Newsmax's Epstein Distraction
Despite Alan Dershowitz serving as an apologist for Jeffrey Epstein, Newsmax found ways to try and distract from and distance him from President Trump.
Newsmax has been relying on Alan Dershowitz to soft-pedal the Jeffrey Epstein scandal, but it has also been working to distance President Trump from it. A June 6 article, for example, touted a former Epstein attorney (David Schoen, not Dershowitz) insisting “authoritatively, unequivocally, and definitively” that his client had no information to hurt Trump, adding, “I specifically asked him!” A July 18 column by Blaine Holt sought to tamp down the controversy:
Perhaps one of the most hopeful developments was then-new U.S. Atty. Gen. Pam Bondi announcing she had the Epstein files and was going to release them all.
Promises made, promises kept.
All was well.
Along the way the Trump faithful’s impatience grew.
When would charges be filed on any of the criminals?
Aren’t the DOGE USAID revelations enough to commence the indictments process?
Is Tina Peters (Colorado 2020 election whistle blower) still in jail?
Wait a minute!
Did Kash Patel and Dan Bongino just say that Epstein did, in fact, kill himself?
Steady! More to come . . . Simmer down MAGA nation!
And then the shot heard “’round-the MAGA” Ms. Bondi now says there are no Epstein files at all and that he was not engaged in human trafficking.
Are you kidding me?
This is an immovable redline to those who backed the president from the start.
Epstein represents far more to MAGA than some salacious headlines.
[…]
We can assume that President Trump and his team have knowledge which makes the Epstein twists and turns that we see, look logical.
However, what the average patriotic American sees is minors abused, our government potentially compromised, and intelligence services and global elites involved.
There’s more than enough information that has come out to know this is no hoax, but we can sympathize with our leader who may be trying to warn us that this is far more dangerous than we had imagined.
Come back to your faithful Mr. President.
We are all in this war together. And to be certain, it is a war.
A Newsmax TV host used the controversy to score points against a competitor:
Hosts on Fox News are too “terrified” of President Donald Trump to cover the growing anger from his MAGA followers over the administration’s handling of late financier and sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s files, according to Newsmax host Rob Schmitt.
“It’s clear that the White House didn’t want this to be a subject, but Trump’s base, his supporters in [the] base, care about it,” Schmitt said on his Newsmax program, “Rob Schmitt Tonight,” on Tuesday.
[…]
Schmitt, a former Fox News host, pointed out that Laura Ingraham, whose program is on at the same time as his Newsmax program, has gone “dark” on the subject of Epstein, “mentioning it only with disdain for about two seconds” after talking “quite a bit” about him at last weekend’s Turning Point event.
He added that there was also a “little bit of it on Bret Baier’s show, ‘Special Report,’” but “otherwise it was completely blacked out of the network. That came from somewhere, obviously. There’s a pressure point, and then it was hit.”
Media Matters For America fellow Matthew Gertz reported this week that Fox News mentioned Epstein eight times on Monday, compared with mentioning former President Joe Biden 158 times.
Newsmax called on Schoen again to downplay the scandal in a July 22 TV appearance:
Criminal Defense Attorney David Schoen, who represented deceased financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein, told Newsmax there’s not much left now save for “conspiracy theories.”
Schoen told “The Record With Greta Van Susteren” on Tuesday that a pending request by the Justice Department to unseal grand jury transcripts in the prosecution of Epstein and his former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, won’t amount to much.
“It’s just going to lead again to more conspiracy theories. And even if they’re disclosed, I don’t believe there’s anything.”
Dick Morris tried his hand at attempting to change the subject, complete with lots of italics, in his July 25 column:
Where there’s smoke . . . there’s smoke.
The Democrats have metastasized the Jeffrey Epstein scandal into a national news peg to try to drown out the real news: The incredible economic performance of the Trump administration.
With no factual basis whatever and just the tawdry record of Epstein, the Democrats have tried to convey the misimpression that Trump and Epstein were somehow connected.
They want to public to assume that where there is smoke, there is fire.
But, in Washington, D.C., there is only more smoke.
We can’t let the non-scandal drive media attention away from the very real fact that Trump has all but extinguished inflation, generated important job growth, turned the economy around, stopped illegal immigration, and deported over one million people who have no legal basis to call themselves Americans.
There is no scandal here.
Just the media trying to create the impression of one.
[…]
Trump can’t count on the facts to come to his defense. The Democrats have tried to replace facts with groundless speculation and fantasy.
