Fox News panel on Epstein files: “The White House wants to move on from this. ... They also feel like this is very much an online kind of outrage.”
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From the July 14, 2025, edition of Fox News' Special Report with Bret Baier
BRET BAIER (ANCHOR): Let's turn to another story that's gathering a lot of attention, and that's the Epstein files and the the controversy around it. You know the thing has changed when the House minority leader is now talking about this story. Take a listen.
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MARY KATHERINE HAM (CONTRIBUTOR): Yeah. I think there's a couple things going on here. Many, many, many people look at this and go, on its face, it looks like it was handled at least incompetently, if not corruptly, from day one regardless of leadership. And they want answers because there are real victims who we will probably never know much about because they signed NDAs and because very powerful people were involved. And also, there was an easy answer for the Trump administration here, which was Ghislaine Maxwell is appealing. We cannot release anything while that is ongoing. Right? I think that would have been the clean answer. Now, they're in this situation where a bunch of people are deeply invested in this particular story, which there may be plenty more to, as a decoder ring for all that is corrupt in government. And if they don't get any answers on that, they will be very mad. Here's the other thing, though. There's a large portion of that portion of the base that will listen to Trump when they give him — when he gives them an answer on this. And the question is how politically salient is that?
BAIER: And does he have the benefit of the doubt, Dasha?
DASHA BURNS (POLITICO): Here is the tension. The White House wants to move on from this. One senior official tells me that they understand it's important to the base, and that doesn't mean they're gonna ignore it, but they want to move past it. They also feel like this is very much an online kind of outrage. Not that the issue is not important to the base, but that the outcry and and the the rage factor is very much an online thing led by these influencers.
But the reality of of of it is that the people in middle America that voted for Trump are not as invested in this as they are in the economy and health care.
The other piece of it is the more that this administration doesn't want to talk about this, the more that online group wants to talk about it and chat about it and feels like there's more of a there there. And it's not — I've talked to many of these influencers. They're just not ready to let go of this yet.
BAIER: So how much does come up on your radio show?
GUY BENSON (CONTRIBUTOR): People wanna talk about it, certainly online. But, look, something very dark and evil happened connected to this man for a very long time, and he was protected and others around him for reasons that are highly mysterious and suspicious. People are right, I think, to be a bit conspiratorial. Myself, I'm not characteristically a conspiratorial person. I'm in the market for conspiracies on this one, always have been because there's something that has never been right about it.
The problem is if you're the Trump administration and several key figures in that orbit, if you dangle this in front of the base and make it into an issue and print up the binders of the files and everything, and then at the last minute, kind of say, oh, never mind, there's nothing. A lot of people aren't just gonna accept that.