As the Jeffrey Epstein controversy continues to drag on, President Donald Trump’s administration is now scrambling to find a way out. And according to a new report, top White House officials will soon meet to assemble a game plan on how to put the Epstein fallout behind them.
CNN reported Tuesday that Vice President JD Vance will host a Wednesday night dinner at his official residence, which will be attended by White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, Attorney General Pam Bondi, Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche and FBI Director Kash Patel. According to the network’s three unnamed sources, the “main focus” of the dinner will be primarily to “craft a unified response” to the administration’s handling of the Epstein case.
Two of CNN’s sources said the White House considers those officials to be the point people on the Epstein case. Bondi in particular has reportedly been told to shoulder the bulk of the burden over Epstein, with the administration stating that the matter “resides within the DOJ.”
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Those in attendance are also expected to discuss whether to publish audio recordings of Blanche’s interviews with convicted child trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell, who was Epstein’s chief co-conspirator. Blanche reportedly interviewed Maxwell for nine hours in July, in which she gave up information on approximately 100 people.
One downside of releasing those recordings, according to one source, is that it risks keeping the Epstein story alive in the news cycle. And some officials believe the story has “died down” enough to warrant not publishing those materials. If the Maxwell interview recordings were made public, it could be done in the next several weeks, according to CNN.
Maxwell was later transferred from her Gainesville, Florida prison to a minimum-security federal prison camp in Bryan, Texas — despite violent offenders not being eligible to serve their sentences in facilities like Bryan. And while Trump hasn’t publicly decided whether to pardon Maxwell, former DOJ pardon attorney Liz Oyer recently argued that there are multiple signs that the convicted child predator could ultimately be offered a pardon or a commutation of her 20-year sentence.
The administration brushed off the reports of potentially releasing interview transcripts, with White House spokesperson Steven Cheung saying: “This is nothing more than CNN trying desperately to create news out of old news.”
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Click here to read CNN’s report in full.