Title: Why the Epstein Case is Dividing MAGA

[MUSIC]

Brian Lehrer: Brian Lehrer on WNYC. Now we'll turn to Washington, where Donald Trump is experiencing another test of his political authority over his MAGA base. Changing his tune on Russia and deficit spending are in the news already. Now comes his administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, that closed in 2019 after the financier and convicted sex offender died by suicide while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges in a Lower Manhattan jail cell.

Why has Epstein become MAGA's political lightning rod this week? Well, conspiracy theories have been swirling for years, as some of you know, about the crimes Epstein committed against underage girls and the very famous company that he kept. Listen to some of the names of figures associated with Epstein found in unsealed court documents from 2024. Former President Bill Clinton, Prince Andrew, Bruce Willis, Kevin Spacey, Naomi Campbell, Leonardo DiCaprio, Victoria's Secret mogul Les Wexner, Michael Jackson, Stephen Hawking.

While most of these individuals have not been implicated in Epstein's crimes, to be clear, the notoriety of just his associations with them has led conspiracists to the belief that Epstein held a "client list," which is at the center of this controversy. Now, take a listen to Attorney General Pam Bondi on Fox News back in February of this year.

Interviewer 1: The DOJ may be releasing the list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients? Will that really happen?

Attorney General Pam Bondi: It's sitting on my desk right now to review.

Brian Lehrer: She said a list of Jeffrey Epstein's clients is sitting on her desk right now, Trump's attorney general, but here she is, a week ago, saying, "Well, maybe not."

Attorney General Pam Bondi: In February, I did an interview on Fox, and it's been getting a lot of attention because I was asked a question about the client list, and my response was, "It's sitting on my desk to be reviewed," meaning the file, along with the JFK, MLK files as well. That's what I meant by that.

Brian Lehrer: All right. Last week, instead, Bondi published a memo essentially stating that there's nothing to see here, an assertion echoed by President Trump. Joining me now to talk about the political earthquake taking place surrounding Trump and Epstein, and Bondi, is Shawn McCreesh, White House reporter for The New York Times. Shawn, hi. Welcome to WNYC.

Shawn McCreesh: Hey, thanks for having me.

Brian Lehrer: I started by laying out the events that brought us to this moment, but can you give us a little more on the timeline? How did this six-year-old case come back to life in such a big way over the last week?

Shawn McCreesh: Yes, it's a really fascinating case of live by the sword, die by the sword, where President Trump and the people around him and in top roles in his government have been feeding this conspiratorial mindset for years and years and years. I think there are a lot of people who were expecting them to make good on these promises, and that two-page memo was just too much for them to swallow, and it was just so anticlimactic and so absurd after all that they'd been promised that the base erupted into a fury, and we keep waiting.

Every day I wake up and think, "Okay, is this thing going to die down?" We can't really tell if we're at the beginning or the end of it, and Trump himself seems determined to keep it going. He's saying and doing all the worst possible things to put the fire out, including a really crazy 250-word screed he posted on Truth Social just an hour ago, attacking his own supporters, calling them weaklings, and saying that they're falling for Democratic hoaxes. Everything's backfiring, and he's making it worse.

Brian Lehrer: Talk about the content of the memo sent out by the Justice Department last week that set off this political earthquake. What were the reasons laid out for closing the case, and why even do something publicly rather than just let it sit there and die by fading away?

Shawn McCreesh: It was just a two-page memo. People in the administration have given various reasons. Some of the stuff that's been found involves victims, and Trump's own reasoning is that you can't just dump everything out there because some of it's unverified, and you could end up maligning innocent people who are mixed up in this thing, and they shouldn't be, but their messaging is all over the place.

A lot of this is being driven by conspiracy theories, but not all of it. I think there are genuine unanswered questions. I think there are a lot of inconsistencies with this case, and people have a right to want to know more about it. It's just been interesting to watch them bungle it so badly.

Brian Lehrer: What are the unanswered questions, according to your reporting, if there is in fact no client list, or can you even say that there's no client list per se, having to do with any kind of sexual abuse?

Shawn McCreesh: The truth is, I'm not exactly the right person to ask about that. I wasn't covering the Epstein case itself. I've just more been covering it from the political fallout of the White House, but I would say that even people who've led on this story, Julie K. Brown, the investigative journalist in Florida, has been saying that there are legitimate questions about files that are out there.

