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United States President Donald Trump and US Attorney General Pam Bondi have come under fire over a government review of the death of the disgraced financier and convicted sex offender, Jeffrey Epstein, in prison. That review found that Epstein died by suicide.
Right-wing conspiracy theorists – many of whom form part of Trump’s MAGA (Make America Great Again) base – say they believe Epstein was murdered because he had sensitive information about powerful figures, and that this was covered up.
They have criticised Bondi for failing to fully publish what are known as the “Epstein files”, including a list of clients they believe exists but which the government review found does not.
Some, but not all, of the files compiled by US federal investigators on Epstein were unsealed in January last year, but many remain redacted. Of particular interest is a theoretical client list.
In recent weeks, the furore among MAGA members has been building, much to the fury of Trump.
In social media posts on Wednesday, Trump dismissed MAGA conspiracy theorists as “weaklings”, describing the controversy as a “hoax” fabricated by his political opponents.
What are the Epstein conspiracy theories about?
On July 7, the Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) and the US Department of Justice concluded that Epstein died by suicide in 2019 in a Manhattan jail cell. On July 14, the same two organisations said there was no evidence Epstein had a specific “secret client list”.
However, online amateur investigators have long posed conspiracy theories that the government covered up the truth behind Epstein’s life and death. The July memos breathed new life into the case.
When the second memo was released, the Justice Department also released a video of Epstein’s jail cell on the night he died, showing no one entering or exiting. However, the time code jumps by one minute and two seconds just before midnight, further inflaming conspiracy theories that part of the video has been deleted.
President Donald Trump, flanked by Attorney General Pam Bondi, speaks during a cabinet meeting at the White House on Monday, March 24, 2025, in Washington, DC [Jabin Botsford/The Washington Post via Getty Images]What do MAGA members have against Pam Bondi?
Pam Bondi has come under intense criticism from many in the MAGA movement since the government’s July 7 and 14 memos detailing its review of the Epstein files.
It claimed that no evidence had been found of an Epstein “client list” and that no more files from the investigation would be made public.
But Bondi has raised the hopes of conspiracy theorists in the past.
During an interview with Fox News in February, when host John Roberts asked the attorney general about government plans to release the list of Epstein’s clients, Bondi said, “It’s sitting on my desk right now to review. That’s been a directive by President Trump. I’m reviewing that.”
Also in February, Bondi presented a tranche of documents titled “The Epstein Files: Phase 1” to conservative commentators at the White House. However, it did not contain any revelatory information about Epstein.
At the time, she said that she would deliver a “truckload” of evidence, reportedly thousands of pages, about the Epstein case to the FBI, but did not provide details, and none have been forthcoming.
The July 14 memo was the last straw for Bondi critics within the MAGA movement, as the “list” she had been promising to release seemingly never existed.
On Tuesday, Bondi denied that, in her February interview, she had been talking about a “client list”. Instead, the “list” she was referring to was the Epstein case file. “That’s what I meant by that,” she said.
The same day, Bondi also said that the thousands of videos regarding the Epstein case, reviewed by US intelligence, could not be released as they contained child sex abuse images.
“Never going to be released, never going to see the light of day,” she said.
Conspiracy theories suggesting a government cover-up of Jeffrey Epstein’s death have persisted in right-wing circles since his death six years ago.
Trump ally Kash Patel, appointed FBI director during Trump’s second tenure, and former FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, both previously questioned the official suicide ruling. By May this year, however, both said they accepted the government’s conclusion about Epstein’s death.
Which right-wing personalities are shouting the loudest about the Epstein files?
Elon Musk
Tech billionaire Elon Musk was once a Trump ally, and he spent almost $300m backing Trump’s presidential campaign alongside other Republicans last year.
However, Musk and Trump had a falling out last month over Trump’s tax-and-spending bill, referred to as the “One Big Beautiful Bill”. After that, Musk alleged that Trump himself was named in the Epstein files in a now-deleted post on his X platform. Later on, he expressed regret for the social media attack.
However, following the July 7 memo, Musk has made more social media posts criticising the Trump administration’s conduct regarding the Epstein files.
Early on Thursday, Musk made added a series posts to X in which he sent the platform’s AI chatbot Grok prompts about Epstein such as, “Are there likely to be electronic records in any government or commercial computers recording who traveled on Epstein’s plane to the US Virgin Islands?” and “Please make a thorough list of all those who should be investigated for possible rape of underage girls provided by Epstein. Think hard and research thoroughly. Order by probable severity and frequency of their crimes.”
