President Donald Trump's behavior around the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case has created suspicion simply because of how little he seems to want to follow through on giving the answers he promised his base, Vanity Fair's Molly Jong-Fast told Ari Melber on MSNBC on Monday.
Melber started this point by playing a clip of Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche's controversial interview with imprisoned Epstein co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell, who said she did not believe Epstein died by suicide — a common conspiracy theory that has animated the debate.
"So even their sex trafficking helping interview witness says that," said Melber. "We, the news press, have not been able to report out or confirm the alternate, but we have reported out that there were breaches of protocol. Then the key video of the door went missing. And I've covered a lot of legal and prison issues for a long time. Crime within prison is a thing, so you can't rule out that theory of the case, even though we haven't confirmed it."
"Your thoughts on that piece of this, because it goes to whether Bill Barr, selected by Donald Trump, at a minimum blew it and at a maximum looked the other way, when there may have been evidence of something that they should have investigated?" he said.
"Yeah, I think that's a really good point," said Jong-Fast. "And look, the whole thing is just so suspicious, even if there's no there there when people are talking about it, Donald Trump loses, right? Alex Acosta gave the sweetheart deal. Ended up in the first Trump administration."
The problem for Trump, she continued, is that even if he isn't covering up something damaging, "at every point, clearly the way he's behaving makes it seem as if he is not feeling good about it, right? If nothing else. So the fact ... he's trying and trying to get it to go away, and he's saying things like, 'We want this to go away now,' all of which do not make it seem like he has a good relationship with this story. Now, we don't know what happened, which is why there are so many conspiracies around it, but it is just, I think, really problematic for him."
One thing driving home that point, she added, is that a recent Democratic entrant into the Maine Senate race, Graham Platner, has told her the number one thing he keeps hearing from remorseful Trump voters is that they no longer trust him over the Epstein scandal.
"I think that having an administration that was saying, we're going to reveal, we're going to reveal, we're going to reveal, I mean, Pam Bondi saying it's on my desk. And then two weeks later, being like, 'No, no, we're not talking about this.' That's a lot for people to stomach. And I do think that it is a real — that this is a real thing for the base."
Watch the video below or at the link here.