Vice President JD Vance is hosting senior Trump administration officials at his residence in Washington, D.C. for dinner on Wednesday evening to discuss, among other things, how the administration should handle the ongoing Jeffrey Epstein fallout and move forward, Fox News has learned.
Vance invited U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche to dinner at the sprawling, 12-acre vice-presidential residence in Northwest Washington. White House chief of staff Susie Wiles is also expected to be in attendance, according to sources familiar.
News of the dinner was first reported by CNN. It comes after weeks of unsuccessful attempts by senior Trump officials to quell mounting public pressure to release more information related to the Epstein investigation — underscoring the sticking power of the Epstein scandal, including among Trump supporters, who have been some of the leading voices demanding the release of additional information.
A spokesperson for Vance disputed the CNN report in question, which he described to Fox News as ‘pure fiction.’
‘There was never a supposed meeting scheduled at the vice president’s residence to discuss Epstein strategy,’ William Martin, Vance’s communications director, said in a statement.
Two well-placed sources in the administration subsequently confirmed to Fox News that the dinner at the vice president’s residence is taking place. They said that the dinner — while not focused entirely on the Epstein fallout — will be one of the topics they plan to discuss.
The Justice Department and the White House have also struggled to coordinate their messaging on the ongoing fallout from the Epstein scandal, following the release of an unsigned July 7 memo that said they did not plan to release additional information about the investigation.
Most recently, the White House and DOJ have been at odds over whether to release an audio file and transcript from Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche’s interview with Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell late last month, senior administration officials confirmed.
It is unclear how long the audio footage and transcripts from the interviews between Blanche’s interview with Maxwell are, but they do exist, Fox News Digital reported yesterday, and discussions remain underway today involving whether — and when — to release the transcript.
Fox News Digital reported yesterday that DOJ officials have both the audio and transcript from Blanche’s interview with Maxwell, which took place over two days at the U.S. Attorney’s office near the Federal Correctional Institution in Tallahassee, Florida, where Maxwell had been serving out a 20-year prison sentence for sex trafficking.
Maxwell was transferred last week without explanation to a new, minimum-security women’s federal prison camp in Texas.
Anything released by the Trump administration would almost certainly involve heavily redacting any identifying information of individuals named in the transcript in order to protect victims — something Bondi has stressed in public on multiple occasions.
News of Vance’s dinner prompted fresh concerns from family members of one Epstein victim, Virginia Roberts Giuffre, who committed suicide earlier this year.
‘We understand that Vice President JD Vance will hold a strategy session this evening at his residence with administration officials,’ Giuffre’s sibling said in a statement Wednesday shared with Fox News Digital. ‘Missing from this group is, of course, any survivor of the vicious crimes of convicted perjurer and sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein. Their voices must be heard, above all,’ they said.
‘We reiterate that Ghislaine Maxwell should have remained in a maximum security prison and does not deserve the luxuries currently afforded her.’
Pressure to release information has been unrelenting in the weeks since July 7, when the Justice Department said in an unsigned memo that it did not plan to release more information about the investigation. The Justice Department and FBI also said that investigators had not found a so-called ‘client list’ from Epstein, as had been suggested widely online, and by some Trump officials earlier this year.
Asked on Fox News in February about news that the DOJ would release ‘the list of Jeffrey Epstein’s clients,’ and when that would happen, Bondi replied, ‘It’s sitting on my desk right now to review.’
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt later said Bondi had been referring more broadly to all the files related to Epstein, and not a single list.