The message was the clearest sign yet of the cracks emerging in the president’s coalition, many of whom are loudly demanding more information about the disgraced financier, who has been subject to myriad conspiracies since his death by suicide in 2019.
And some of his allies don’t appear to be listening, with Republicans in Congress taking steps on Wednesday morning (Wednesday night AEST) to potentially force the Justice Department to release more documents.
Declaring that Democrats had struck “pay dirt” in the Epstein scandal, Trump said his political opponents were using the issue to attack him.
“Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘bullshit,’ hook, line, and sinker,” Trump wrote in a missive on Truth Social. “They haven’t learned their lesson, and probably never will, even after being conned by the Lunatic Left for 8 long years.”
Trump said the Epstein controversy — roiling now for more than a week after his Justice Department announced in a memo that there was no Epstein “client list” and it didn’t plan to release any more documents in the investigation — was distracting from the successes of his presidency.
“I have had more success in 6 months than perhaps any President in our Country’s history, and all these people want to talk about, with strong prodding by the Fake News and the success starved Dems, is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax,” he wrote.
“Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats (sic) work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!”
The angry message was Trump’s strongest rebuke of his own supporters, many of whom have been vocally furious about his administration’s handling of the Epstein matter.
While Trump has dismissed the controversy as sordid and uninteresting, before his post on Wednesday (early Thursday AEST) he hadn’t gone as far as disavowing some of his staunchest allies who continue to press for more information.
“It’s a very delicate subject. We should put everything out there and let the people decide it,” Johnson said.
She has joined Representative Thomas Massie — a fellow Republican hardliner and a frequent Trump agitator — on the push, which will use a congressional workaround known as a discharge petition to try to defy party leaders and force a vote with Democrats’ help. That would require at least 218 signatures from House lawmakers to move forward. Another Trump friend-turned-foe, Elon Musk, gave a thumbs-up to the effort on Wednesday.
It won’t be immediate, however. The actual vote isn’t expected to take place until members return in September from their summer recess. And Massie and Greene face a seven-legislative-day delay before they can even start collecting signatures.
Others in Congress have issued calls for public testimony from Ghislaine Maxwell, the onetime Epstein associate who is serving a 20-year prison sentence in Florida for conspiring to sexually abuse minors.
The pressure to release more information has mostly fallen on Attorney General Pam Bondi, who said earlier this year she had a list of Epstein’s clients sitting on her desk, but whose department later said in its memo no such list existed. Bondi said last week she was referring to other documents at the time.
Trump has enthusiastically backed up Bondi, saying she’s handled the matter well. But he also appeared open Tuesday to allowing more information to come out, at Bondi’s discretion, though he suggested any additional details might not be legitimate.
“I would like to see that also,” the president said, in an apparent reference to calls for more transparency.
“But I think the attorney general — the credibility is very important, and you want credible evidence for something like that, and I think the attorney general’s handled it very well.”
