Fox News edits Trump interview clip to remove muddled response to Jeffrey Epstein question

Fox News edited out a section of an interview last Sunday where former President Donald Trump appeared to retreat from a promise to declassify files related to sex offender and financier Jeffrey Epstein, Semafor reported. The exchange, part of a June 2 sit-down with Fox & Friends, was cut from the original TV broadcast but later reappeared in full on Will Cain's Fox News radio show.

A Fox News spokesperson, challenging claims that the network was protecting Trump, also shared with Salon another brief clip that showed the full Epstein segment, while not included in the original Sunday broadcast, was played on air the next day.

Asked whether he would declassify files related to 9/11, the JFK assassination, and Epstein, Trump asserted that he would — and on the TV broadcast, that was the end of it. The unedited version reveals that Trump was not so sure.

"I guess I would," Trump said. "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, or at least ... "

"Do you think that would restore trust — help restore trust?" the interviewer, Rachel Campos-Duffy, then asked in an effort to steer the former president back on course.

"Yeah. I don’t know about Epstein so much as I do the others. Certainly about the way he died," Trump replied. "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."

Fox's editing, which allowed Trump to maintain his facade as a truth-teller in a world of conspiracy, is consistent with the media outlet's pattern of nudging Trump towards certain answers. In one 2023 interview related to the classified documents search in Mar-a-Lago, Fox personality Sean Hannity effectively laid out Trump's answer for him: that the former president wouldn't deliberately possess the documents or obstruct federal agents from looking for them.

Unfortunately, Trump didn't play along.

“I would do that," he said. "There would be nothing wrong.”

The Fox broadcast on June 2 also cut out segments in which Trump recalled having "nice conversations" with the Taliban and referenced the "n-word" to describe Russia's threat to use nuclear weapons in Ukraine.

But Fox did elect to keep another Trump falsehood: his claim that he declassified many of the files related to President John F. Kennedy's assassination. "I did a lot of it," he said. He didn't.

This piece has been updated to include comment from Fox News.