"Deadline: White House" host Nicolle Wallace on MSNBC on August 11, 2025

President Donald Trump is continuing to botch his official explanation for his administration's handling of the Jeffrey Epstein case, according to MSNBC host Nicolle Wallace.

On the Monday episode of her show "Deadline: White House," Wallace argued that the administration was digging itself into a deeper hole. While she noted that Trump initially claimed the Epstein story was "a big hoax" that was "perpetrated by the Democrats," they still managed to rope in "stupid Republicans" who bought into the controversy.

Wallace then pointed to Vice President JD Vance recently invoking former President Joe Biden's administration during a Fox News interview when asked about the Epstein files, where he expressed skepticism at the idea that Democrats wanted to get to the bottom of the Epstein case despite having control of the Department of Justice for the past four years.

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"We know that Jeffrey Epstein had a lot of connections with left-wing politicians and left-wing billionaires," Vance said. "And now President Trump has demanded full transparency from this, and yet somehow the Democrats are attacking him and not the Biden administration, which did nothing for four years."

Wallace then noted that between Trump's insistence of a "hoax" and Vance's assertion that Democrats were covering up a scandal, Republicans were now miring themselves in a "tangled mess of their own contradictions." She then pivoted to a recent ruling by U.S. District Judge Paul Engelmayer (an appointee of former President Barack Obama), who denied the Trump administration's bid to release portions of grand jury testimony from Epstein accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell's case. Engelmayer said that the administration's rationale for releasing the grand jury evidence "fails at the threshold" to provide anything new to the public. He noted that the evidence in question is from just one day of testimony from a law enforcement official "responding to tightly structured questions" from a U.S. attorney, whereas Maxwell's testimony was several weeks long.

"A member of the public, appreciating that the Maxwell grand jury materials do not contribute anything to public knowledge, might conclude that the Government’s motion for their unsealing was aimed not at 'transparency' but at diversion — aimed not at full disclosure but at the illusion of such," Engelmayer wrote in the ruling.

"A judge said that," Wallace said. "A judge. The illusion of transparency."

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Watch the full segment below, or by clicking this link.

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