There is no fire here, just smoke.
Morris didn’t mention that Trump himself is creating the impression of a scandal by so adamantly refusing to release the Epstein files.
Newsmax continued its efforts to distance Trump from Epstein with a July 26 TV appearance by its favorite (well, second favorite behind Alan Dershowitz) former Epstein attorney, David Schoen:
The Department of Justice and the FBI announced earlier in the month there was never any specific “client list” of the late, disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein and confirmed he did die by suicide. Mixed signals from conservative influencers and inconsistent promises from government officials have only added to the speculation that the Epstein case will never reach closure. David Schoen, the former attorney of Epstein, told Newsmax on Saturday that regardless of what is eventually released, “nobody is going to be satisfied.”
“The conspiracy theorists, I hate to say … are never going to be satisfied. If you produce something, they’ll say, ‘Well, there must be something more. They’re holding back.’ And on the left. They don’t care about the issues. They simply want to sow dissension, by the way, they ought to be careful. They may rue the day that they got any documents, because if there ever were such a list, they’d come up with a lot more of their friends on it than [President] Donald Trump’s friends,” Schoen said during an appearance on “Saturday Agenda.”
Schoen, who was Epstein’s attorney for only nine days before Epstein died, said there was never any “such list” of individuals that Epstein may have been blackmailing in compromising positions.
An anonymously written July 28 article huffed:
As the political firestorm surrounding the late Jeffrey Epstein reignites, a recent report by The Washington Post finds that there is “no public evidence of any wrongdoing on [President Donald] Trump’s part.”
Despite that key finding, questions from lawmakers and media figures have dominated headlines in recent weeks about who was really involved with Epstein, the wealthy financier and convicted sex offender who died in a Manhattan jail in 2019.
The article did admit that “The media whirlwind has been backed by some on the extreme MAGA right,” but didn’t really define what that means or why it considers Tucker Carlson to be a part of that.
Yet another July 28 article hyped:
This powerful Newsmax exposé uncovers what the mainstream media refuses to say — the Epstein scandal wasn’t just a tragedy, it was deeply tied to some of the most powerful figures in the Democratic Party.
Available ONLY on Newsmax Platinum — Here’s Why You Must Read It:
Discover how Jeffrey Epstein’s closest political, financial, and social ties were overwhelmingly with high-profile Democrat leaders, not Republicans:
[…]
As America heads into a pivotal election year, knowing the truth about elite Democrat connections is more important than ever.
Apparently, that article was not so important that Newsmax wouldn’t stop hiding it behind a paywall — and given that nobody else has reported its claims, it probably wasn’t that important at all. This promo article was essentially an ad for Newsmax Platinum.
One more July 28 article touted a conspiracy theory by Trump himself:
President Donald Trump says his name may have been planted in the Jeffrey Epstein files by former FBI Director James Comey or former Attorney General Merrick Garland.
“Those files were run by the worst scum on earth. They were run by Comey, they were run by Garland, they were run by [former President Joe] Biden, and all of the people that actually ran the government, including the autopen. Those files were run for four years by those people. If they had anything, I assume they would have released it,” Trump told reporters Monday in Turnberry, Scotland.
“Now, they can easily put something in the files that’s a phony. … Christopher Steele, as an example, wrote a book, a dossier. We call it the fake news dossier. And the whole thing was a fake. The whole thing was a fake. They could put things in the file that are fake, but those files were run by bad, sick people,” he said.
Writer Solange Reyner made no effort to try and verify anything Trump said.
Meanwhile, Newsmax published two wire articles repeating Trump’s claim that he fell out with Epstein due to poaching of staff at Mar-a-Lago. And it promoted another paywalled article on the subject:
This powerful Newsmax exposé uncovers what the mainstream media refuses to say — Ghislaine Maxwell knows the darkest secrets of the Jeffrey Epstein scandal — and her revelations could rock America and the world.
If you’re looking for real answers in the Epstein scandal — not sanitized headlines — Newsmax Platinum’s explosive report delivers what the mainstream media avoids: names, connections, and the unsettling implications behind them.
This isn’t just another rundown of the Epstein saga. This article cuts through the noise to explore what Ghislaine Maxwell really knows, who she may expose, and why the global elite should be worried.
