What Epstein Files? Sydney Sweeney Has Blue Genes!

A condensed overview of 25 hours of Fox News for the week ending 8/3/25

Aug 07, 2025

Last week the folks at Fox News pretended the ‘Epstein files’ didn’t exist while everyone at the network got extremely worked up over an American Eagle commercial that featured the actress, Sydney Sweeney. The advertisement was yet another culture war fixation meant to distract from Trump’s possible involvement with the sex trafficking of underage girls.

The political furor surrounding the Epstein files has reached the rare distinction of being a bipartisan crusade. Americans across the political spectrum have become obsessed with the mysterious circumstances surrounding Jeffrey Epstein’s death, his once close relationship with the president of the United States and the secrecy surrounding documents related to his alleged sex trafficking operation.

Trump and his intelligence officials promised they would declassify everything related to Jeffrey Epstein once they had the power to do so. After months of excuses Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel along with Deputy Director Dan Bongino told the American public that there was nothing to reveal.

Collectively they claimed there was no infamous client list and no information that would provide more details surrounding Epstein’s mysterious death which was ruled a suicide. Soon after their public statements the Wall Street Journal and The New York Times both published stories alleging Pam Bondi warned the president that his name was found throughout records related to Jeffrey Epstein.

No one involved with the scandal, including President Trump, has given a coherent or plausible explanation for the lack of transparency.

Bondi, Patel and Bongino have created more suspicion as their explanation for a missing minute in a surveillance video outside the jail cell where Epstein was found dead has been debunked by video forensic experts.

The official explanation for the missing time has been an automatic reset of the camera. Experts found evidence of nearly three missing minutes from the footage along with proof that the copy was stitched together from two separate files.

Trump’s statements about the controversy have caused even more alarm as he has changed the timeline regarding the end of his relationship with Epstein and made statements that make it seem more likely that may have had some involvement with Epstein’s sexual abuse of underage girls.

It seems Fox News had no way to spin the story other than manufacture outrage about what it called the woke mob and an advertisement involving a double entendre of genes for jeans featuring a blonde-haired blued-eyed actress. Segments about the commercial were featured on every program I covered last week Monday through Friday.

Other stories included on Fox News last week involved Trump’s trade policies, a new conspiracy theory surrounding Hillary Clinton and a mass shooting at a Manhattan office building that so far doesn’t seem to have any political motivation.

Shows I covered on Fox New last week:

Fox & Friends
The Five
The Ingraham Angle
Jesse Watters Primetime
Hannity

Fox News - How to Ignore the Biggest Scandal in the Country

The network did everything it could to avoid mentioning the Epstein files or Trump’s relationship to them.

On Wednesday on “The Ingraham Angle” Raymond Arroyo featured a homemade video posted on social media of Rep. Eric Swalwell (D-CA). Swalwell made the brief media clip to criticize Speaker Mike Johnson’s decision to send lawmakers on their summer break early to avoid dealing with the Epstein files controversy.

“What he should be doing. Laura is hiring a writer. He next stage the very same monologue at a ball field and then a gym,” said Arroyo.

Producers cut to the short social media clip that featured Swalwell working out in a gym.

“I should be working right now. I should be at the Capitol. I should be in a suit. Instead, Republican senators from. Because they would rather stand up for Donald Trump, then release the Epstein files” said Swalwell.

Right after Swalwell said the phrase ‘Epstein files’ the camera cut back to Arroyo who laughed at the congressman.

That was the first example of the name ‘Epstein’ during the programming I covered on Fox last week. The next two instances of a reference to the Epstein files were from Friday.

While a guest on “The Ingraham Angle” pollster Matt Towery of InsiderAdvantage brought up the convicted sex offender during a discussion about the Democratic Party.

“And you have a great example today in that all the last few weeks have been Epstein, Epstein, Epstein on all of these legacy media stations talking endlessly, this having a little effect on the president's numbers, to be honest with you,” said Towery.

Brian Kilmeade, who was hosting the program, agreed with Towery.

“But all they talk about is Epstein.”

Later during the same program radio host Jason Rantz also mentioned the infamous financier.

“And so they could lie and really get some, some sort of edge on Republicans or just being honest about what's in this bill. But they're choosing instead to do stupid stunts like this and talk about Epstein as much as people maybe care about it who are watching right now. I care about it. But the average American, they don't really care all that much about that particular issue in comparison to everything else that's actually impacting their lives.”

Later that night on what looked like a pre-taped episode of “Hannity” producers inserted a 45-second breaking news update that included information about Epstein’s co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell.

