Vice President JD Vance and President Donald Trump’s core team had deep disagreements over how to handle fallout from the Jeffrey Epstein case last year, according to a new book.
Vance wanted “maximum transparency” regarding releasing a multitude of government files related to the deceased convicted sex offender when the case blew up in the summer of 2025, according to an excerpt of the book Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, written by New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan.
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On the other hand, Trump and those in his inner circle, particularly chief of staff Susie Wiles, reportedly favored a different approach. In one of the most revealing inside looks at the disagreement, Vance’s suggestion that media personality Tucker Carlson interview Epstein’s ex-girlfriend in an effort to clear Trump’s name was shot down by the rest of the group, the authors wrote.
“Vance had also floated to colleagues an extraordinary P.R. gambit — that the White House enlist Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison,” the book reads, describing an encounter between top officials during a Situation Room meeting on July 17. “It might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein.”
In the end, the White House called for the release of grand jury materials related to the case. Wiles told the group she would discuss the matter with Trump and ask whether he would post on Truth Social calling for the release of the sealed grand jury documents, according to the book.
In his bid to get more information released, Vance even urged the team at a later meeting to release an uncorroborated and secondhand claim made nearly a decade earlier, about Trump aggressively flicking and sucking a young woman’s nipples until they “looked incredibly painful,” prompting Wiles to swiftly shut down the idea, the authors wrote. One official later said it was “surreal” to be debating the nipple accusation in the White House Situation Room, according to the excerpt.
“Wiles would tell others that the vice president had proved himself to be a major conspiracy theorist,” the authors wrote.
The reporters wrote that amid the disagreements, the White House was derailed by months of paralysis over how to handle the Epstein case, as then-Attorney General Pam Bondi became embroiled in controversy over her handling of the affair.
“Trump made clear to his aides that he had no interest in releasing anything related to Epstein. He snapped at anyone who raised the issue, and his staff mostly learned to avoid the subject in front of him,” the journalists wrote. “As The Wall Street Journal prepared a damaging article about his relationship with Epstein, the president tried to kill it. He called News Corp.’s chief executive; its owner, Rupert Murdoch; and the paper’s editor in chief, Emma Tucker. The president, practically shouting as he threatened to sue, told Tucker, who is British, that she must ‘hate America.’”
The debacle caused a meltdown in relations among top administration officials, particularly between Bondi and the FBI’s senior leadership — Kash Patel and Dan Bongino — according to the excerpt. Bongino even worried that the Epstein affair would become “President Trump’s Iran-Contra,” a reference to the infamous scandal that plagued Ronald Reagan in the 1980s, the excerpt said.
“Blondie f***** this whole thing up,” Bongino warned, referring to Bondi. “She was the one on TV saying over and over they had all this stuff. There was never anything. We were always clear about that. But now everyone thinks we did something wrong.”