With congressional inquiries heating up, Maxwell could soon be forced to talk under oath — a moment that could shift the landscape of elite accountability.
the names of Bill Clinton and Prince Andrew were teased, but it also pointedly noted that “there’s no public evidence linking Trump to Epstein’s crimes.” Again, the article itself is behind a paywall, so it can’t actually be that important.
And none of these articles that one of the prosecutors who helped arrange Epstein’s sweetheart plea deal, Alex Acosta, is on the Newsmax board of directors.
More distraction
Newsmax’s Trump-Epstein distraction efforts turned to emphasizing a former president. John Gizzi speculated in an Aug. 6 article:
Hours after former President Bill Clinton received a subpoena from the House Oversight Committee on Tuesday morning regarding his history with the convicted sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein, speculation mounted in the press and among Clinton watchers that he would decline to comply and not testify before the committee.
Were the 42nd president to do so, he would follow in the path of two of four former presidents who were subpoenaed and rejected an order to testify before a congressional committee.
On Nov. 14, 2022, Donald Trump defied a subpoena from the House committee investigating the riot at the U.S. Capitol on Jan. 6, 2021.
An Aug. 10 article by Brian Freeman hyped:
House Oversight Committee Chair James Comer is insistent on making Bill and Hillary Clinton testify before the panel after it voted to subpoena the couple concerning the Jeffrey Epstein saga, the Kentucky Republican told Fox News’ “Sunday Morning Futures.”
The congressman said “if the Clintons try to fight this subpoena, which we presume they will,” the committee’s efforts will be helped tremendously in court by the fact that the vote was bipartisan.
Comer said that “the American people want to know what went on at Epstein island … we know that Bill Clinton went there many times. We just want to ask him what he saw when he was there and who all was involved.”
Freeman did not question why Comer did not subpoena Trump — which would seem to contradict his assertion on Newsmax TV a few days earlier that he’s “serious” about the investigation.
Newsmax then fixated on another side issue in an Aug. 13 article by Michael Katz:
First lady Melania Trump has threatened to sue Hunter Biden for more than $1 billion after he suggested that convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein introduced her to President Donald Trump.
[…]
Melania Trump’s Florida-based attorney Alejandro Brito wrote a scathing letter to Biden’s attorney Abbe Lowell demanding that Biden “immediately retract the false, defamatory, disparaging, and inflammatory statements” he made about the first lady, the New York Post reported Wednesday.
“Failure to comply will leave Mrs. Trump with no choice but to pursue any and all legal rights and remedies available to her to recover the overwhelming financial and reputational harm that you have caused her to suffer,” wrote the letter, a copy of which was obtained by Fox News.
The next day, the apparently unironically named Charlie McCarthy followed by noting that “Hunter Biden offered a blunt expletive in saying he will not apologize to first lady Melania Trump over comments involving disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein,” and Nicole Weatherholtz stated that Trump said “that he supports first lady Melania Trump’s moving ahead with her threat to sue former President Joe Biden’s son Hunter Biden over comments that she is linked to deceased convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.”
Katz returned for an Aug. 22 article trying to further distance Trump from Epstein:
Jeffrey Epstein’s accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell has told Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche that she never witnessed anything untoward in President Donald Trump’s friendship with the convicted sex offender and never heard of any allegations that Trump acted inappropriately — “absolutely never, in any context.”
Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in federal prison in Texas and is actively seeking a pardon, also said she didn’t see Trump in any massage setting at his Mar-a-Lago estate in Florida or at Epstein’s house.
Given that Blanche used to be Trump’s personal attorney — something Katz didn’t disclose — it’s unclear how much weight that claim holds.
This got emphasized in an Aug. 22 TV appearance by this guy:
Roger Stone, a former adviser to President Donald Trump, told Newsmax Friday that newly released documents related to Jeffrey Epstein confirm his long-standing position that the president had no improper ties to the late financier and sex offender.
“It’s an absurdity,” Stone told “Finnerty.” “Look, we had all this information in 2015. I had Epstein’s phone book. Not everyone in the phone book is guilty of inappropriate or illegal behavior. But his butler did circle the names of those he said were involved in pedophilia or were witnesses.”
He said Trump “has nothing to fear from full disclosure,” adding that unsealed transcripts from Epstein’s former girlfriend, Ghislaine Maxwell, who is serving 20 years in prison for her role in his activities, showed that she denied Trump was involved in inappropriate conduct during her questioning by Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche.
Given Stone’s legacy of sleazy politics (not to mention his affinity for swinging), he may not be the best person to defend Trump on this.