Of course, there are files, and WIRED Magazine did some great reporting this week about how the footage of the jail cell had been doctored, and there's just a lot out there that people want answered, so this isn't just like some conspiracies, just driven completely by fantasy. I think that's adding to the bonfire of it all.

Brian Lehrer: I see that even House Speaker Mike Johnson, generally a reliable ally of Trump, is asking for more. This is, I'm sorry, Johnson, about Epstein and the alleged client list on a conservative podcast.

House Speaker Mike Johnson: Put everything out there and let the people decide it. The White House and the White House team are privy to facts that I don't know. This isn't my lane. I haven't been involved in that, but I agree with the sentiment that we need to put it out there.

Brian Lehrer: Shawn, put what out there? What exactly aren't they releasing?

Shawn McCreesh: People say that there are a lot of files because Epstein had been investigated many times over the years and had been tried a lot, but the thing, the issue is that these people who work for Trump, most of them were previously podcasters and conspiracy theorists themselves, and they've been saying to people that there's more out there and the government has it, and what it is, we don't know, but now that they're in control of the government, people want answers.

Brian Lehrer: Here's a clip for more context. We played the Pam Bondi clip from February, where she said, "The client list is sitting on my desk." Now she says it doesn't exist. Here's a clip of then candidate Donald Trump from June of last year on Fox News.

Interviewer 2: Would you declassify the Epstein files?

Donald Trump: Yes, yes, I would.

Interviewer 2: All right.

Donald Trump: Yes, I would. I guess I would. I think that less so because you don't know. You don't want to affect people's lives if it's phony stuff in there, because it's a lot of phony stuff with that whole world, but I think I would, or at least I--

Interviewer 2: Do you think that would restore trust? Help restore trust?

Donald Trump: Yes. I don't know about Epstein so much as I do the others. Certainly, about the way he died, it would be interesting to find out-

Interviewer 2: Sure.

Donald Trump: -what happened there because that was a weird situation, and the cameras didn't happen to be working, et cetera, et cetera.

Brian Lehrer: He's saying he would declassify the Epstein files. Is that the technical status of these things that Mike Johnson is calling to release? They're listed as classified.

Shawn McCreesh: They don't really know what they're calling for yet because now some people in the base are calling for a special counsel, which would be a whole other tangled web. I will say Trump's answers about this have always been strange. Even in that clip you played, it's a little un-Trumpian, and yesterday he was asked about this again, and he called it a really boring story.

He said it was sordid, but boring, which I just thought was so rich. Trump is like a one-man National Enquirer. He loves stuff like this. He's dabbled in conspiracy theories for years and years and years. The idea that he is just saying, "Nothing to see here, folks, it's not even interesting," is just adding to people's suspicions about it, and I would also say, I think something that some people might not understand about his base and this worldview is that the Epstein conspiracy theory is the skeleton key that unlocks the whole thing.

It's like a foundational myth to the entire MAGA worldview where Trump comes onto the scene about 10 years ago at a time when the country is gripped with cynicism and mistrust following two failed wars, one of which was premised on false intelligence, a financial crisis in which none of the perpetrators paid the price, and here comes Trump and he has this really powerful story, which is, "I'm going to pull back the curtain and show you what's back there.

"I've seen it myself. I'm an elite. I know how this works. It's one giant party and you're not invited. It really is a corrupt cabal that's selling you all down the river. They do not live by the same laws and rules that you people do, but I'm so crazy that you can trust me to go in and rip the face off the whole thing, and we're going to do it together," and then, over the next 10 years, every bad thing that happened to him, he just fed into that myth.

Like, "They're coming after me because I'm going after them for you," and it drew them all closer, and the Epstein thing slots so well into it. It's a story about Democrats and Republicans and elites and pedophiles and government intelligence agencies and foreign assets, and it just slots so well into all of it, and so for Trump to now be returned to power, get into the government and turn around and say, "What? You people are still talking about this? Get over it," it's just too much for them to handle.

Brian Lehrer: Another Trump clip, that one was from 2024. This is a quote, I don't have a clip, but in 2002, he was quoted in New York Magazine saying, "I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it, Jeffrey enjoys his social life."

That quote is really creepy considering what we now know about Jeffrey Epstein and almost implies, I don't know what it implies, but here's a question from a listener in a text message, which I'm sure more than one listener is thinking about, and it just asks, "Might Trump be on the client list?"

Shawn McCreesh: That's the million-dollar question, right? Why is he behaving so strangely? I don't want to get into conjecture here, but that's what everybody wants to know.

