This isn’t the kind of news liberals generally see fit to print.
The New York Times Magazine this week published a mammoth look at the last days of life for sex criminal Jeffrey Epstein, apparently aimed at establishing firmly whether the official finding that Epstein committed suicide actually holds water
On that front, the effort is a failure, but the notoriously liberal publication did manage to cement one fact — and it’s not the kind of fact its liberal readership craves when it comes to President Donald Trump.
Jeffrey Epstein was obsessed with trying to take down Trump before suicide, report says https://t.co/N8kpqVWlG6 pic.twitter.com/Tyf4MrWbal
— New York Post (@nypost) June 16, 2026
Since Trump’s return to the White House in 2025, political opponents who spent four years forgetting that Epstein ever existed have suddenly morphed into Torquemada-level fanatics about the affairs of the late, unlamented Epstein.
As usual for the left, the goal has nothing to do with the truth — Epstein’s associates were overwhelmingly leftish (even if you leave Bill Clinton out of it), and his political contributions all leaned decidedly in the Democratic direction.
The aim of the left instead is to try to link Epstein and his evil to Trump in any way imaginable — to make it appear the two men were friends and that Trump is somehow tainted with Epstein’s crimes. But the magazine report does exactly the opposite.
In fact, Trump’s name comes up only five times in the report’s nearly 150 paragraphs, twice as a means of establishing another person’s identity (former Trump adviser Steve Bannon, former Trump Attorney General Robert Barr), and three times in phrases that make it clear Epstein was anything but a friend of the man who’s now in the Oval Office.
In one paragraph describing the methodology behind the mammoth report, the article stated:
“We obtained about a dozen pages of other notes handwritten by Epstein in jail that were also previously unseen — including some in which he tried and failed to come up with significant information he might have on Donald Trump to offer to prosecutors,” the report stated. (Emphasis added.)
In another paragraph, buried deep in the report, the article notes that:
“His attorneys discussed with federal prosecutors the prospect of a proffer: giving them information that might be useful in other cases in exchange for the possibility of some leniency in his own. Epstein was particularly preoccupied with what he might have on Donald Trump, who was then serving his first term in office. Jotting on a legal pad, he returned to the president again and again, trying to dredge up anything to offer prosecutors. But his scribblings — ‘Trump is a total con artist — smoke & mirrors’ and ‘Never had money’— suggest that he could come up with little that wasn’t already known.” (Emphasis added.)
This isn’t the behavior of a man trying to protect a friend — it’s the behavior of a criminal desperate for leverage to get out of facing justice for his crimes.
Report: Epstein tried to offer prosecutors dirt on Trump for a deal, but he didn’t actually have anything on Trumphttps://t.co/2Tw8TuJlwl
— Not the Bee (@Not_the_Bee) June 17, 2026
The record on Trump’s relationship with Epstein is well known and has been reported by conservative outlets like The Western Journal for years.
The two men were part of the insular, wealthy social scene in Palm Beach, Florida, decades ago. They had a falling out sometime in the 2000s, before Epstein’s 2008 conviction for soliciting prostitution involving a person under 18. (Trump applauded the police investigation that led to that conviction.)
Are you surprised the New York Times even mentioned this?
Trump has been adamant that he was never of friend of Epstein’s after that, but that isn’t stopping Democrats from doing everything they can to create the impression he was. That includes using misleading redactions in the “Epstein files” to intimate Trump involvement in Epstein’s crimes.
And now, The New York Times itself, in the form of its weekly magazine, is publishing proof that an imprisoned Epstein had it in for Trump — that he was working with his legal advisors to come up with “significant information” on Trump, but had nothing.
“Jotting on a legal pad, he returned to the president again and again, trying to dredge up anything to offer prosecutors,” the report stated.
Of course, it’s possible that one member of a criminal conspiracy would attempt to come up with evidence against another member if it meant a reduced punishment — but the fact that Epstein came up with nothing is a pretty solid indication that there was nothing to come up with.
It’s doubtful The New York Times ever set out to clear Trump in the Epstein case. There might not be a more virulently anti-Trump outlet out there — at least not in the establishment media.
But the reality is, it did, in resounding fashion.
Tellingly, the article was a good deal less convincing on the topic of whether Epstein actually did kill himself in August of 2019.
Setting the stage for the the body’s discovery, the article noted:
“At the time of his death, Epstein was alone in his cell in spite of clear guidance to the contrary, while the guards assigned to his section of the jail neglected to conduct their rounds for hours. The jail’s security-camera system partially failed, and the video it did record showed an orange blur — the color of an inmate’s uniform — moving toward Epstein’s corridor shortly before his death. After Epstein’s body was found, evidence from his cell was not cataloged carefully, and photographs and objects gathered there seemed difficult to reconcile with aspects of his autopsy report. Two pathologists present at that autopsy had differing interpretations of the injuries to his neck.
“There were so many people with an ostensible stake, one way or another, in Epstein’s death. Was it possible that all of this just happened?” the report asked, with seeming skepticism.
Well, “yeah, actually it was,” is the non-skeptical suggestion, although the report was a good deal wordier:
“The picture drawn most clearly by this new information is not the elaborate conspiracy that his murder would have required; rather, it is an unfortunate though not improbable convergence of longstanding institutional failures, human errors and chance events, which created an opportunity for Epstein to act on what was by then a well-established desire that he had already tried and failed to realize.”
But in its penultimate paragraph, the report ends up back at square one, acknowledging that there might never be a definite answer to the question of whether Epstein really died at his own hands or at another’s.
“In the end, the autopsy photos were like everything else in the Epstein case, offering more possibilities than conclusions,” the article stated. “Every question was easier to ask than to answer. It made the case the perfect petri dish for conspiracy theories, a space in which nothing could definitively be proved wrong, as long as someone wanted to believe in it.”
The Epstein case might be a “perfect petri dish for conspiracy theories” — and there are countless men and women on the left and right who have their own. But one thing The New York Times voluminous reporting does establish, almost despite itself, is that whatever evil Epstein was part of, Donald Trump was not part of it.
And that isn’t what liberals in 2026 America want to see at all.
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