“I don’t comment on something that’s a dead issue. I gave all comments to the staff. It’s a dead issue,” Donald Trump said Tuesday when asked to respond to the “bawdy” birthday letter he allegedly sent to deceased sex predator Jeffrey Epstein, which was made public by House Democrats Monday.
It would appear that Fox News has also decided to treat the latest Epstein bombshell as a “dead issue,” despite getting the opportunity to speak to the congressman in charge of the investigation into the Department of Justice’s handling of the Epstein case.
Of course, there’s nothing new about Fox News turning a blind eye to the furor surrounding the so-called Epstein files. For the past two months, and especially after Trump essentially ordered his supporters to stop talking about the saga amid a MAGA backlash over the DOJ’s conclusion that there was no Epstein “client list,” the conservative cable giant has given scant coverage to the explosive political story.
The right-wing network continued to sweep the issue under the rug after the Wall Street Journal – its corporate cousin – reported on the existence of the hand-drawn card included in a book compiled for Epstein’s 50th birthday. Despite (or perhaps because of) the president launching a $10 billion defamation lawsuit against the paper and its owner Rupert Murdoch over the story, Fox News barely covered the WSJ’s reporting.
Still, Monday’s publication of the letter – which was produced by Epstein’s estate and handed over to the House Oversight Committee following a subpoena – seemingly should have opened the door for the top-rated cable channel to at least give cursory coverage to the issue, if even to just jump on board with the rest of MAGA world’s increasingly desperate denialism that it is a “hoax.”
Instead, Fox News has doubled down on the strategy it’s long held to when it comes to an inconvenient story that might make the president look bad – it’s just outright ignored it.
Since the drawing was first made public, which showed a hand-drawn figure of a naked woman framing a poem allegedly written by Trump to Epstein and the president’s scribbled signature mimicking pubic hair, the network has only mentioned the story once on the air – and briefly at that.
During Monday evening’s broadcast of Special Report, Fox News’ flagship “hard news” program, chief political anchor Bret Baier – whom the network generally relies on to provide token coverage of uncomfortable stories for Fox viewers – brought on correspondent Chad Pergram to give a quick rundown of the latest developments.
“Well, the Oversight Committee received the first set of documents it subpoenaed from Epstein’s estate today. It includes a birthday book that Ghislaine Maxwell assembled for Epstein’s 50th birthday,” Pergram stated. “Also in the documents: a 2007 non-prosecution agreement between the feds and Epstein. Now, the birthday book purports to include a letter from President Trump, committee Democrats say that President Trump writes about ‘a wonderful secret between he and Epstein.’ The White House says the president did not draw the picture nor sign it.”
And that was it. Those 30-plus seconds have represented all of Fox News’ on-air coverage of Trump’s alleged lewd sketch to the late pedophile, as of early Tuesday afternoon.
Meanwhile, on the network’s digital news site, Fox News posted a story about the Epstein documents handed over to Congress – but shifted the attention to a different note written by former President Bill Clinton to the disgraced financier.
The report barely mentioned Trump, other than to note that the president has “vehemently denied” the veracity of the letter allegedly written by him, and that both he and Clinton have not “been accused of any wrongdoing related to Epstein.”
The Epstein blackout extended to a Tuesday morning interview with House Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer (R-KY), who has been highly critical of Democrats on the committee for “cherry-picking” documents from the Epstein estate in order to embarrass Trump.
“It’s appalling Democrats on the Oversight Committee are cherry-picking documents and politicizing information received from the Epstein Estate today,” Comer said in a statement Monday night. “Oversight Committee Republicans are focused on running a thorough investigation to bring transparency and accountability for survivors of Epstein’s heinous crimes and the American people. President Trump is not accused of any wrongdoing and Democrats are ignoring the new information the Committee received today.”
Comer took further swings at Oversight ranking member Rep. Robert Garcia (D-CA) on Tuesday morning, calling the congressman a “big drama queen” for quickly sharing the lewd birthday card in an effort to damage Trump’s reputation.
However, during Comer’s appearance on America’s Newsroom on Tuesday, anchor Bill Hemmer failed to bring up anything related to the committee’s Epstein investigation, which has dominated political coverage outside the MAGA media bubble. Instead, Hemmer focused singularly on Comer’s probe into former President Joe Biden’s use of an autopen to sign pardons during the final months of his presidency – an issue that has galvanized conservatives for months and has been a fixation of Trump’s.
“Thank you for coming on. We got 100 more questions, but we don’t have enough time,” Hemmer concluded the five-minute interview.
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While Capitol Hill has been laser-focused recently on the Epstein saga, much to Republicans’ chagrin, Fox News and its top Trump acolytes have spent the past few weeks outright boasting that they are going to keep their viewers in the dark on the issue.
Late last month, for instance, Trump’s “shadow chief of staff” Sean Hannity told his radio listeners that when he interviewed Attorney General Pam Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel, who have both been under fire over the DOJ Epstein memo, he wouldn’t ask them about the deceased sex offender. And he held true to his word later that evening.
At the same time, though, the rampant and increasingly ludicrous denialism coming from both the White House and prominent MAGA voices – some are even suggesting Epstein forged the note himself – over the birthday card has yet to be echoed on Fox News’ airwaves. This appears to be a deliberate effort to follow the president’s lead and treat it as the “dead issue” he wants it to be.
“This isn’t about news judgment. It’s about politics — and what’s become a remarkably lucrative business model. Fox knows its viewers don’t want uncomfortable, Trump-adjacent headlines,” Mediaite’s Colby Hall noted. “Keeping that audience happy is far more valuable than pursuing the story. Which explains why Fox’s muted coverage looks less like an editorial stance and more like a truce, a tacit agreement to protect Trump in exchange for peace and profit.”
Noting that it wasn’t that long ago that the president was treating the network like a spurned “ex-lover” while raging over the channel’s attempts at “even a whiff of balance,” Hall added that Trump’s “scorched-earth broadsides against the network itself have all but disappeared.” Instead, as he observed, this isn’t “really a détente so much as a quid pro quo.”
In the end, don’t expect Fox News to reverse course anytime soon.
