Former Fox News host Tucker Carlson says the order to keep the government’s files on sex offender Jeffrey Epstein sealed came from President Donald Trump himself, turning a fight that had been about foot-dragging into an accusation of suppression at the top. Carlson made the claim in a Vanity Fair profile of Vice President JD Vance, published September 16, 2026.
Carlson, a onetime MAGA ally who appeared alongside Trump and Vance during the 2024 campaign, said he pressed the president to open the archive in the summer of 2025, as frustration built among Trump’s base over a campaign promise the White House had not kept.
“My position from the beginning with Trump, I said it to Trump, was, ‘I don’t understand why you would ever keep any of this stuff secret,'” he told Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple. “And I got like a bunch of different answers.”
“I don’t feel any need to cover for Epstein. So I said, ‘You shouldn’t either.’ In the end, it came from Trump directly,” Carlson said. Pressed by Whipple on what exactly had come directly from the president, he answered: “The order to cover it up came from Trump.”
“I asked him why. And he gave me this long, very emotional explanation that this was all a plot against him, like Russiagate,” he said.
Carlson has since broken with Trump over a number of issues, including the president’s decision to embark on a war with Iran. The accusation, then, originated inside Trump’s own coalition rather than with Democrats or longtime critics — and Carlson still commands a following among the voters who put Trump back in office.
From Campaign Promise to Signed Law
Trump said in a June 2024 Fox News interview that he would declassify the Epstein files when he returned to office. Vance had also pushed for release inside the administration.
Pressure from the public and from lawmakers mounted in the months that followed, and Trump ultimately reversed course, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law on November 19, 2025. The law produced millions of documents, including a major Justice Department release on January 30, 2026. It did not end the fight. The department still draws criticism for the scale of its redactions and for the millions of records that have yet to be unsealed.
Epstein, a sex offender whose contacts ran from Wall Street and politics to philanthropy, academia, royalty and the media, died in federal custody in 2019 as he awaited trial on sex trafficking charges. The president is named thousands of times in the trove the Justice Department has put out under the law. No criminal wrongdoing has been alleged against him in connection with Epstein, and being named in the files does not imply any. The two men moved in the same circles during the 1990s and 2000s, and Trump insists he broke off the relationship years before Epstein came under investigation.
A woman suing under a pseudonym accused Trump of raping her in 1994, when she was 13, at Epstein’s Manhattan residence. She later dropped the suit voluntarily, and Trump denied the allegation.
The White House Points Elsewhere
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis told Vanity Fair: “Just as President Trump has said, he’s been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein.” She credited Trump with releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with a House Oversight Committee subpoena request, signing the transparency act and calling for more investigations into Epstein’s Democratic friends, and said he has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.
On the substance of the conversation Carlson describes, the White House steered attention to a lengthy Truth Social post Trump wrote in April, in which the president said Carlson had not finished college, called him a broken man since his firing from Fox News and suggested he see a psychiatrist.
A Warning From the Right
The files remain a live problem for the administration and for the party. Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer displayed a photograph of Trump with Epstein at a February 26 news conference announcing oversight efforts. Both Vance and Susie Wiles, who serves as White House Chief of Staff, have seemed to acknowledge that the records could still be dragging on the party politically by 2028. Trump, meanwhile, has banned CNN, MS NOW and Politico, an escalation against the press that has unfolded as the fight over the Epstein records has sharpened.
Retired conservative federal Judge J. Michael Luttig, an appointee of George H.W. Bush who has become a prominent critic of the president, appeared on MS NOW host Nicolle Wallace’s show on Monday, September 21. Citing what he sees as mounting resistance to Trump, alongside a cost-of-living crisis and an Iran war with no end in sight, Luttig said he and others had seen this day coming for six years, and more acutely over the past 19 or 20 months.
“The walls are closing in on him, and he is desperate at this point,” Luttig said, adding that it should worry Americans and the wider world. He likened the president to a trapped wild animal and argued that Trump is being hemmed in by the country itself. Luttig, who advised then-Vice President Mike Pence in 2021 as Trump sought to overturn his 2020 election loss, predicted that the desperation would persist through the midterm elections and the certification of the new Congress in January.