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Vance Says White House ‘Screwed Up’ Epstein Files Rollout In Bombshell Joe Rogan Chat

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JD Vance
Photo Credit: "J. D. Vance" by Gage Skidmore is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0. To view a copy of this license, visit https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0/?ref=openverse.

JD Vance admitted the White House fumbled the Epstein files rollout, telling Joe Rogan the administration “screwed up” the messaging even as he rejected the idea that officials were trying to hide evidence.

The vice president revisited the chaotic 2025 release in an interview on “The Joe Rogan Experience” that aired Wednesday, arguing that the political firestorm came from bad communication rather than a cover-up.

“We absolutely screwed up the comms of the Epstein files,” Vance told the Spotify podcaster.

“We just did. But do I think the reason we screwed up the comms is because we were trying to hide something? No.”

The rollout first went sideways with Pam Bondi’s “client list” claim. After the former attorney general suggested the material was already on her desk, the administration later had to acknowledge there was no list.

The follow-up gesture of giving right-wing influencers binders branded as “Epstein files” only made the release look emptier.

Vance said Bondi had damaged public trust in the process, though he did not accuse her of acting in bad faith.

“The effect of it was to make people distrust the entire effort,” Vance said. “Look, I know Pam, I like Pam. I don’t think there was anything malicious going on. I think Pam was trying to respond to the political moment.”

“I think she overstated what we have and what we didn’t have, and I think she got roasted for it publicly, by a lot of people, including me,” he added.

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Vance leaned into his own obsession with the case, calling himself one of the “OG Epstein conspiracy theorists.”

His view, he told Rogan, is not that Epstein never blackmailed powerful people. It is that any proof of it was either never gathered properly or disappeared years before the current administration reviewed the files.

To explain why the records may never have contained what people expected, Vance went back to Alex Acosta and the early Epstein investigation.

“You go back to the original warrant back in 2008,” Vance said. “What was he looking for? What was he allowed to look for? What were they collecting? It was not looking at a broader conspiracy.”

The vice president said Epstein’s first serious legal trouble may have been the moment when any damaging material that existed slipped out of reach.

“So that happens, Epstein gets pinched. I think he goes to prison or maybe this is when he was on house arrest,” Vance continued.

“Anything that existed from the 80s, 90s, up to 2006, 2007, anything that existed that we didn’t get back then, was disappeared.”

Vance said his review of the files did not make him abandon the darker theories around Epstein. What it did, he said, was convince him that the decisive proof people wanted was not there.

“So when people say, has what you seen on the inside make you think that Epstein never blackmailed people or that Epstein never engaged in broader sex trafficking? No, absolutely not,” he added.

“What I have seen, and I’ve looked at most of the files, is that there just wasn’t dispositive evidence. And if that dispositive evidence ever existed, it was probably destroyed after 2006, 2007.”

Rogan then raised the theory that Epstein was tied to Mossad, and Vance gave the idea room.

“Yeah, Mossad or CIA or some other deep state, whether in America or Israel or another country,” he reflected. “Or both! Look he clearly had connections to the highest levels of American intelligence. He clearly had connections to the highest levels of Israeli intelligence.”

The theory, by Vance’s own telling, is not backed by a smoking-gun document in the records he reviewed.

“I’ve asked, were there like, were there documents connecting Jeffrey Epstein directly to our intelligence agencies or anybody else’s, and the answer is no. But if that sh*t existed, it wouldn’t exist in 2026,” he insisted.

Vance then folded the Epstein discussion into his view of Israeli politics, arguing that the people around Epstein did not line up neatly with Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s side of the country’s political divide.

“The Epstein thing is interesting, because as much as I know Prime Minister Netanyahu is not a particularly popular person in the United States of America right now, Epstein seemed to be connected to the elements of the Israeli deep state that were left of center,” he detailed.

“I’ve always found that fascinating. It wasn’t like he was super connected to the right of center of Israeli politics.”

Domestically, Vance described Epstein’s Rolodex as strictly bipartisan.

“He had Republican friends, he had Democratic friends,” he went on. “He had much deeper connections to the Israeli left of center than right of center, I don’t know what that means, but I find that interesting.”

Vance also defended President Donald Trump from Democratic accusations tied to Epstein, pointing to what he said was in the files.

“Who was the guy who narc’d on Epstein to the Palm Beach police?” Vance questioned. “That’s in the Epstein files. It was Donald Trump!”

His hindsight answer was simple: release the material up front, move quickly on redactions for victims and avoid letting the rollout become a slow-drip credibility fight.

“There is a story there — I will go to my deathbed believing there is a story there, but I can’t prove it,” Vance noted. “And I promise there’s not some document, that at least I’m hiding, that allows us to prove exactly what was going on and how.”

The wider Epstein cloud also followed Bill Gates into Warren Buffett’s CNBC interview.

Buffett, 95, said he had spent months reading about Gates’s contact with Epstein and came away critical of the association, though not ready to treat it as something outside the range of his own possible misjudgments.

“While it’s distasteful, while he made mistakes, I made mistakes, hiring all kinds of people, or choosing friends, and then finding out later that, one way or other, they weren’t who I thought they were,” Buffett said.

“I found nothing in there that was beyond what I could picture myself doing,” he added.  “No one bats a thousand in the business of choosing people.”

Gates has said his contact with Epstein was limited to several meetings between 2011 and 2014 about donors for his foundation, and that he did not know about Epstein’s crimes.

The Justice Department’s position, delivered by Acting Attorney General Todd Blanche at his Wednesday confirmation hearing, was that the Epstein file review did not end the possibility of new prosecutions.

“There are no closed investigations,” Blanche said. “If we learn today, if we learn next week, if we learn next month that there’s an individual that we can investigate, indict and prosecute out of the Epstein files, you better believe it, we will.”

Blanche also pushed back on criticism over victim outreach, saying department officials had already met with representatives for more than 30 victims and remained open to more conversations.

“We will never not talk to victims,” Blanche said. “We will never not do everything we can to prosecute anybody that committed any crimes against any of these women.”

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