ABC News White House correspondent Mary Bruce just exposed the hoax that Donald Trump is trying to perpetrate by claiming he supports the release of the Epstein files.
A simple question from Bruce – “Mr. President, why wait for Congress to release the Epstein files? Why not just do it now?” – at an Oval Office photo-op with Saudi blood money guy Mohammed bin Salman on Tuesday unleashed a torrent of invective from Trump, who based on his answer clearly doesn’t want to release the Epstein files.
“It’s not the question that I mind, it’s your attitude,” Trump said in response to Bruce, against the backdrop of the controversy over calling another female reporter who asked about Epstein in an Air Force One press gaggle “piggy.”
“I think you are a terrible reporter,” Trump said to Bruce, who, earlier in the photo-op, had pressed bin Salman on the murder, with a bone saw, of Saudi dissident Jamal Khashoggi, earning her first rebuke from Trump as she did.
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“It’s the way you ask these questions. You start off with a man who is highly respected,” Trump said, the “highly respected” man he’s referring to there being bin Salman, who, again, we know mainly because he ordered the murder, with a bone saw, of a political rival, “asking him a horrible, insubordinate and just a terrible question. And you couldn’t even ask that same exact question nicely. You’re all psyched up. Somebody psyched you over at ABC. You’re a terrible person and a terrible reporter.”
From all of that: “insubordinate”?
We don’t work for you, Trump – and by “we,” I’m meaning here, we in the media, but I could also be getting at, any of us who aren’t your kids or their spouses.
Trump went on from there to claiming, as he has done ad nauseam for the past several months, that he had “nothing to do” with Jeffrey Epstein, the disgraced billionaire who died in federal custody in 2019 on charges that he led an extensive child sex-trafficking ring that has been linked to dozens of political, cultural and economic elites, including Trump, Epstein’s long-time best friend.
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Trump did, curiously, claim, in his next breath, that he had thrown Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club “because I thought he was a sick pervert,” which would seem to be a concession that he knew of Epstein’s criminal doings – though the claim about him distancing himself from Epstein doesn’t hold up to scrutiny, from what we know from the recent trove of emails released by congressional Republicans last week, which have Epstein acknowledging continued close ties to Trump’s inner circle during Trump’s first term in the White House.
Trump went from there to advancing his claims that a raft of Democrats are the ones who should worry about their ties to Epstein.
He then threatened the revocation of ABC’s broadcast license, which isn’t a thing he can do, but he likes to threaten – because he likes to try to come across like a mob boss.
“I think the license should be taken away from ABC, because your news is so fake, and it’s so wrong. And we have a great commissioner, the chairman, who should look at that,” Trump said, alluding to Brendan Carr, the FCC commissioner, who tried a similar tact back a couple of months ago with threatening ABC over its late-night talk-show host, Jimmy Kimmel, which didn’t work out so well for Carr or for Trump, but did for Kimmel, whose show got a massive boost in viewer numbers afterward.
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Chris Graham
