JD Vance pushed to have Tucker Carlson interview jailed sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell as part of White House efforts to defuse Donald Trump’s self-engineered Jeffrey Epstein crisis.
The president pledged full transparency on the late pedophile’s crimes on the 2024 campaign trail. He broke that promise after retaking the White House with what critics say was a concerted effort to deflect scrutiny of his own relationship with Epstein by blocking and later obfuscating the release of Justice Department findings on the case.
The backlash ran so deep that Trump’s top officials convened a secret meeting last July to frantically compare notes on containing the scandal as it threatened to split the MAGA base, according to an explosive report by the New York Times, published Wednesday.
Trump himself, the newspaper adds, did not attend the summit, which was held in the Situation Room beneath the White House ten days after the DOJ and FBI released a memo reasserting Epstein had kept no “client list” of uber-wealthy accomplices and that his 2019 death in police custody had been a suicide. Influential right-wing voices have long questioned those claims.
“This is a huge problem,” Vance opened by telling the room, the newspaper reported. He was apparently so panicked that other aides left under the impression he’d fully embraced some of the wilder theories about Epstein’s crimes that have long swirled in darker corners of the internet. Susie Wiles, Trump’s chief of staff, famously admitted in a subsequent Vanity Fair interview that she believes Vance is a full-blown “conspiracy theorist.”
The vice president’s proposed remedy was to send Carlson into prison to question Maxwell, who is serving a 20-year sentence for her part in Epstein’s abuse of underage girls, in the hope she might clear Trump of any impropriety on camera, the NYT found. Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche, Trump’s former defense attorney, eventually wound up doing that interview, rather than Carlson.
Vance further suggested making his own appearance on the Joe Rogan podcast to discuss the scandal. Only a portion of that interview would be committed to the Epstein case, he proposed, with the rest focused on trumpeting the president’s legislative agenda.
Deputy Chief of Staff James Blair was quick to pour cold water on Vance’s ideas for getting ahead of the crisis. “With all due respect, the communications strategy of this group got us here,” he told Vance. “I don’t know that it’s going to get us out. And if you’re going to go in front of the press, you’ve got a lot of work to do.” He then asked Vance a series of mock questions to illustrate just how challenging any appearance might prove.
Vance nevertheless lobbied hard for dumping the full cache of files, and even backed a congressional inquiry, according to the NYT. “He argued that Congress was going to force the release of the files eventually,” the newspaper writes. “If the administration got out of this and released everything voluntarily—including whatever material existed about the president—it would at least get credit for transparency.”
“The alternative was to let the story drag on for months as information dripped out, each new revelation renewing the cycle of suspicion and fury,” it adds. Trump, in the end, chose the latter option, only releasing the files in heavily redacted tranches after a bipartisan campaign of pressure from the House and Senate forced him to do so.
The Daily Beast has contacted Vance’s office and the White House for comment.
