamming the door on years of Epstein speculation, their distress highlights their longstanding habit of preying on Americans’ willingness to believe conspiracy theories, especially when they advance a partisan narrative.
A few lines in some letters is hardly the same, but it does involve a comparable tactic. Democrats appear to be advancing their political interests by exploiting their supporters’ inclination to believe something that is probably untrue, and certainly unsupported.
It’s easy to see why. Epstein’s name grabs attention, and Trump certainly did spend time with him. But talk of finding Trump in the Epstein files is, for Democratic activists, wish-casting. For lawmakers, it is pandering. These efforts recall those 2017 days when Trump critics believed the supposed “pee tape” might soon hit the airwaves. There is a palpable wish out there for documentary evidence, especially of something sexual, that humiliates Trump.
But that, of course, is fool’s gold. Democrats seeking to hold the president accountable do not have time to waste looking for it. There are more than enough real Trump scandals out there to fill Congress’ limited time.