Brian Lehrer: Yes, and another listener writes, "Brian, this is not a conspiracy theory. There is a live document right now on Justice Department's server," and this includes a link that the listener sent in. In this document, Pam Bondi says she has 200 pages of "Epstein contacts and demands that Kash Patel," the FBI director, "send her the next thousand pages that she says he is holding, and says they have both discussed on the phone that he is holding."

That from another listener, is the widespread belief among people who are trying to look at this objectively, even though it seems, I guess, from what you're reporting as well as from some listeners are saying, we have incomplete knowledge at this point, but does it seem like, okay, Trump and others made up this idea of a client list to cast doubt on Democrats, mostly Democrats, as well as elites in general, as you were saying before, and it was always fake, and now they have to admit that there's no there there, and they're trying to weasel out of it, weasel out of the fact that they made this up in the first place, and it was always fake? Is that the likely story here?

Shawn McCreesh: I have always thought of it as both. I think that there are genuine unanswered questions, and there's a lot of weirdness around Epstein, and there are some things the public doesn't know and wants to know more about. Fine, but this network of people that are influencers and podcasters and Trump propagandists and apparatchiks, they live and die by engagement and clicks and views and outrage, and they've channeled it all into this politically helpful worldview that I described earlier.

It just kept growing and growing and growing, and now they're in this really strange, interesting philosophical trap where they're in charge, and no matter what they produce, it's never going to be enough for some people, for a lot of people, but instead they've chosen to produce nothing and then said, "How dare you even ask? You're a bunch of idiots." They're handling it in the worst way possible, but it's also a story about what happens when you take a bunch of conspiracy theorists, podcasters, and put them in charge of the intelligence agencies in the Department of Justice.

Brian Lehrer: It's not enough for a lot of people, you're saying? Including, apparently, Allen in Morristown. Allen, you're on WNYC. Hello.

Allen: Hello. Yes. My point is that I keep hearing about the client list being mentioned over and over again. I don't know that there is such a thing because that implies that people were paying him to have these, shall we call them, services. I think it's more interesting to find out who was on the flight log and what were on these tapes, and what was that all about? As opposed to just focusing on a client list, which very well may not exist.

Brian Lehrer: Thank you. Go ahead, Shawn.

Shawn McCreesh: I think that the other thing that makes the Epstein story so powerful is that a lot of people understand it as not just about sex. There was all this mysterious money and all these connections and favors being doled out. If you look at it in this viewpoint about how the elites function, it's like this many-layered thing that this guy represents. His name is bigger than just him. I think that's what your listener is asking about.

Brian Lehrer: Right, and flight logs refer to his private plane, right? Who flew on his private plane, when the caller says flight logs? Last question. For you as a White House correspondent, I said in the intro that this is the latest test of his political authority over his MAGA base. Another one is now changing his tune on Russia and Ukraine. We're going to talk about that in our next segment with Garry Kasparov, also, the deficit spending that has Elon Musk, among others, so inflamed in the so-called Big, Beautiful Bill, proving, again, that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. Is there a larger political context for you as a White House correspondent about Trump and the MAGA base and whether that matters to anything policy-wise?

Shawn McCreesh: Yes, I thought it was really smart that you said that. I think the real political danger for them is that if the base starts linking these various betrayals, they've been upset before over his foreign policy and over his pro-vaccine stance, and he's upset them before, and these are discreet issues, and they get over it, and no one thing is enough to make them split from him.

They hate the opposition more, but this Epstein thing is shattering them so much, and then if you link in these various other betrayals that have happened in a quick succession, it could really start to breed a deep cynicism, and I think you see that fear from the lawmakers. They still have to worry about the midterms. The other thing that's a background element that's playing out in all of this is the fact that Trump is a lame duck.

For the first time, since he's burst on the scene, we have a solid fixed endpoint for Donald Trump, and when you have an end date, you just lose power. You do. You can't hold it over people's heads anymore that you're going to run again or come back, and so even if people aren't thinking about it that explicitly as they start to undermine his authority, it's part of the mood music here. People are starting to already look over his shoulder at what's next, and I think that makes it easier to defy him.

Brian Lehrer: What, you don't think he's going to suspend the Constitution and have a third term? All right.

Shawn McCreesh: Never say never, but I don't know.

Brian Lehrer: Leave that for another day. Shawn McCreesh, White House correspondent for The New York Times, thank you very much.

Shawn McCreesh: Thanks, Brian.

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