On July 8, Musk wrote on X, “How can people be expected to have faith in Trump if he won’t release the Epstein files?”
Musk owns companies such as the carmaker Tesla and rocket manufacturer SpaceX. According to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, his net worth stood at $361bn as of Friday.
Trump, right, during a news conference with Elon Musk in the White House in May 2025 [File: Evan Vucci/AP]Laura Loomer
Loomer, 32, a Trump ally and far-right conspiracy theorist, wrote on X on July 8, “Pam Blondi [sic] is covering up child sex crimes that took place under HER WATCH when she was Attorney General of Florida,” adding that Bondi “needs to be fired”.
In an interview on Wednesday with Politico, Loomer warned that Trump’s handling of the Epstein files threatens to “consume his presidency”.
“The best thing that the president can do is appoint a special counsel to handle the Epstein files investigation,” she said.
But Loomer made it clear that she still supported Trump and was not splitting from the US president over the issue.
“President Trump is doing a lot of great things and we don’t need to throw the baby out with the bathwater,” she wrote in an X post after her interview. “But we can’t just Truth Social the Epstein Files away. Two things can be true at the same time. I fully support President Trump.”
Loomer has long been involved in US politics and backs Trump, but she has not officially worked for his campaign, both Trump and Loomer clarified last year.
She unsuccessfully ran for Congress twice in southern Florida as a Republican, in 2020 and 2022. She has a reputation for promoting anti-immigration and anti-Muslim rhetoric online.
Loomer has clashed with other right-wing figures in the past.
Last year, she wrote in an X post that if former Vice President Kamala Harris won the presidential election, “the White House will smell like curry” as a jab at Harris’s Indian and Jamaican heritage.
She was rebuked for this by Marjorie Taylor Greene, a Republican representative from Georgia, who wrote in an X post, “This is appalling and extremely racist. It does not represent who we are as Republicans or MAGA. This does not represent President Trump. This type of behavior should not be tolerated ever.”
Loomer has been banned from several social media sites. In 2018, she was banned by X, then called Twitter, over her Islamophobic posts. In response, she handcuffed herself to the company’s headquarters in New York. After Musk acquired the social media site in 2022, Loomer’s account was reinstated.
Laura Loomer at Philadelphia International Airport in 2024 [File: Chris Szagola/AP]The Hodge twins
An account called “Hodgetwins” posted on X on July 8, “Trump has to fire Pam Bondi. She went on camera and told the world she has the Epstein client list on her desk. Now they say there is no list??”
The duo comprises Keith and Kevin Hodge, 50-year-old twin brothers who post content online about fitness and politics.
The twins have a channel on YouTube with 3.4 million subscribers. The first published video on their channel is dated September 2010. The pair posted videos about fitness and bodybuilding until they pivoted to food content around 2016 and then to relationship advice in 2021. In recent years, they have posted about culture and politics.
The twins have a website through which they sell dietary supplements and merchandise, including T-shirts that say “America Only” and snapback caps that say “Gulf of America“. One shirt says “Alligator Alcatraz“, with an illustration of an alligator clad in a military green uniform with a cigar in its mouth. Alligator Alcatraz is the moniker assigned to a migrant detention facility in Florida.
They also have a podcast called TwinsPod, for which they started releasing episodes last year.
On July 11, they posted a podcast episode more than two hours long titled, Epstein List COVERUP?! This Is Getting Weird… The guest in this episode was Harrison Smith, a host at conspiracy theory website Infowars.
Alex Jones
On July 8, conspiracy theorist and Infowars founder Alex Jones posted on X, “Next the DOJ will say ‘Actually, Jeffrey Epstein never even existed’,” calling the memo’s findings “over the top sickening”.
Jones, 51, has advocated multiple conspiracy theories over the years, including that the US government failed to prevent, or was involved in, the Oklahoma City bombing and the 9/11 attacks.
The Oklahoma bombing was a domestic terrorist attack which happened on April 19, 1995, in Oklahoma. A truck bomb exploded outside the Alfred P Murrah Federal Building, killing 168 people, including 19 children, and injuring more than 600 other people.
Jones spent the past three years in federal bankruptcy court after being ordered to pay $1.3bn to families of the 2012 Sandy Hook school shooting victims in defamation suits in Connecticut and Texas for falsely claiming the shooting was a hoax.
