From the Riverbed to the FBI Files – How JD Vance Twists the Epstein Scandal Between Obedience to Power and Delusions of Grandeur

JD Vance has once again shown in recent days how far a politician can go when party loyalty matters more than truth. In several TV interviews, he presents himself as a supposed whistleblower in the Epstein affair – and yet his words sound as if they were taken straight from the handbook of political distraction. “Completely transparent, but I have to say, Maria, I laugh at Democrats,” he begins, almost casually, as if talking about a bad joke. But this is about nothing less than one of the dirtiest scandals of recent decades. Vance names names – not concretely, but sharply outlined: Democratic politicians, Democratic billionaires. He makes it sound like a given that Epstein had his closest ties there. Evidence? None. What he leaves out: Epstein’s guest lists were a who’s who from both camps – and they reached deep into Trump’s own circle. “We know that Jeffrey Epstein had many connections to left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires,” Vance later repeats, as if to burn the formula in. He does not say whether these were business, social, or intimate contacts. It is a sentence like a smoke grenade – a lot of smoke, no clear core.

Then the big moment for his boss: “Now President Trump is calling for full transparency.” With Trump, transparency looks like this – in May 2025, around 1,000 FBI employees had to redact his name from the Epstein files. Todd Blanche – once Trump’s defense attorney and now the number two at the Department of Justice – conducted the interrogations with Ghislaine Maxwell. That conflict of interest alone is grotesque. Vance presents it as if it were a selfless act, as if Trump wanted to shine the whole light on Epstein. Left unmentioned is that this president stated as recently as January 2025 that he had never been on the island – and that his name still appears in several files. Transparency sounds good as long as it is always directed only at others. “It is reasonable to ask these questions,” says Vance, while referring to alleged subpoenas from the House of Representatives. He claims that leading Democrats were “on the island all the time” and that no one had ever acted on it. He repeats it, varies it, reinforces it – like a speaker who knows that a claim sticks in people’s minds mainly through constant repetition. But the known facts are clear: Epstein was not a party man. He was a networker whose address book was filled equally with Republicans and Democrats. Anyone who rewrites the story into a one-sided political thriller does so deliberately. Vance knows what he is leaving out. He also knows that leaving things out can be almost as powerful as a lie.

And how Vance understands power became clear only recently on a small scale – or rather, on a large one. For a private kayaking trip on his 41st birthday, not he himself, but the Secret Service had the water level of a river raised by releasing water from a reservoir – officially to ensure the safe navigation of security boats. Vance later stated he had known nothing about it. Critics nevertheless called it a misuse of public resources, especially at a time of budget cuts. On a larger scale, this self-evidence of bending infrastructure to suit one’s own needs recalls exactly the kind of hubris that also surrounds the Epstein complex. The real drama is not that Vance uses false catchphrases. It is that he nips every critical question about Trump in the bud. Party discipline replaces the search for truth. The moral authority he sees in Trump stands on a foundation that has cracks – and Vance stands protectively in front of it as if it were a monument, not a man.

Such appearances are no accident. They are the deliberate narrowing of a complex scandal into a convenient attribution of blame. They are proof of how easily political communication can turn into a one-way street – with only one goal: to raise one’s own leader above any doubt and portray the other side as the sole swamp. In the end, the question of what Epstein did matters less than the realization of how much power, at any cost, shapes the truth. And what would Trump now say in response? Of course, “Biden was to blame.” What a pathetic government sits there in Washington.

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