President Donald Trump is hoping the outrage surrounding the Jeffrey Epstein files will eventually blow over if his administration just stops talking about it, according to a report.
In a shift from the usual strategy of publicly defending Trump at all costs, White House officials have reportedly implemented a gag order on the administration discussing Epstein without “high-level vetting,” a senior administration official told NBC News.
“The communications office has to be directly involved in every aspect of this,” the official said. “Every ‘i’ must be dotted, and every ‘t’ must be crossed through us.”
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Trump, who’s been desperately trying to distract his MAGA base from the late pedophile’s crimes with wave after wave of outrage bait, is also hoping the furor will die down if his inner circle stops talking about Epstein, a source close to the White House told the outlet.
The president’s aides realized a full-blown media blackout was a non-starter, as they still want officials to praise Trump’s policies and message on television. Instead, Trump and his team came with a compromise to convince his administration to quickly move on and not try to defend the president when the issue of Epstein comes up.
“The questions are going to come, but whether we engage or not is part of the consideration,” the official said.
The shift underscores just how much Trump’s team is struggling in its attempt to control the Epstein narrative, which has riled up the president’s MAGA base for weeks now.
Despite Trump and his inner circle promising to release all Epstein files, the FBI and Department of Justice said they won’t be releasing any further documents, and denied the existence of a so-called “Epstein client list” which according to the MAGA faithful contained names of rich and powerful figures tied implemented in his sex crimes.
A cornered Trump has already tried, and failed, to convince his supporters to move on from Epstein, even issuing a rare attack on his own supporters claiming they have bought into conspiracy “bulls--t,’ hook, line, and sinker.”
Trump’s latest attempt to kill the Epstein story is to get his base to be outraged instead over a baseless claim that former President Barack Obama committed “treason” because his intelligence team “manufactured” evidence to suggest that Russia tried to influence the 2016 election.
Obama’s office described the “bizarre” and highly disputed allegations as a “weak attempt at distraction.”
In the latest sign that the Epstein saga is not going away any time soon, The Wall Street Journal reported Wednesday that Attorney General Pam Bondi told Trump in May that his name appears multiple times in the Epstein files, a direct contradiction to what Trump told reporters earlier this month.
“No, no,” Trump said at the time. “She’s given us just a very quick briefing in terms of the credibility of the different things that they’ve seen.”
One Trump ally acknowledged it’ll take something drastic to finally shift attention away from Trump and Epstein. “Short of a war or some life-changing news event, I’m not sure what does the trick,” the ally told NBC News.
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment from the Daily Beast.