He grew up in Dallas and moved to Austin with his family as a teenager. In 1996, he began working for a radio station in Austin, but was fired three years later because his opinions made it difficult to get sponsors on the show, according to the local publication, the Austin Chronicle.
After he was fired, Jones set up the Infowars website, buying the domain name for $9. He broadcast from his house.
Jack Posobiec
Far-right influencer Jack Posobiec posted on X on July 7, “We were all told more was coming. That answers were out there and would be provided. Incredible how utterly mismanaged this Epstein mess has been. And it didn’t have to be.”
Posobiec has been sharing conspiracy theories about the Epstein case for years.
In 2022, the FBI searched Trump’s Mar-a-Lago estate to recover possible classified documents. Soon after, Posobiec claimed the judge who approved the raid was “Epstein’s lawyer”. This was misleading because while Judge Bruce Reinhart had represented Epstein’s employees in the past, he was simply the available magistrate at the time, according to local reports.
Posobiec also has a reputation for posting anti-Semitic and white supremacist content online.
In February this year, The Washington Post reported that Posobiec had been invited on Secretary of Defense Pete Hegseth’s first overseas trip to Europe.
The far-right figure is best known for promoting “Pizzagate“, a conspiracy theory alleging that Democratic politicians were involved in a pedophilia ring. The theory picked up during the 2016 presidential election when Pizzagate theorists alleged that then-presidential hopeful Hilary Clinton was running a child sex ring out of a pizza place.
Will Bondi be the fall guy for any fallout from this saga?
Experts say that, while critics within MAGA may well be trying to make Bondi the scapegoat in this situation, she still has Trump’s backing.
“Hardcore MAGA figures would undoubtedly like to make Pam Bondi into a scapegoat, but at the moment, she still seems to have Trump’s support. It’s more likely that Trump will push the blame elsewhere,” Peter Knight, a professor of American studies at the University of Manchester, told Al Jazeera.
Knight added that Trump could instead blame groups, including “the Democrats, the Deep State, the Fake News media”.
Trump has already blamed news outlets and Democrats for promoting the “Epstein hoax”.
The Deep State refers to the idea that there is a hidden group of powerful people, often in government, intelligence, or military agencies, who secretly control or influence government policy, no matter which leaders are publicly in charge.
‘Weaklings’: What was Trump’s recent outburst over Epstein all about?
Despite promising to release all the Epstein files during his presidential campaign last year, Trump is now showing anger towards his supporters over Epstein conspiracy theories.
“Their new SCAM is what we will forever call the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax, and my PAST supporters have bought into this ‘b*******,’ hook, line, and sinker,” Trump wrote on his Truth Social platform on Wednesday.
“I have had more success in 6 months than perhaps any President in our Country’s history, and all these people want to talk about, with strong prodding by the Fake News and the success starved Dems, is the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax,” Trump wrote.
“Let these weaklings continue forward and do the Democrats work, don’t even think about talking of our incredible and unprecedented success, because I don’t want their support anymore!” he continued.
On Tuesday, Trump said Bondi had handled the situation “very well”, adding, “whatever she thinks is credible, she should release.”
On July 12, Trump posted on Truth Social: “What’s going on with my ‘boys’ and, in some cases, ‘gals?’ They’re all going after Attorney General Pam Bondi, who is doing a FANTASTIC JOB! We’re on one Team, MAGA, and I don’t like what’s happening.”
During a White House Cabinet meeting on July 8, a reporter asked Bondi about the missing minute on the Epstein prison video, which was circulated the day before.
Trump, who also attended the meeting, jumped in, asking, “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein? This guy’s been talked about for years”.
“Are people still talking about this guy, this creep? That is unbelievable,” Trump added before asking Bondi if she wanted to “waste time” answering the question.
When asked by a journalist if the attorney general had told Trump whether his name appeared in any of the records, he said, “No, no.”
The president also questioned the enduring fascination with the Epstein case, “only really bad people, including the fake news, want to keep something like this going.”
Could this row hurt Trump’s popularity in the US?
“In theory, this event could turn the MAGA faithful against Trump,” Knight said.
“But it is very unlikely that the MAGA crowd will turn against Trump because of the Epstein files, even if they have good reason to feel betrayed. There is no one else that they could get behind in the same way as Trump. Instead, it’s much more likely that this episode will soon be drowned out by the next conspiracy theory media spectacle.”
