A key moment has a former Trump White House insider thinking a damning new report on Jeffrey Epstein probably holds up.
Sarah Matthews, a deputy White House press secretary in Trump's first administration, said on Tuesday's episode of "The Bulwark Daily" that first lady Melania Trump's "weird random press conference" earlier this year is the "most convincing piece of evidence" that the House Judiciary Committee Democrats' report is "probably accurate."
Host Tim Miller, a former Republican strategist, opened the show by reading from the report's executive summary, which states that "Donald Trump was an active participant in Jeffrey Epstein's sexual abuse of young women during the mid to late 1990s."
According to Miller, the report includes a new allegation that Trump raped a 24-year-old woman and then promised her a visa and admission to NYU while demanding she stay quiet. It also claims Trump lied about kicking Epstein, the late convicted sex offender, out of his Mar-a-Lago club and "strongly suggests that Epstein introduced Trump to his wife Melania." Trump has long denied any wrongdoing connected to Epstein.
"This seems like confirmation that Trump met his wife Melania through a pedophile sex trafficker and that we have a new allegation of rape against this president," Matthews said.
Matthews said the report immediately took her back to the press conference Melania Trump held at a moment when, as she put it, "we actually weren't really even talking about the Epstein files as much anymore."
"She probably caught wind of what was in these Epstein files and her mentions in there," Matthews said. "And so she wanted to get out ahead and didn't really think through the fact that it actually makes it look more guilty and that it does make it look in fact true."
Miller agreed, calling it "an unbelievably defensive press conference and weird at the time."
"There was certainly a 'the lady doth protest too much' to the whole deal," he said.
Matthews also suggested the allegations would barely register with Trump's allies in conservative media.
"I bet if you're turning on Fox News today, they've barely talked about this," she said.
