Elon Musk dug the knife into Donald Trumpâs side again on Saturday as the fallout over the White Houseâs handling of the Jeffrey Epstein investigation continues to damage the president and his team.
The Twitter and Tesla billionaire weighed in as a response to an X user who screenshotted a particularly oddly-worded Truth Social post from Trump on Saturday, who wrote a lengthy post urging his followers to drop the matter.
âThis is in the running for worst post ever made,â wrote the X user.âSeriously,â Musk responded. âHe said âEpsteinâ half a dozen times while telling everyone to stop talking about Epstein.
âJust release the files as promised.âAccording to reports, the deputy FBI director grew heated at Bondi during a Wednesday meeting in the Oval Office attended by White House chief of staff Susie Wiles this past week.
Bongino did not report to the FBI headquarters on Friday after the heated discussion with Bondi in the Oval Office, where the deputy director accused his superior of mismanaging the review of the investigation into Epstein, who died in 2019 in a Manhattan detention facility while awaiting prosecution on sex crimes, multiple outlets reported.After being blamed internally for a minute of tape seemingly missing from a video released by the FBI of the area outside of Epsteinâs cell on the night of his death, Bongino â who as a Fox News host fanned the flames of conspiracy theories about Epsteinâs death in jail â and others were incensed by the ferocity of the blowback on the right.
That is now an open civil war among the MAGA crowd over the shuttering of the case. Administration officials, including Bongino, kicked off a firestorm with a declaration that Epsteinâs death was a suicide, and that there was no evidence to support the existence of a list summarizing the disgraced pedophileâs accomplices.âBongino is out of control furious,â the person who has spoken with the deputy FBI director said. âThis destroyed his career. Heâs threatening to quit and torch Pam unless sheâs fired.â
Bondi remains at the center of Bonginoâs ire and general accusations of mismanagement of the Epstein review largely due to a comment she made on Fox News earlier this year.During an interview, Bondi said that she had the client list âon her deskâ. She responded to an interviewerâs question about the list being made public: âItâs sitting on my desk right now to review.âBut in recent days Bondi has explained that she was referring to the full investigation itself, not a âclient listâ, sitting on her desk. Itâs an explanation that has satisfied few on the MAGA right, and a wide range of Trump-aligned influencers are calling on Bondi and others to resign or be fired. Trump himself has found himself accused of involvement, given his known friendship with Epstein before the latterâs criminal conviction.
The inner tension within the administration spurred the presidentâs post Saturday evening.