For four years, the Biden administration sat on the Epstein files and offered the public nothing. Trump made their release a campaign issue, then followed through last month by signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act. That move left Democrats exposed, so they scrambled for cover. Instead of accepting the facts, they have pivoted to spinning conspiracy theories about the Epstein files themselves, in a blatant attempt to explain why the long-promised smoking gun against Trump doesn’t exist.
The conspiracies have become so pervasive that NBC’s Kristen Welker asked Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche on Meet the Press Sunday about one such conspiracy theory regarding the temporary removal of documents from the Justice Department’s release of the Epstein files.
As expected, the left tried to spin it as some cover-up for Donald Trump. Blanche wasn’t having it.
Welker asked Blanches about the “15 files released Friday” that “disappeared from DOJ’s website yesterday, including this photo of what looks like a desk with a drawer open containing photos of Donald Trump.” She pressed Blanche to explain why the files were taken down, asking if it was “at the direction of a judge.”
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Blanche calmly explained the actual reason, which had nothing to do with protecting Trump and everything to do with protecting victims. “Well, you can see in that photo, there’s photographs of women,” Blanche said. “And so we learned after releasing that photograph that there were concerns about those, about those women and the fact that we had put that photo up. So we pulled that photo down.”
Then came the key part that deflated the entire left-wing narrative.
“It has nothing to do with President Trump,” Blanche stated. “There are dozens of photos of President Trump already released to the public seeing him with Mr. Epstein. He has said that in the ’90s and early 2000s, he socialized with him.”
Blanche didn’t stop there. He called out the absurdity of the conspiracy theory directly. “So the absurdity of us pulling down a photo, a single photo, because President Trump was in it, is laughable,” he said. “And the fact that everybody’s trying to act like that’s the case is a reflection of their true motivation.”
The deputy attorney general went on to explain the DOJ’s policy regarding victim privacy in the Epstein document release. “But the reality is anybody, any victim, any victim’s lawyers, any victim rights group can reach out to us and say, ‘Hey, Department of Justice, there’s a document, there’s a photo, there’s something within the Epstein files that identifies me.’ And we will then, of course, pull that off and investigate,” Blanche explained.
.@DAGToddBlanche: “The absurdity of us pulling down a photo — a single photo — because President Trump was in it is laughable, and the fact that everybody is trying to act like that’s the case is a reflection of their true motivation.” pic.twitter.com/9u7ZjgL4m7
— Rapid Response 47 (@RapidResponse47) December 21, 2025
So there you have it. The breathless speculation from the left about Trump supposedly being protected by the Department of Justice—which is full of people who helped try to take him down, by the way—falls apart under the slightest scrutiny. The files were pulled to protect potential victims whose images appeared in the photographs, not to shield Trump from scrutiny. Photos of Trump with Epstein have been public for years, and Trump has acknowledged socializing with him decades ago, before cutting ties in the early 2000s, well before he was first arrested for soliciting prostitution back in 2006. Many Democrats, however, continued to socialize with Epstein after that.
In the end, the idea that the DOJ would suddenly try to hide a single photo when dozens already exist publicly is, frankly, stupid.
But don’t expect the conspiracy theorists to let facts get in the way of their narrative. They’ll keep pushing this story because they have convinced themselves there’s a smoking gun, even though it’s obvious that if there were, the Biden administration would have released it years ago.
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