Morning Joe host Joe Scarborough tore into the Trump administration for dragging its feet on the Epstein files after the president fretted about whether their release could damage powerful people’s reputations.
A visibly exasperated Scarborough said on Tuesday morning’s episode that the drip-drip release of documents did not make sense, given reporting that has found nothing in the files that showed that Trump broke the law.
“I just want to underline again that there has been reporting from this network and others that there’s nothing in the files that proves Donald Trump broke the law. Nothing," said the 62-year-old MS Now host. “So the question is, why does Donald Trump—why does the White House continue to drag its feet? Why does the administration continue to drag its feet and keep this story alive?”
He then barely got through tossing to a clip of Trump’s rambling about the Epstein scandal Monday.
“Here’s Donald Trump, saying something yesterday about something,” he said with a disappointed shake of his head.
In the clip from Monday’s Mar-a-Lago press conference, Trump, 79, said the Epstein scandal is “a way of trying to deflect from the tremendous success that the Republican party has.”
Trump also attempted to express sympathy for individuals pictured with Epstein in released photos.
“A lot of people are very angry that pictures are being released of other people that really had nothing to do with Epstein,” said Trump. “But they’re in a picture with him because he was at a party and you ruin a reputation of somebody.”
Trump’s excuse rang false to Scarborough, who noted that on Friday, the DOJ released a series of photographs showing former Democratic president Bill Clinton with Epstein, but none of Trump with the disgraced financier.
“I’d just like to add, ‘We tried to ruin Bill Clinton’s reputation, but nobody bought it,’” he quipped, joking about the DOJ.
Scarborough and MS Now contributor Sam Stein then ripped into how the Trump administration has handled the Epstein files. Stein said that the DOJ’s slow-trickle release strategy, which is in violation of the Epstein Files Transparency Act that required all of the files to be released on Dec. 19, only serves to fuel more conspiracies about a government cover-up.
“When you ask, ‘why aren’t they just putting it all out there?’, the only logical explanation for that is that they’re trying to protect their client, Donald Trump,” said Stein. “They’re trying to hurt Democrats, which is why you got all those photos of Bill Clinton.”
“The way they are handling this is not gonna ultimately benefit them in the long run,” Stein added. “Either you put everything out all at once, when you’re ready and when you’ve redacted it, or you don’t, and they haven’t. And that’s just gonna feed conspiracies that more people are getting preferential treatment and that Trump’s enemies are not.”
The segment took place early Tuesday morning, before a Tuesday file dump that contained a letter Epstein wrote to fellow sex offender Larry Nassar in which Epstein claimed Trump “loved” “nubile young girls.” Tuesday’s release also contained an email from a Southern District of New York attorney that read Trump flew on Epstein’s plane, aka the “Lolita Express,” “many more times than previously reported.”
The Justice Department said on X that the claims against Trump in the files were “sensationalist” and “untrue.”
