Right-wing activist Laura Loomer warned that President Donald Trump’s handling of the investigation into Jeffrey Epstein threatens to “consume his presidency” in an interview on Wednesday, a dramatic rebuke from a presidential confidante that illustrates the growing rupture in the MAGA coalition.

She likened it to the intense media interest in ties between Trump’s first White House campaign and Russia, saying “I don’t want it to consume his presidency.”

Obviously, this is not a complete hoax given the fact that Ghislaine Maxwell is currently serving 20 years in prison in Florida for her crimes and activities with Jeffrey Epstein, who we know is a convicted sexual predator,” Loomer told POLITICO. “This is why I said, and I’ll reiterate it again, the best thing that the president can do is appoint a special counsel to handle the Epstein files investigation.”

The debacle over a new government review of evidence relating to Epstein, the notorious sex offender, has blown up in recent days, causing a schism within Trump’s MAGA movement over his administration’s approach to the case.

Trump has sought to move on from the Epstein saga, defending Attorney General Pam Bondi as she faced attacks over the report and going so far as to blast his own “past supporters” on Wednesday, calling the entire thing a “hoax.”

Senior Trump administration officials had previously built up significant fanfare around the release of a supposed Epstein “client list,” which has long been a focal point for conspiracy theories as many right-wing media personalities posited that the billionaire convict was murdered in prison as part of a cover-up of a sprawling government conspiracy.

After hyping the promised release, a joint FBI and Department of Justice report last week said they had found no evidence of a list — or that Epstein, who died by suicide in his prison cell in 2019, had been murdered — prompting outcry from within MAGA circles.

Still, Loomer — the onetime Trump whisperer — wasn’t prepared to split entirely with the president over the case.

“I’m not going to dogpile the president,” she said, adding “he can’t allow for all of his focus and attention to be on the Jeffrey Epstein files. Do I think this has been handled poorly? Absolutely.”

And in a post-interview post on X, Loomer reiterated that “that it is a distraction from the incredible work President Trump is doing to Make America Great Again” and she “fully support[s] Trump.”

As Bondi faces heightened scrutiny for her repeated attempts to dodge questions about the Epstein files, Loomer also teased that “there are people in the White House who agree with me that Pam [Bondi] spent too much time on Fox News and her statements were inconsistent and undermined what messaging is today about the Epstein files.”

Other prominent MAGA-aligned supporters of the president have also warned that Trump could see significant damage to his standing among his base if he does not change course.

Sixty-three percent of voters in a Quinnipiac University national poll released Wednesday said that they disapproved of Trump’s handling of the files. Republicans were also nearly split. Just 40 percent said they support how he’s handled the files, with 36 percent disapproving and another 20 percent not offering an opinion.

Mike Flynn — who briefly served as Trump’s national security adviser in his first term — wrote in a lengthy X post on Wednesday that Trump needed to “gather your team and figure out a way to move past this.”

“The roll out of this was terrible, no way around that,” Flynn wrote. “Americans want America to be successful, therefore, WE NEED YOU TO BE SUCCESSFUL.”

Obviously, this is not a complete hoax given the fact that Ghislaine Maxwell is currently serving 20 years in prison in Florida for her crimes and activities with Jeffrey Epstein, who we know is a convicted sexual predator,” Loomer told POLITICO. “This is why I said, and I’ll reiterate it again, the best thing that the president can do is appoint a special counsel to handle the Epstein files investigation.”

The debacle over a new government review of evidence relating to Epstein, the notorious sex offender, has blown up in recent days, causing a schism within Trump’s MAGA movement over his administration’s approach to the case.

Trump has sought to move on from the Epstein saga, defending Attorney General Pam Bondi as she faced attacks over the report and going so far as to blast his own “past supporters” on Wednesday, calling the entire thing a “hoax.”

