President Donald Trump will not appoint a special counsel to review the Jeffrey Epstein case, the White House said Thursday, shooting down a move that several of his allies have advocated.
"The president would not recommend a special prosecutor in the Epstein case. That's how he feels," White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt said at a briefing when she was asked about calls for him to do so.
Some of Trump's most prominent supporters, including Steve Bannon, far-right activist Laura Loomer and Rep. Lauren Boebert, R-Colo., had promoted the idea of Trump’s naming a special counsel.
The Trump administration has come under a firestorm of criticism since the Justice Department and the FBI issued a brief memo this month saying they had thoroughly reviewed the Epstein case, that no one else faced charges in the probe and that they would not release more information in the future.
That has not sat well with some of Trump's most loyal supporters, given that Trump and members of his administration, including FBI Director Kash Patel and Deputy Director Dan Bongino, have helped fuel conspiracy theories about Epstein, the politically connected financier.
Epstein was found dead by suicide in a New York jail cell in 2019 while he was awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. His social circle once included the likes of Trump and former President Bill Clinton.
Trump has urged his supporters to move on, chiding those who do not as “weaklings.” "I don’t want their support anymore!” he wrote on Truth Social. He has also started referring to the case as a "hoax."
Leavitt was asked what exactly Trump thought was the hoax.
“The president was referring to the fact that Democrats have now seized on this, as if they ever wanted transparency on this, which is an asinine suggestion,” she said, complaining they did not “do a dang thing” when Joe Biden was president.
Other Trump have called for the Justice Department to simply release the files in the case, an idea Leavitt also threw cold water on. She said that would have to be done by the Justice Department but that if the material includes grand jury information, “a judge would have to approve it. That’s out of the president’s control.”
Trump had said during the campaign that he would make the Epstein files public, and Attorney General Pam Bondi had repeatedly pledged to make more information available.
A reporter asked Leavitt whether Trump thought justice had been served.
"The president believes that he directed the Department of Justice to do an exhaustive and thorough review, and they did that. They all agreed, the FBI director, the deputy FBI director, the attorney general, on the memo they drafted and they released,” she said.
Trump said this week that Bondi had given him a brief review of her findings this month, and Leavitt was asked whether he had any knowledge of or understanding about information in the case that has not been released.
“Not to my knowledge," she said, adding that the "president has told the attorney general if they have any more credible evidence, they should release it.”