“Convicted sex trafficker in Jeffrey Epstein's former girlfriend Ghislaine Maxwell has been moved from a federal prison in Florida to a minimum-security prison in Texas. This comes as her attorneys are seeking a pardon from President Trump. Maxwell recently spoke with the deputy attorney general, part of an effort by the Trump administration to fight backlash over the Epstein files. Maxwell is serving a 20-year prison sentence,” said Chanley Painter, a Fox News correspondent.

Those four examples were the only times Jeffrey Epstein was mentioned in the 25 hours of Fox News programing I analyzed last week.

PBS Interviewed the Journalist Who Broke the Epstein Story

On Thursday the PBS News Hour managed to schedule an extended interview with Julie K. Brown, the journalist at the Miami Herald who re-opened the case about Epstein’s alleged crimes in a series of articles in November 2018.

Her reporting ultimately led to a criminal investigation and Epstein’s arrest. Brown spoke to 80 potential victims some who were as young as 13 or 14 years old at the time of they said they were abused by Epstein.

Brown is also the author of “Perversion of Justice: The Jeffrey Epstein Story.”

Amna Nawaz, a co-anchor of the PBS News Hour asked Brown about the many discrepancies in Trump’s accounts of his relationship with Epstein.

“There's also real questions about the timeline here. The incident when Epstein was hiring away Mar-A-Lago employees was in 2000. The real estate fight was reportedly 2004. Mr. Epstein was reportedly banned from Mar-A-Lago in 2007. So based on your reporting and what we know so far, can we say for sure what led to the break between the two men?” asked Nawaz.

Brown answered,

“No, I don't think we know because we've been told inconsistent stories, you know, and and even the latest, iteration of this story doesn't make sense using, the words, you know, that they were taking his people. What does that mean? Was there more than one, young girl or one women or, you know, or was he also taking groundskeepers?” I mean, we don't know the answer to these questions, and and it's troubling that the story, sort of has, has changed.”

Trump had said that he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago after he made inappropriate comments to a club member’s daughter. When I researched that claim I found some journalists had doubts over the veracity of Trump’s account.

Last Tuesday Trump told members of the press that he became angry after his close friend ‘stole’ staff members from Mar-a-Lago.

"He took people, I say 'don't do it anymore', you know they work for me... beyond that, he took some others," Trump said. "Once he did that, that was the end of him."

This is especially troubling since one of Epstein’s alleged victims Virginia Giuffre said that Ghislaine Maxwell approached her when she was working at the spa at Mar-a-Lago. Giuffre was only 16 years old at the time Maxwell convinced her to work for Epstein.

On PBS - Julie K. Brown Revealed More About Ghislaine Maxwell

During the same segment Nawaz asked Brown about Epstein’s co-conspirator.

“What about from Ghislaine Maxwell? We know the deputy U.S. Attorney general, Todd Blanche, spent a couple of days down in Florida where she is imprisoned, questioning her. We know Congress has subpoenaed her to testify. What could we learn from her at this stage?” asked Nawaz.

“Well, she knows everything. I mean, there's no doubt that she was the person that started, or helped start launch Epstein's sex trafficking operation. She was the person who came up with the idea of going around to Palm Beach schools, to gyms, to spas and recruiting these girls, leaving her business card around, and and, we know this because the valet who drove her to these various places testified in court that he did this. So, she she knows, you know, exactly how this whole thing operated, because she helped, formulate it quite frankly,” said Brown.

Since Maxwell’s arrest and conviction Trump has made several alarming statements about his relationship with her.

According to reporting by Politico in July 2020 after her arrest for sex trafficking and other crimes Trump said,

“I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach, and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well, whatever it is.”

He also said during an interview with Axios,

“I do wish her well. I’m not looking for anything bad for her. I’m not looking bad for anybody,” Trump said of Maxwell, adding: “Her boyfriend died. He died in jail.”

Hannity Pushed a New Conspiracy About Hillary Clinton

Sean Hannity cannot give up on the dream of an elaborate scheme created by Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama meant to destroy Donald J. Trump before the 2016 presidential election. .

In Hannity’s imagination Democrats are masterminds when it comes to manipulating the media, controlling the intelligence community and playing the long game but they are incompetent at everything else especially governing.

Tulsi Gabbard and Kash Patel are doing their best to create a distraction from the Epstein scandal and keep their jobs by pulling discredited and irrelevant material from an old investigation, the Durham report, while trying to fabricate the crime of the century known as “The Clinton Plan Intelligence.”

Last week Senator Chuck Grassley released a newly declassified 29-page annex of the Durham report that is supposed to show Hillary Clinton’s plan to create a false narrative that Russia was trying to boost Trump in the 2016 election.

