When it comes to President Donald Trump's efforts to disassociate from the scandal surrounding his relationship with late convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, it's the president's own FBI Director who "really gave away the game here," says The New Republic's Greg Sargent on The Daily Blast podcast.
In his combative testimony before the House Judiciary Committee Wednesday, Kash Patel, Sargent says, "filibustered when asked questions about whether Trump’s name is in the files. He seemed to accidentally reveal that he does know how many times Trump’s name appears in them."
Historian and Vanderbilt University professor Nicole Hemmer, who has written books on media, conservatism and the presidency agreed, saying, it was "a transparent attempt to change the subject," and that Patel, along with Attorney General Pam Bondi, "may be loyal to Trump, but they’re not doing a very good job of defending him."
In response to Rep. Eric Swalwell's (D-CA) grilling on how many times Trump's name appears in the Epstein files, Patel's evasiveness, Hemmer says, made "it clear that he is familiar enough with these files to know that Trump is mentioned in them and likely knows at least roughly how many times he’s mentioned."
On Wednesday. Rep. Dan Goldman (D-NY) told Patel in a fiery exchange that he was part of the Epstein cover-up.
"The MAGA ecosystem spent literally years demanding to know what’s in the Epstein files and they screamed again for years that an elite cover-up was happening that the deep state was behind it yet here on video is Kash Patel, who is the FBI director, visibly covering up what he knows about what’s in them in real time. How can MAGA overlook this?" Sargent asks.
Though Hemmer doesn't think they're overlooking it, she does say that it's causing a deep divide among Trump loyalists.
"There is a division between like do you want the Epstein files or do you want to show your loyalty to Trump? And that’s where the dividing line is right now," she says, adding, "the problem is they turn Donald Trump into the avatar of their movement and he is implicated in the Epstein files. And there’s such a cognitive dissonance there that I think for many of them, they just can’t square it."
This dissonance, both Sargent and Hemmer note, is an example of one of the far-right's loudest rallying cries.
"It’s an actual deep state cover-up and it is an actual example of elite corruption. Like this is the kind of thing that populist movements arise in response to. And if MAGA is a genuine populist movement, then it should be leading the way on this," Hemmer says.
"They certainly could release more of the files if they wanted to," Hemmer added, noting that Trump and MAGA have made a mess of the situation.
"It’s one of those Frankenstein monsters stories, right? You create the monster and then you can’t control it after," she said. "It’s a story that keeps coming up and, even though they try to whack-a-mole back down, they’re just not successful in getting people’s attention off of the story."