Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche was subjected to an intense grilling over Jeffrey Epstein on Katie Miller’s podcast on Tuesday, in which he defended the Department of Justice’s work on the case.
Blanche guested on the show, hosted by the wife of Homeland Security adviser Stephen Miller, a day before he and Attorney General Pam Bondi appear before the House Oversight Committee to discuss the Epstein files in a behind-closed-doors hearing.
Miller hosted members of President Donald Trump’s administration, including FBI Director Kash Patel, who was grilled about the “love story” behind his relationship with country singer Alexis Wilkins.
However, she admitted up front on Tuesday that she was “so excited” to be addressing Epstein with Blanche because “all my favorite conspiracy theories” revolve around the billionaire pedophile, who died in a New York jail cell in August 2019.
Miller, who is pregnant with her fourth child, began their 55-minute interview by asking the deputy AG straight out: “The moms are desperate to know because they want to be protectors of kids and they kind of feel like you’ve failed them thus far. Do you think you failed the kids?”
Blanche launched into a defense of the DOJ’s release of 3.5 million government documents on Epstein in compliance with the passage of the bipartisan Epstein Files Transparency Act through Congress late last year.
“I mean, no, not in any way, shape or form,” he answered. “When I hear this narrative that we are letting down victims or that we are failing victims... I want to make sure people know that every day we fight for victims.”
Moving on to the circumstances of Epstein’s death, which a coroner determined to be the result of suicide, Miller asked Blanche whether he accepted the ruling or believed he had been murdered at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in Brooklyn.
The official said that all the “available evidence” suggested Epstein had taken his own life, only for Miller to press him on the release last year of security camera footage from the night of the prisoner’s death, which appeared to be incomplete.
“Do the cameras in the jail fail frequently or just in this specific case?” she asked. “No time of death was ever determined, only that his body was discovered [at] 6.30 a.m. the next morning. Why couldn’t investigators establish a clearer timeline?”
“That’s a good question,” Blanche conceded. “And it’s one of the failures, right? What happened with Epstein leads to these type of fair questions about what happened that night.”
Not finished there, Miller asked her guest whether any potential connection was ever investigated between Epstein and the notorious Pizzagate conspiracy theory, which evolved into the QAnon movement, and alleged that a secret sex trafficking operation existed, run by elite Democrats, including Hillary Clinton.
“Well the Pizzagate conspiracy theory has been debunked repeatedly by law enforcement, not by me, by law enforcement,” Blanche answered.
“Sure, it was totally debunked,” Miller came back. “And then you look at what happened with Epstein, where a wealthy, well-connected man was actually trafficking underage girls in elite circles. And then you begin to think, ‘Hmm, maybe things aren’t a real conspiracy theory?’”
Reverting to the release of the Epstein files, Miller put it to Blanche that “there’s still 3 million held back, not all of them are public.”
“No, they’re all public,” he countered. “There’s a narrative that there’s 3 million pages that are being held back. They have nothing to do with Epstein. What we did to make sure we didn’t leave a single page out we over-collected.”
Asking about some of the wealthy men who are known to have once associated with Epstein, Miller asked if they were “completely absolved of any wrongdoing.”
“When it comes to the trafficking of underage women, there’s no statute of limitations,” Blanche answered.
“So this case is never closed. If there’s evidence that we learn of that we can act on, we will act on it immediately like we do every single day. So no, it’s not closed.”
Miller expressed a desire to see more people held to account over the scandal than just Epstein and his jailed accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell, and asked why more had not been prosecuted.
“Well, because you need provable evidence,” Blanche answered. “And so what I can do as the deputy general is invite anybody with evidence to come to the FBI and tell us, which is what we’ve been screaming from the rooftops for a year.”
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