Shortly after Donald Trump grudgingly left the White House following his 2020 defeat, he was effectively banned from most major social media platforms and made few television appearances. In his absence, The New York Times described Wisconsin Sen. Ron Johnson as Trump’s successor as the Republican Party’s “foremost amplifier of conspiracy theories and disinformation.”
The senator has seemed a little too eager to prove his critics right, peddling bizarre and easily discredited nonsense about Covid-19. And the Jan. 6 attack. And vaccines. And climate change. And the 2020 presidential election. And the 2024 presidential election.
A few months ago, the Wisconsin Republican even began peddling 9/11 truther claims more commonly found on the radical fringes of the internet than on Capitol Hill.
So it probably didn’t surprise anyone when Johnson sat down with CNN’s Jake Tapper and brought a conspiratorial focus to the Jeffrey Epstein files.
Ron Johnson suggests Democrats tampered with the Epstein files: "I do know that the Epstein files were in the custody of the Biden administration. I don't know to what extent they added or deleted things."
— Aaron Rupar (@atrupar.com) 2025-07-17T22:27:05.451Z
“I don’t know what’s in the Epstein files,” Johnson said, before quickly adding, “You know, I do know that the Epstein files are in the custody of the Biden administration. You know, I don’t know to what extent they’ve added or deleted things.”
The senator went on to express concern about the “chain of custody” with the files.
This didn’t stand out for me because the GOP lawmaker is looking at the Epstein story through a conspiratorial lens — for all intents and purposes, Johnson looks at every story through a conspiratorial lens — but rather because his take has come up quite a bit in recent days, especially among Republicans aligned with the White House.
Indeed, the morning after the senator’s on-air comments, the president himself emphasized the fact that Democrats “controlled the ‘files’ for four years.”
As best as I can tell, the argument is that the Epstein files should be seen as inherently suspect because of possible mischief and political manipulation. It was the Trump administration that investigated, arrested and charged Epstein, who died while in custody in 2019, but the Republican president left office after his 2020 defeat, at which point rascally Democrats could have, as Johnson put it, “added or deleted things.”
For now, let’s put aside the obvious fact that there’s literally no evidence of the Biden administration altering or manipulating any Justice Department files for any reason. Let’s instead consider the underlying logic. Why, exactly, would Democratic officials, working in secret, fabricate incriminating evidence in a sex trafficking case — and then do nothing with the fruits of their illicit labor? Or put another way, if nefarious Democrats had manipulated the Epstein files, wouldn’t they have leaked them, rather than leaving them on Attorney General Pam Bondi’s desk? Why would any conspirators go to the trouble of concocting bogus evidence against political rivals, only then to sit on that evidence until their rivals were in power? The problem with Johnson’s theory isn’t just that it’s wrong, it’s also bizarre. This post updates our related earlier coverage.
Steve Benen is a producer for "The Rachel Maddow Show," the editor of MaddowBlog and an MS NOW political contributor. He's also the bestselling author of "Ministry of Truth: Democracy, Reality, and the Republicans' War on the Recent Past."
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