Donald Trump’s political rivals seemed unshaken by his attempts to pin blame on them for the fallout over his administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation this weekend.
As the president and his allies leveled allegations about the Biden Justice Department supposedly tampering with evidence to link Trump to the convicted pedophile, Democrats remained fixed on calling for the full release of the Justice Department’s cache of evidence and investigation.
Even as news broke this past week that Trump had instructed Attorney General Pam Bondi to release grand jury testimony from the investigations into Epstein and his mistress, those same Democrats called the move an attempt to cover up the president’s involvement, given that it constituted less than full transparency.
On Sunday, Sen. Amy Klobuchar laughed off a suggestion made by Trump on Wednesday in an interview with a MAGA-supporting channel, Real America’s Voice: “I can imagine what they put into files, just like they did with the others.”
“The president blaming Democrats for this disaster, Jake, is like that CEO that got caught on camera blaming Coldplay, okay?” Klobuchar joked to CNN’s Jake Tapper on State of the Union, referencing a now-viral clip that made the rounds last week. “This is a problem of his own making.”
Eric Swalwell, a congressman from California, also discussed the president’s response and call for the release of the Epstein grand jury testimony.
“If you’re Donald Trump and you have Elon Musk saying you’re in the files, and Mick Mulvaney, your former chief of staff, saying you’re in the files, and Michael Wolff, your biographer saying that you’re not just in the files but that there’s some pretty disturbing things you did with underaged girls, wouldn’t you want to clear your name?” he asked during an appearance Saturday evening.
“I think that’s why his supporters are scratching their heads,” Swalwell continued, adding that the president was “willing to throw his supporters overboard to keep these files buried.”
Numerous other Democrats across the ideological spectrum joined in on the calls for the files’ release this past week, bridging across the party’s ideological spectrum and revealing a generational divide more than a policy gap. Senior Democrats, like Nancy Pelosi, have referred to the controversy as a “distraction”.
But younger Democrats roll their eyes at the notion of letting Republicans off easy on the first issue that has truly divided the MAGA base in years.
“This is Donald Trump’s effort…to gaslight you into thinking they’re turning over the Epstein files, when in reality, they’re turning over nothing that is relevant to what everybody deserves to know,” Congressman Dan Goldman said on Friday. “The grand jury testimony of course will only relate to Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell — the two people who were charged in the case.”
The Justice Department moved this past week to unseal grand jury transcripts from the prosecutions of Jeffrey Epstein and his girlfriend/accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell. Epstein died in federal custody in 2019 while Maxwell remains in prison.
Any transcripts released from those grand jury proceedings would relate solely to Maxwell and Epstein themselves, and would not likely contain any mention of Trump or other powerful men known to have cultivated relationships with the billionaire financier who was set to face trial for sex trafficking underage girls when he died.
The motions were filed in court a day after the Epstein story again blew up with a bombshell story from Rupert Murdoch’s Wall Street Journal.
The Journal published the text of a note that was allegedly penned by Trump to Epstein as part of a 50th birthday card. The note itself was framed with the silhouette of a naked woman, Trump’s signature in place of pubic hair; the contents alluding to a “secret” that Trump wrote the two men shared.
Trump has fiercely denied the authenticity of all parts of the Journal’s reporting, from the drawing to the contents of the note.
On Friday and Saturday, Trump launched lawsuits against the newspaper as well as unaffiliated journalists who shared it on social media.
