Asked how the White House is dealing with reports that multiple documented interviews with a woman who claimed she was sexually assaulted by both Jeffrey Epstein and Donald Trump are missing from the notorious Epstein files, MS NOW’s Jonathan Lemire noted an oddity in the president’s schedule on Wednesday.
With a new cloud hovering over the presidency, Lemire told his colleagues on “Morning Joe,” that “There's been frustration all along with how this has been handled. And that's sort of counterintuitive, because so much of what the DOJ is doing is at the direction, at least unspoken direction, perhaps, of the White House. But the president has said to people close to him in the last few months that he's been soured on how Attorney General Bondi has handled this. And then we see Bondi try to do a course correction to protect him, and that only seems to make it worse.”
“There's no doubt that they were upset with the timing of these revelations. It drowned out the State of the Union,” he added before switching gears and mentioning, “There's no doubt that they were upset with the timing of these revelations; it drowned out [his] State of the Union.”
“And as an aside, when was the last time a president delivered a State of the Union and then didn't go toward the country, or to support those ideas or even appear in public?” he asked. “We never saw President Trump at all yesterday; truly strange on the heels of a speech like that meant to reignite some momentum for his presidency.”
“But they understand," he reported. “They understand that this Epstein matter is much to the president's frustration. He, since last summer, has urged it to go away. Remember when it first –– it was percolating on the right with, you know, podcasts and stuff and he's like, ‘No, stop talking about it. Stop talking about it.’”