Tucker Carlson, the former Fox News host, said the order to keep the government’s Jeffrey Epstein files sealed came from President Donald Trump himself, an accusation he made in a Vanity Fair profile of Vice President JD Vance published September 16, 2026.
Carlson made the claim to Vanity Fair’s Chris Whipple, who interviewed him for the profile. Pressed by Whipple on what exactly had come directly from the president, Carlson said: “The order to cover it up came from Trump.”
Describing his conversations with the president, Carlson said: “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 added: “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.
Carlson also described what the president told him when he asked for a reason. “I asked him why. And he gave me this long, very emotional explanation that this was all a plot against him, like Russiagate,” Carlson said.
The claim turns a fight that had been about foot-dragging into an accusation of suppression at the top. Trump’s own coalition, not Democrats or longtime critics, produced the charge, and the voters who returned Trump to office still make up a following that Carlson commands.
Carlson said he pressed Trump to open the archive in the summer of 2025, amid building frustration among Trump’s base over an unkept campaign promise. A onetime MAGA ally, Carlson appeared alongside Trump and Vance during the 2024 campaign. A number of issues have split the two men since then, among them the president’s decision to embark on a war with Iran.
White House Cites Exoneration
White House spokeswoman Lauren Bis said: “Just as President Trump has said, he’s been totally exonerated on anything relating to Epstein.”
Thousands of pages of documents released, cooperation with a House Oversight Committee subpoena request, the signing of the transparency act and calls for more investigations into Epstein’s Democratic friends were all things Bis credited to Trump. No one before him, she said, has done more for Epstein’s victims.
As for the substance of the conversation Carlson describes, a lengthy Truth Social post Trump wrote in April was where the White House steered attention. In it, Trump said Carlson had not finished college, called him a broken man since his firing from Fox News and suggested he see a psychiatrist.
From Campaign Promise to Law
A June 2024 Fox News interview had Trump saying he would declassify the Epstein files when he returned to office. Inside the administration, Vance had also pushed for release.
The public and lawmakers kept up the pressure in the months that followed, and Trump ultimately reversed course. He signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act into law on November 19, 2025.
Millions of documents came out of the law, among them a major Justice Department release on January 30, 2026. The fight is not over: criticism still falls on the department over the scale of its redactions and over the millions of records that have yet to be unsealed.
Oversight and a Press Ban
A Democratic oversight effort on the handling of the files was launched by Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer at a February 26, 2026, news conference.
Susie Wiles, who serves as White House chief of staff, and Vance have both seemed to acknowledge one possibility: that by 2028 the records could still be dragging on the party politically.
CNN, MS NOW and Politico were the outlets Trump moved to bar from the White House. That escalation against the press has unfolded as the fight over the Epstein records has sharpened. Trump banned the three outlets on September 18, and their reporters’ press badges were deactivated by the Secret Service the next morning.
A lawsuit followed: the three outlets took the administration to federal court in Washington on September 21, on First and Fifth Amendment grounds. In protest, the five-network presidential television pool suspended its coverage.
U.S. District Judge Timothy Kelly then issued a temporary restraining order on September 24, requiring the White House to restore their credentials. Reporters from CNN and MS NOW said they were still kept out of some events that day.
Luttig Says Walls Are Closing
Retired conservative federal Judge J. Michael Luttig, an appointee of George H.W. Bush, has become a prominent critic of the president. He appeared on MS NOW host Nicolle Wallace’s show on Monday, September 21.
“The walls are closing in on him, and he is desperate at this point,” Luttig said on the program.
Luttig cited what he sees as mounting resistance to Trump, alongside a cost-of-living crisis and an Iran war with no end in sight. He said he and others had seen this day coming for six years, and more acutely over the past 19 or 20 months.
Luttig likened the president to a trapped wild animal and argued Trump is being hemmed in by the country itself. He added that the situation should worry Americans and the wider world. He predicted the desperation would persist through the midterm elections and the certification of the new Congress in January.
Luttig advised then-Vice President Mike Pence in 2021 as Trump sought to overturn his 2020 election loss.
Epstein was a sex offender whose contacts ran from Wall Street and politics to philanthropy, academia, royalty and the media. He died in federal custody in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Trump is named thousands of times in the trove the Justice Department has put out under the law. No criminal wrongdoing has been alleged against Trump in connection with Epstein, and being named in the files does not imply any. Trump and Epstein 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.
