On Friday, on CNN’s “The Lead,” former Trump administration communications official Alyssa Farah Griffin said the MAGA base was not going to accept the current Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files.
Griffen said, “The MAGA base has felt so strongly about Jeffrey Epstein since his crimes came to light. This has been sort of a rallying cry on the right. There’s been some of some of it, by the way, well documented his crimes, others that kind of turn over into the conspiracy space thinking that prominent left wingers are going to get wrapped up in this sort of network that he was associated with. This is the first time I can really remember that Trump is sidestepping his base and not doing what they’re very vocally asking him to do. And so as there’s these calls now by some on the right for Pam Bondi to step aside or to resign or be fired, the thing I would say is, if Donald Trump wants all of the information the government has on Jeffrey Epstein to be released, he can make that available. He can direct the attorney general to release it. He can move to whether it may be law enforcement sensitive, to declassify that and make it public. So the fact that he’s not, I think, raises a lot of questions. And this is an issue this White House is not going to be able to make go away overnight. Another White House would be able to say, hey, we’re — we, the Department of Justice — is independent. We don’t tell them what to do. But that is not how this DOJ and this White House operate. So folks are going to expect Donald Trump to weigh in on this.”
She added, “I think those around Donald Trump are advising him for as long as you can make this not your problem, let it be a DOJ problem. Let Bongino and Pam and Kash work this out and let them fight amongst themselves, as he’s going to try to focus on other things like trade deals, among other things. But this is one of the real issues with his base that I don’t think he can just hope is going to go away.”
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