Last summer, roughly five months before Election Day 2024, Donald Trump sat down for one of his many “Fox and Friends” interviews, which didn’t generate a ton of headlines at the time. (One of the hosts asking the Republican questions at the time was, oddly enough, future Defense Secretary Pete Hegseth.)
But the interview resurfaced this week because of Trump’s comments about the so-called Epstein files.
At the time, Fox News’ Rachel Campos-Duffy (wife of Trump’s current transportation secretary, Sean Duffy) began by asking the then-candidate whether he would declassify government files related to 9/11, and Trump said he would. She then asked about declassifying John F. Kennedy assassination files, and he again said he would. The co-host went on to ask, “Would you declassify the Epstein files?” referring to the federal investigation into Jeffrey Epstein, the late millionaire pedophile who was arrested during Trump’s first term.
What viewers saw at the time was Trump replying, “Yeah, I would.”
But what those who tuned into the interview didn’t see was the rest of his answer.
If you can't put the pieces together by now, we can't help you.
— The Lincoln Project (@lincolnproject.us) 2025-07-14T21:54:59.378Z
In a video that resurfaced in light of the ongoing controversy surrounding his team’s handling of Epstein-related documents, Trump, after saying he supported access to the files, quickly added, “I guess I would. I think that less so because, you don’t know, you don’t want to affect people’s lives if it’s phony stuff in there, because it’s a lot of phony stuff with that whole world. But I think I would.”
Asked if such a move would help restore public trust, he added, “Yeah. I don’t know about Epstein so much as I do the others. Certainly about the way he died. It’d be interesting to find out what happened there, because that was a weird situation and the cameras didn’t happen to be working, etc., etc. But yeah, I’d go a long way toward that one.”
To be sure, this isn’t altogether new information. In fact, Semafor had a good report on this last summer. (Fox News did not respond to the outlet’s request for comment at the time. That said, the full video was featured on the Fox Nation streaming service and on Will Cain’s radio program.)
But it’s returned to the fore for a couple of reasons. First, the comments Trump made last summer are newly relevant given his administration’s efforts to make this ongoing fiasco go away. In fact, it seems likely that many who want the White House to follow through on its earlier commitments will take a keen interest in this year-old appearance. Second, the fact that Fox News edited the interview this way also seems newly significant given that the president has been quite hysterical for months about CBS News’ “60 Minutes” including some benign edits in a pre-election interview with Kamala Harris. Indeed, the Republican was so outraged — or at least pretended to be outraged — by the edits that he recently accused the news magazine of “fraud,” airing “defamatory” segments, “illegally” intervening in the last presidential election, “corruptly changing major answers to Interview questions” and being a “Political Operative” that has engaged in “unlawful and illegal behavior.” He added that CBS “should lose” its broadcast license and “pay a big price,” while calling on the FCC to “impose the maximum fines and punishment.” Whether the president would expect Fox News to face similar penalties — or endorse Harris filing a $20 billion lawsuit against the network, which was the amount of the since-settled civil suit he filed against CBS and its corporate parent — remains unclear.
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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