Watch: Bill O’Reilly Says POTUS Told Him Exactly Why He Won’t Release Epstein Files – Do You Agree with His Reasoning?

How did we go from President Donald Trump’s promises to release the Jeffrey Epstein client list to the determination there wasn’t a client list? Former Fox News host Bill O’Reilly thinks he knows the answer.

As you’ve probably heard, the Trump administration has spent the better part of a week explaining away the lack of a client list and its conclusion that the mysterious financier and sex trafficker’s death was the result of suicide. Attorney General Pam Bondi said that she had no knowledge of him being an intelligence agent, and the Department of Justice released video of Epstein’s cell on the night he died, albeit conspicuously missing a minute. (Bondi called this a routine bug caused by an old system.)

This led to a raft of speculation. Many users on X reminded people that former Trump administration official Alex Acosta — who handled a sweetheart plea deal with Epstein in 2007 — had been told to keep his hands off the financier “because he belonged to intelligence.”

On Fox News, former CIA-er John Kiriakou said that deep-staters below Bondi and FBI Director Kash Patel had likely destroyed the relevant files, something which there’s precedence for.

Tucker Carlson, apparently taking a break from rating the cleanliness of subway systems in rogue states, chimed in to say that the decision not to release the list either meant Trump was on it (he said that he found this to be unlikely) or “that intel services are at the very center of this story, U.S. and Israeli.” (Tucker seems to have developed a recent fascination with Israel, you may have noticed.)

Appearing on Chris Cuomo’s NewsNation show Wednesday, O’Reilly had a more benign — but also somewhat believable — explanation of why the list wasn’t being released, which he said came directly from Trump’s mouth.

O’Reilly and Trump, the former Fox Host said, had met “man-to-man, eye-to-eye on St. Patrick’s Day” to discuss files related to Epstein and conspiracy-laden events in modern history, including the John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King assassinations.

“He said, and I agree, there are a lot of names associated with Epstein that had nothing to do with Epstein’s conduct,” O’Reilly said.

“They maybe had lunch with him or maybe had some correspondence for one thing or another. If that name gets out, those people are destroyed, because there’s not going to be any context.”

O’Reilly says Trump told him why Epstein files shouldn’t be released: “There’s a lot of names assoc w/Epstein that had nothing to do w/his conduct-maybe had lunch w/him or correspondence. If that name gets out those people are destroyed bc there’s not going to be any context.” pic.twitter.com/lHxMHTrwkx

— Ron Filipkowski (@RonFilipkowski) July 10, 2025

O’Reilly didn’t say that, at present, the issue of the Epstein client list was being handled well, and he urged Bondi to go through why the government had made the decisions it had made by going through the investigation in a “methodical way” during a media briefing.

“You can’t destroy human beings by putting out the files, whatever they may be, but you certainly can have Attorney General Bondi say, ‘This is what we know, and you know we’re going to protect the innocent,’” O’Reilly said.

Does this hold water? Perhaps, and I’d like to put forth another theory about who’s really guilty on the Epstein list. For this, I’m going to go way back — back to Watergate.

As most of you know, the Watergate scandal couldn’t have been broken if Bob Woodward and Carl Bernstein hadn’t relied on a confidential source known as “Deep Throat” to lead them in the right direction. For years, speculation was rampant on just who the informant was — and some of that speculation was beyond wild.

Among the big names suspected of being the leaker: Secretary of State Henry Kissinger; then-Gen. Alexander Haig, later to become secretary of State; Supreme Court Justice William Rehnquist; Nixon speechwriter and future presidential candidate Pat Buchanan; White House counsel John Ehrlichman; future ABC News journalist Diane Sawyer; and even (no, really) Richard Nixon himself.

Years later, the real “Deep Throat” finally stepped forward: W. Mark Felt. Who? Yeah, while he was important in the grand scheme of the intelligence community, Felt was a mostly anonymous associate director for the FBI who was miffed that he was passed over for promotion. And while he was a mystery to most Americans, he wasn’t a mystery to the Nixon administration, who concluded a few months after the scandal broke that Felt was talking to the press.

Let’s say the U.S. government really does have a client list of Epstein’s, one that delineates between people he had lunch with and people he blackmailed after they had sex with underaged females. You’re unlikely to get Prince Andrew or Justin Trudeau or Brad Pitt or Bill Clinton or Silvio Berlusconi or Johnny Depp on there. Heck, you’re unlikely to even get Amber Heard, and she’ll star in any role she can get her hands on these days.

Instead, if that list really does exist and it was released, you’d get a lot of “Um, Who?”, “Wait, Is That a Real Person?” and “Oh, Whoever That Is.” They may be theoretically important as a cog in a wider system, but people still wouldn’t be happy. We demand big names and big revelations — otherwise, we’d still hear about how things were being hidden.

Release the whole list, meanwhile, and let’s face facts: There are going to be a lot of people who didn’t engage in nefarious behavior who came into Epstein’s orbit because he had a lot of money and would distribute it promiscuously if it helped burnish his image and connections to the rich and powerful. To pillory a wholly innocent man while ignoring a guilty “What’s-His-Name” because it doesn’t get headlines.

The message is: Steel yourself for disappointment. Even if the will to release the list of the people Epstein potentially blackmailed without implicating innocent people existed, it may well be impossible thanks to the deep state and the damage they’ve been able to do in the six years since his death. Just like every other suspicious historical event the government has promised us, for too long, that it’s not lying about — but won’t give us the receipts. The will to expose treachery may exist, but the way has likely long since been blocked off.

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