Political Memes

I would kind of argue it's Fox News that lied on this one. They edited down his full response which was a lot more sketchy about whether he would release the files.

In the interview, co-host Rachel Campos-Duffy asked whether Trump would declassify “9/11 files” and “JFK files.” He said yes without hesitation. Then she asked, “Would you declassify the Epstein files?”

His answer, as it initially aired: “Yeah, yeah, I would.”

But in the full version that only aired later, Trump said, “Yeah, yeah, I would. I guess I would. I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would, or at least—”

Campos-Duffy interjected and said, “Do you think that would restore trust? Help restore trust?”

Trump hedged again: “I don’t know about Epstein, so much as I do the others. Certainly, about the way he died. It’d be interesting to find out what happened there, because that was a weird situation and the cameras didn’t happen to be working, etc., etc. But yeah, I’d go a long way toward that one. The other stuff, I would.”

His actual answer hedges on how much or whether he'd release any of the Epstein files and especially the actually damaging stuff, preferring to release only the stuff about how he died while casting aspersions about the reliability of the whole ... pedo jet and island part. Fox edited him down to a more agreeable position than the one he actually held.