Semafor columnist David Weigel speaks to MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” about his recent column: Why MAGA Can’t Move On From the ‘Epstein Files’

DAVID WEIGEL: This was a theme [at the Turning Point conference], you saw a split between people who work for Trump or are running for office who didn’t talk about this-and every other influencer who did. And the Bannon perspective, which is widely shared, is that there is a deep state that, if you could cover this up, you can cover up who knows how many crimes against Donald Trump, crimes against the American people. If there must be something hidden in the Epstein record that would embarrass-much like the Church Committee 40, 50 years ago-embarrass the security state, there must be that material in the Epstein files. TBD-unproven so far. The other part of it is that from the people who were booing in that audience, there’s a real belief that there are people walking-you were talking about Palm Beach, people like that-walking free right now, who committed terrible crimes that have not been, that have not been exposed. And based on what happened here, would never be exposed. And so I would say that the anger is being redirected by these influencers a little bit away from Trump, towards Pam Bondi. You saw it in that Megyn Kelly clip. A theme there in our reporting-Shelby Talcott’s reporting-Axios backed this up-is that Dan Bongino, and to a lesser extent Kash Patel, are seen as the people who were pushing from the outside, even more than Trump was, for four years that this needed to be released. That Bondi can’t be trusted because she’s a glory hog, in the way that Kelly was putting it. But it comes from these two fears: One, that there are real crimes people got away with. Two, that if you expose those real crimes, think of the temples that can crumble in front of Donald Trump. Why don’t they want to do that? That’s the question the base has.

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