Vice President JD Vance pitched the White House crisis team gathered to manage the fallout from President Donald Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein that Tucker Carlson be enlisted to help clear the president’s name.

The stunning revelation came from Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan’s upcoming bombshell book, titled: Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump. The New York Times published reporting from the book on Wednesday detailing a July 2025 meeting of top brass in the Situation Room complex to discuss an upcoming Wall Street Journal report tying Trump to Epstein.

“This is a huge problem,” Vance reportedly said to start the discussion. The Times reported, “Arrayed around him were the White House chief of staff, Susie Wiles; the White House counsel, David Warrington; the press secretary, Karoline Leavitt; the deputy chief of staff Taylor Budowich; the communications director, Steven Cheung; the deputy attorney general, Todd Blanche; the associate attorney general, Stanley Woodward Jr.; and the deputy chief of staff James Blair. Attorney General Pam Bondi and the F.B.I. director, Kash Patel, joined on speakerphone.”

“The vice president appeared panicked to others in the room about the way the subject of Epstein was already dividing the MAGA coalition. Some senior officials had the impression that Vance had bought into the darkest theories about Epstein and a cabal of predators hidden within the country’s ruling class,” continued the stunning report, adding:

Wiles would tell others that the vice president had proved himself to be a major conspiracy theorist. Another top official said later that Vance had been pounding on the Epstein issue since the release of the memo. He was privately pressing for the administration to release all the Epstein files, everything in the Justice Department’s possession, even encouraging a congressional investigation.

Habermann and Swan went on to describe Vance’s suggestion for how best to get ahead of the impending scandal. “Vance had also floated to colleagues an extraordinary P.R. gambit — that the White House enlist Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison,” the report said, adding Vance believe such an interview “might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein.”

Maxwell would later meet with now Acting Attorney General Blanche and publicly state that Trump had nothing to do with Epstein’s illicit sex trafficking. After her meeting with Blanche, who formerly served as Trump’s personal lawyer, Maxwell was moved to a much more comfortable prison to continue serving her sex trafficking sentence.

The Times added that “Vance told the group he believed all the files should be released as soon as possible,” arguing it was best to get ahead of them as “Congress was going to force the release of the files eventually.”

Read the full report here.

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