Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche has revealed the real reason why President Donald Trump‘s picture vanished from the Epstein files soon after it was released.
More than a dozen files, including an image of Trump in the drawer of the late pedophile’s desk, were mysteriously taken down by the Department of Justice after being released on Friday.
The move caused fury as many speculated the image, which saw Trump alongside a group of women and another of him posing next to Melania, Epstein, and Ghislaine Maxwell, was taken down as a way to seemingly protect the president from embarrassment.
But, according to Blanche, that is not at all the case.
‘Absolutely, positively not,’ he told NBC’s Kristen Welker on Sunday’s Meet the Press.
‘It has nothing to do with President Trump. There are dozens of photos of President Trump already released to the public seeing him with Mr. Epstein. He has said that in the ’90s and early 2000s he socialized with him.
‘So the absurdity of us pulling down a photo, a single photo, because President Trump was in it, is laughable,’ Blanche said before sharing the real reason the photos disappeared.
‘A judge in New York has ordered us to listen to any victim or victim rights group if they have any concerns about the material that we’re putting up.
Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche set the record straight on why an image of President Trump that was released in the Epstein files was taken down
The missing files, which were available Friday, contained a photo of Trump, alongside Jeffrey Epstein, Melania Trump and Epstein’s longtime associate Ghislaine Maxwell. Another showed the president posing with a group of women
‘And so when we hear concerns, whether it’s photographs of women that we do not believe are victims, or we didn’t have information to show that they were victims, but we learn that there are concerns, of course we’re taking that photograph down, and we’re going to address it.
‘If we need to redact faces or other information, we will, and then we’ll put it back up,’ the AG added.
Welker then pushed a bit further, asking Blanche if he was saying that the women, or one of them in the pictures, was ‘a victim or survivor of Jeffrey Epstein.’
‘No, that’s not what I’m saying,’ Blanche hit back.
‘Of course, if we knew that, if we believed that that photograph contained a survivor, we wouldn’t have put it up in the first place without redacting the faces. But not withstanding what we believe, we don’t have perfect information.
‘And so when we hear from victims’ rights groups about this type of photograph, we pull it down and investigate. We’re still investigating that photo. The photo will go back up,’ he added.
The reporter continued to quiz the AG, asking him: ‘Can you guarantee that every mention and every photo of President Trump in the Epstein files will be released?’
‘Yes. I mean, I’ve said it three, four times now, we’ve said it before, and President Trump has said it repeatedly, since before he was elected, and since he was elected, all summer long, he said the same thing, “I have nothing to hide”,’ Blanche snapped back. ‘And so of course, that’s the case.’
Blanche called the idea of the DOJ taking down the image of Trump to protect him ‘absurd’ and ‘laughable’ because the president has admitted he hung around Epstein before
He doubled down, adding: ‘But let me just make sure everybody understands something. To the extent that he is, quote, in the Epstein files, it’s not because he had anything to do with the horrific crimes. Full stop.’
Other than the images of the commander-in-chief, paintings depicting nude women and series of other photographs were seen.
Democrats quickly grew enraged after the release of the files that had to be shared by Friday’s deadline, per the recently passed Epstein-Files Transparency Act.
This is a breaking news story… updates to follow
