Squirming Vance Makes Damning Admission About Epstein Files
The vice president made the admission while he was grilled by Joe Rogan.
Vice President JD Vance admitted that the Trump administration is “guilty” of mishandling the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files after facing a grilling from Joe Rogan.
The Epstein files have become one of the biggest crises of President Donald Trump’s second term, after he and his lieutenants first declared the case closed despite years of hyping the files’ release, and then reversing course while continuing to delay the release of millions of sealed documents.
Trump, a former friend of the late pedophile, has reacted angrily to the backlash and maintains the administration has done nothing wrong, but Vance struck a different tone during Wednesday’s episode of The Joe Rogan Experience.
Trump long sought to dissuade the GOP from supporting the Epstein Files Transparency Act, backing it only after its passage appeared inevitable.
Thomas Concordia/Thomas Concordia/Getty Images
“If people want to say we mishandled the Epstein release—guilty,” the 41-year-old vice president admitted bluntly. “We did mishandle it, especially the communications of it.”
“What do you think should have been done?” asked Rogan, who had earlier noted that “there was a tremendous amount of resistance to those files being released” inside the administration.
“I think that we should have just dropped everything at the very beginning and, like obviously, it takes a little time to review the stuff, to find the stuff, to redact things where you have victims and so forth, but we should have just done it as quickly as possible,” Vance said.
Vance skipped a meeting scheduled with House Republicans on Tuesday to appear on a MAGA podcast.
Joe Rogan Experience/YouTube
The vice president passed the blame for the administration’s mishandling of the files on fired Attorney General Pam Bondi.
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“I think she overstated what we had and what we didn’t have,” he said, citing Bondi’s fateful claim in February 2025 of the convicted sex trafficker’s client list “sitting on my desk.”
The Epstein files were only released after Congress passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump had sought to sink, backing it only after its passage appeared inevitable.
“Was there some, you know, b----ing and moaning, and was there some back and forth? Yes,” Vance admitted, but he argued that the idea that Trump was “forced into” releasing the documents was wrong.
Vance also defended Trump’s own extensive appearance in the Epstein files, saying, “I’ve never seen a single piece of cred—credible evidence that the president of the United States engaged in wrongdoing with minors. Ever.”
He added, “So, like, when the president says ‘the hoax,’ that’s what he’s talking about. It’s this democratic idea that he somehow was a—was a pedophile. It’s absurd. There’s no evidence for it.”
The White House did not immediately respond to a request for comment.
Vance said, “We did release all these files,” but admitted, “Did it take longer than it should have taken? Yes.”
The DOJ has not released all the files; 2.5 million documents remain sealed from public view. Many of the unsealed documents remain heavily redacted.
Trump turned on MAGA rebels Thomas Massie and Marjorie Taylor Greene after they backed the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
Heather Diehl/Getty Images
Rogan, 58, pointed out that “some of the names that were redacted weren’t victims.”
The vice president replied that it is “sometimes hard to draw a distinction between victim and co-conspirator,” before attacking Democratic Rep. Ro Khanna, who co-authored the Epstein Files Transparency Act.
A bombshell report in The New York Times last month revealed the extraordinary lengths the White House went to in order to protect Trump from the Epstein files fallout, including convening meetings in the Situation Room to quell outrage that had spilled into the ranks of MAGA.
Vance, who presided over those meetings last summer, emerged as a central figure in the exposé, which portrayed him as being panicked and wanting to rip the Band-Aid off by releasing the DOJ’s millions of files even if it damaged Trump.
The Times reported that some Trump officials viewed Vance as having embraced the darkest Epstein theories, with Trump’s chief of staff Susie Wiles reportedly telling others that Vance was a major conspiracy theorist.
Speaking to Rogan, Vance called the Times article, “somewhat true, somewhat false.”
“But where Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, says, ‘Well, we know JD’s a conspiracy theorist on this.’ Like, I am actually,” Vance said.
He later added, “There’s a story there and, you know, I will go to my deathbed believing there is a story there, but I can’t prove it. And I promise you there’s not some document, at least that I’m hiding, that allows us to prove exactly what was going on and how.”
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