Last February, a group of MAGA influencers emerged from the West Wing of the White House holding white binders, each emblazoned with a Department of Justice seal and the words “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” in a red serif font.
The influencers — a crew of 15 podcast hosts, political organizers and self-described “new media” personalities from the right-wing digital landscape — posed proudly with the dossiers in hand. They explained that their followers were eager for new information about Jeffrey Epstein, the deceased financier and convicted child sex offender whose crimes have spurred countless conspiracy theories, especially among the MAGA base.
Scott Presler, a conservative activist, hoped it would be the first of many such events. “If a binder is titled ‘Phase 1,’ there will be other binders,” he proclaimed in a post on X at the time.
One year since that triumphant West Wing photo shoot, there are still no details on a possible “Phase 2” binder release from the DOJ or the FBI, and the group that appeared to be handpicked to deliver the White House’s message now seems dubious of the second phrase printed on the “Phase 1” binder cover: “The Most Transparent Administration in History.”
The “Phase 1” binder was full of redacted scans of Epstein’s address book, the unredacted version of which had long been publicly available. Nothing in the dossier resembled a much-hyped client list, despite the fact that Attorney General Pam Bondi told Fox News the list was “on my desk” just six days prior to the binder event.
Liz Wheeler, a podcast host and author, livestreamed the contents of the binder from Ronald Reagan Washington National Airport just hours after leaving the White House. Throughout the half-hour stream, Wheeler insisted that the event hadn’t been a stunt and that any disappointment about the binders should be blamed on the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York — which handled the 2019 investigation into Epstein — and not the DOJ, the FBI or the Trump administration.
Presler issued a similar defense of Bondi the day of the binder event, and opted instead to redirect blame to the FBI and its director, Kash Patel.
“The FBI told her she had everything.” Presler wrote on X, referring to a letter between Bondi and Patel in the lead-up to last February’s event. “The FBI withheld information.”
But by summer, Wheeler and many of the other influencers who received the Epstein binders had changed their tunes; photos of triumphant smiles were replaced by harsh criticism of Bondi and President Donald Trump on many of the influencers’ social media feeds.
None of the influencers who received binders from the White House responded to multiple requests for comment from MS NOW.
Isabel Brown, a conservative podcast host, expressed her discontent on social media in July, writing on X that the “‘file drop’ turned into a ‘nothing drop.’” That same month, Mike Cernovich, a right-wing political commentator, called the DOJ’s handling of the Epstein file release a “cover-up” in a post on X. In August, Collin Rugg, co-owner of conservative breaking-news site Trending Politics, wrote that “Epstein has been the biggest fumble of this admin so far.”
“This will be part of your legacy,” Cernovich wrote to Trump in the post. “There’s still time to change it!”
Rogan O’Handley, who runs the X account @DC_Draino, said the full release of the Epstein files would “restore trust in the DOJ.” Presler also called on the DOJ to release the full, unredacted files that July.
Some of the invitees, like Chaya Raichik, the woman behind the anti-LGBT X account @libsoftiktok, appeared to drop the Epstein issue almost entirely, and pivoted instead to other conservative culture issues of the day, returning to the Epstein conversation only to blast Democrats whose names appeared across various documents.
It took the near-unanimous passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act in the House of Representatives last November to force the DOJ to release millions of files, but even that hasn’t swayed many of the influencers who received the binders away from an onslaught of criticism aimed at Bondi and Patel.
O’Handley called for the complete unredaction of the DOJ’s most recent document release earlier this month. During Bondi’s testimony before the House Judiciary Committee earlier this month, some influencers’ ire toward her intensified, with Wheeler calling the attorney general’s performance a “total disaster” on her podcast.
Wheeler has emerged as one of Bondi’s harshest critics in the year since the Epstein binders were handed out, even suggesting in an X post earlier this month that “Pam Bondi needs to go.”
The DOJ is now under immediate fire for its handling of redactions within the release; more recently, amid allegations that the department wrongly withheld FBI files that contained summaries of three interviews from 2019 with a woman who accused Trump of sexual assault. The department is reportedly reviewing those allegations internally. The president has denied all accusations of wrongdoing.
Despite their frustrations with the DOJ’s handling of the Epstein file release, none of the influencers has turned their back on Trump over the past year. Both Wheeler and Cernovich echoed the president’s own remarks that January’s document trove release “totally exonerated” him from accusations of wrongdoing or misconduct related to Epstein.
“Trump was always innocent. That’s why his treatment of the Epstein files broke my heart,” Cernovich wrote earlier this month on X. “He was misled, but of course that’s on him.”
Adam Hudacek is a desk associate for MS NOW covering national politics in Washington, D.C.