US President Donald Trump has said Attorney General Pam Bondi should release “whatever she thinks is credible” on sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, as he faces a rare backlash from supporters after seeking to draw a line under the case.
Bondi has been lambasted by some of Trump’s political base after she said last week there was no evidence that Epstein kept a “client list” or was blackmailing powerful figures.
At the weekend Trump urged supporters not to “waste time and energy” on the controversy. But allies of the president, including House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson, are calling for “transparency”.
Epstein’s 2019 death in a US prison while awaiting federal trial was ruled a suicide.
But many in Trump’s Make America Great Again (Maga) movement have theorised that details of the well-connected convicted paedophile’s crimes have been withheld in order to protect influential figures, or intelligence agencies.
On Tuesday, Trump praised his attorney general’s handling of the matter, saying: “She’s handled it very well, and it’s going to be up to her. Whatever she thinks is credible, she should release.”
When asked by a journalist if the attorney general had told Trump whether his name appeared in any of the records, he said: “No, no.”
Later on Tuesday, the president again called for the release of “credible” information, but he questioned the enduring fascination with the Epstein case, calling it “sordid but boring”.
“Only really bad people, including the fake news, want to keep something like this going,” Trump said.
Last week he vented frustration in the Oval Office about the fixation on Epstein and urged everyone to move on.
But some Republican allies of the president are not letting go of the matter.
In an interview on Tuesday with US conservative commentator Benny Johnson, Speaker Johnson said that he trusted President Trump and his team, and that the White House was privy to facts that he did not know.
But he said Bondi “needs to come forward and explain it to everybody”.
“We should put everything out there and let the people decide,” Johnson said in an interview.
Georgia congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene told Benny Johnson in a separate interview on Tuesday: “I fully support transparency on this issue.”
She praised Bondi’s work as attorney general, but said that leaders and elected officials should keep their promises to voters.
Another conservative Republican, Lauren Boebert of Colorado, said if more Epstein files were not released, a special counsel should be appointed to investigate the financier’s crimes.
Senator John Kennedy of Louisiana said the voters expect more accountability.
“I think it’s perfectly understandable that the American people would like to know who he [Epstein] trafficked those women to and why they weren’t prosecuted,” Kennedy told NBC News.
But other influential Republicans – including Senator John Thune and congressman Jim Jordan – deferred to President Trump on the matter.
At an unrelated news conference on fentanyl on Tuesday, Bondi brushed aside questions about the controversy.
“Nothing about Epstein,” she told reporters. “I’m not going to talk about Epstein.”
She said last week’s memo by the Department of Justice, jointly released with the FBI, declining to release any further files on Epstein and confirming his death by suicide, “speaks for itself”.
Bondi told Fox News in February that a list of Epstein clients was on her desk for review, before her spokesman said last week she had actually been referring to overall files in the case.
The government’s findings were made, according to the memo, after reviewing more than 300 gigabytes of data.
On Tuesday, House Democratic lawmakers tried unsuccessfully to force a vote on releasing Epstein files.
Republicans pointed out the administration of President Joe Biden, a Democrat, also had access to the files, but did not release them.
By BBC News
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