Senior Trump administration officials had previously built up significant fanfare around the release of a supposed Epstein “client list,” which has long been a focal point for conspiracy theories as many right-wing media personalities posited that the billionaire convict was murdered in prison as part of a cover-up of a sprawling government conspiracy.

After hyping the promised release, a joint FBI and Department of Justice report last week said they had found no evidence of a list — or that Epstein, who died by suicide in his prison cell in 2019, had been murdered — prompting outcry from within MAGA circles.

Still, Loomer — the onetime Trump whisperer — wasn’t prepared to split entirely with the president over the case.

“I’m not going to dogpile the president,” she said, adding “he can’t allow for all of his focus and attention to be on the Jeffrey Epstein files. Do I think this has been handled poorly? Absolutely.”

And in a post-interview post on X, Loomer reiterated that “that it is a distraction from the incredible work President Trump is doing to Make America Great Again” and she “fully support[s] Trump.”

As Bondi faces heightened scrutiny for her repeated attempts to dodge questions about the Epstein files, Loomer also teased that “there are people in the White House who agree with me that Pam [Bondi] spent too much time on Fox News and her statements were inconsistent and undermined what messaging is today about the Epstein files.”

Other prominent MAGA-aligned supporters of the president have also warned that Trump could see significant damage to his standing among his base if he does not change course.

Sixty-three percent of voters in a Quinnipiac University national poll released Wednesday said that they disapproved of Trump’s handling of the files. Republicans were also nearly split. Just 40 percent said they support how he’s handled the files, with 36 percent disapproving and another 20 percent not offering an opinion.

And former Trump adviser Elon Musk — with whom the president had a blowup fight last month in which Musk accused Trump of being named in the Epstein files — criticized his former boss for trying to paint the whole situation as a hoax.

“He should just release the files and point out which part is the hoax,” Musk wrote on X Wednesday.

The MAGA meltdown over Epstein “could be his Afghanistan going into the fall,” Mark Mitchell, head of polling and operations at Rasmussen Reports, told Steve Bannon Tuesday on his “War Room” podcast.

“People are trying to say this isn’t a big deal,” Mitchell said. “People are trying to say nobody wants this Epstein information out. It’s an absolute misdirection. This is horrifying. And if it isn’t corrected, it threatens derailing Trump’s agenda, getting rid of his political capital.”

“This is not about a guy who died in 2019, this is about a representation of two-tier justice and about unaccountable government,” Mitchell told Bannon.

On Wednesday, conservative political commentator John Solomon told Bannon that he had interviewed the president, and that Trump supported the appointment of a special prosecutor to investigate elements of the Epstein case as part of a broader look into a supposed deep state conspiracy to punish the Republican Party.

“I think he’s frustrated by all the social media chatter by people who don’t really know what’s in the Epstein files,” Solomon said. “He was very pointed about that, let’s stay focused on the things that matter to the American people. ‘I want the answers to Epstein like everyone’, he said, so let the prosecutor do that.”

The Epstein fiasco also prompted Speaker Mike Johnson to split with Trump on Tuesday, calling for the Department of Justice to release all the information it has on the sex offender in the name of “transparency.”

“It’s a very delicate subject, but you should put everything out there, let the people decide it,” Johnson told conservative commentator Benny Johnson, adding that Bondi should explain her previous claims of having the elusive Epstein “client list.”

Just a day prior, the Louisiana Republican had defended Bondi, choosing to defer to the Trump administration instead of criticizing the attorney general.

But Trump appears to remain unmoved despite growing rebellion within his MAGA cohort.

In the Oval Office on Wednesday, Trump repeated his claims that the whole ordeal was a “hoax” peddled by Democrats and once again defended Bondi’s handling of the case.

“She’s done very good. She says ‘I gave you all the credible information,’ and if she finds any more credible information, she’ll give that too. What more can she do than that?” Trump said, adding that he had “lost a lot of faith in certain people” over their outcry on the administration’s approach to the issue.

Politico