Pundit says Trump told him why the Epstein files are being withheld
Conservative commentator Bill O’Reilly on Wednesday said Trump told him why releasing the Jeffrey Epstein files is problematic—and it’s because of the legacy media.
The former Fox News host told NewsNation’s Chris Cuomo that he and Trump had a “man-to-man, eye-to-eye” conversation on St. Patrick’s Day, in which the president told him that releasing the Epstein files would ruin the lives of innocent people. Many who came in contact with the late billionaire pedophile did not participate in his sex trafficking operation but would nevertheless be skewered by the media if their names were to feature in the Epstein files.
“They maybe had lunch with him or exchanged a message,” O’Reilly said he was told by Trump. “If those names come out without context, the media will destroy people — and they won’t care if they’re innocent.”
O’Reilly said he agreed with the president.
“You can’t destroy a human being by putting out the files, whatever they may be,” he stated. “The media doesn’t care about the truth. They care about headlines.”
Even before his election victory last year, President Trump expressed reservation about releasing the Epstein files for the same reason. When asked by a Fox and Friends panel about whether he would release the JFK files and Epstein files, Trump was hesitant to agree to the latter.
“That less so, because you don’t want to affect people’s lives if there’s phony stuff in there,” he said.
‘People feel stung’
But the Trump administration is under fire now from Republicans, who are up in arms about the Justice Department’s announcement this week that there is no “Epstein client list” and its refusal to publish the entire tranche of files.
“If I’m President Trump, I am looking at what Attorney General Pam Bondi has done to the base,” conservative commentator Liz Wheeler, who has been leading the charge against Bondi for withholding the files, told journalist Megyn Kelly. “He has lost his administration, even though he had nothing to do with this. His administration has lost a tremendous amount of goodwill with voters because people care viscerally about the Epstein files. They care deeply about this, partially because these are grisly crimes that were committed against children, but also because this represents justice.”
“People feel stung because when they see what Pam Bondi said in that Department of Justice memo on Sunday, she is telling us [to] ignore the evidence, the anomalies, the suspicious, fishy things surrounding Epstein’s operation and his person and his connections and his death,” Wheeler continued. “Instead, believe me, without evidence. She’s telling us to ignore what’s before our very eyes and believe her instead with no evidence. There is not a politician in this world that you should extend that amount of blind faith towards.”
‘People want closure on this case’
The Daily Caller reported on Thursday that officials within the Trump administration are peeved that the DOJ oversold the evidence it had. In February, Bondi appeared to say that Epstein’s “client list” was “sitting on [her] desk.”
“You can arrest all the drug leaders and cartel leaders, but people want closure on this case, and the Attorney General must find a better way to reconcile that,” one official told the Daily Caller.