Kash Patel was more than happy to promote the idea that the material found in the annex is evidence that Hillary invented a story of Russian interference into the election to harm Trump. The problem with this theory is that the so -called evidence is likely a fabricated email created by Russian spies.

John Durham concluded a key piece of evidence in the annex is likely not credible and a product of Russian disinformation. The email in question was allegedly sent by Leonard Benardo of the Open Society Foundations network an organization affiliated with George Soros.

“The office’s best assessment is that the July 25 and July 27 emails that purport to be from Benardo were ultimately a composite of several emails that were obtained through Russian intelligence hacking of the U.S.-based think tanks, including the Open Society Foundations, the Carnegie Endowment and others,” the annex says according to reporting by The New York Times.

Benardo also told John Durham in 2021 that he’d never seen the email before and did not write it. Durham also searched through emails from the Open Society Foundation and couldn’t find copies of the same messages that were allegedly written by Benardo.

There are glaring signs that the correspondence was not written by a native English speaker as it contains a Russian idiom and is riddled with awkward phrasing and syntax along with other obvious mistakes. The annex also contained two different versions of the same email with one version including an extra sentence.

Hannity wasn’t bothered by any of this. Last week he spent 22% of his airtime dedicated to this latest conspiracy surrounding the former Secretary of State. On Thursday night he presented this problematic email as if it was the smoking gun that would destroy Hillary Clinton, possibly Barack Obama and the Democratic Party.

“And it gets so much worse. A prior email on July 25th, 2016, from that same Clinton ally stated the following quote,

“Julie says it will be a long term affair to demonize Putin and Trump. Now it is not. Now it is good for a post-convention bounce. Later, the FBI will put more oil into that fire,” said Hannity directly quoting the email.

The first error is the name Julie. The email was supposed to be addressed to a woman named Julianne Smith, a foreign policy adviser for the Clinton presidential campaign who worked at the Center for a New American Security.

The second obvious red flag was the phrase, ‘the FBI will put more oil into the fire.’ An American would likely use the idiom ‘add more fuel to the fire.’ The phrase ‘oil into the fire’ is a Russian idiom.

I’d also argue the first sentence is problematic.

“Julie says it will be a long-term affair to demonize Putin and Trump.”

Americans normally use the word ‘affair’ to mean a romantic affair not a scheme or plot.

The rest of the email also contains strange phrasing and more mistakes.

“HRC (Hillary Rodham Clinton) approved Julia’s idea about Trump and Russian hackers hampering U.S. elections. That should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level.”

In this section Julianne is referred to as Julia which is a completely different name. Clinton’s emails are reduced to a single email which could have been a typo or just a poor translation.

The last sentence just sounds goofy when isolated.

“That should distract people from her own missing email, especially if the affair goes to the Olympic level.”

The plan is again referred to as ‘an affair’ and ‘goes to the Olympic level,’ is not phrasing most American English speakers would use.

The last section of the email Hannity featured was equally suspect.

“In absence of direct evidence, Crowdstrike and ThreatConnect will supply the media.”

“In absence of direct evidence,” is overly formal and awkward.

So far Sean Hannity is the only primetime host who seems to give this latest conspiracy theory much oxygen. While he dedicated quite a bit of his energy and airtime to the “Clinton Plan Intelligence,” Jesse Watters only briefly brought it up and Laura Ingraham only included short segments about it at the end of her program.

Last week producers at “The Five” and “Fox & Friends” mostly ignored the story.

Airtime dedicated to the Clinton Plan Intelligence

The Ingraham Angle - 5%
Hannity - 22%
Jesse Watters Primetime - 1.5%
The Five - 0% it was mentioned by no segment was dedicated to the story.
Fox & Friends - 1.3%

The Truth About Trump’s Tariffs

Every now and then a guest on Fox News doesn’t stick to the expected narrative. On Friday night Charlie Hurt boasted about Trump’s tariff policies while hosting a pre-taped episode of “Hannity.”

“While we’ll get slimmer. Our wallets are getting fatter. We just made $150 billion in tariff revenue and wages are going up,” said Hurt.

On Wednesday Laura Ingram brought up tariff revenue.

“In July the U.S. collected nearly $28 billion in tariff revenue, bringing the 2025 total to $150 billion.”

Tuesday morning on “Fox & Friends,” Charles Gasparino, a journalist who has written about Wall Street for decades and frequent Fox News contributor, had a completely different view of Trump’s tariffs.

Brian Kilmeade began the segment while standing in front of a giant screen that contained graphics about the president’s trade policies.

“50% tariff on EU steel and aluminum. The big picture there. What how does that going to affect all of us?” asked Kilmeade.

Gasparino cut him off.

“Well it's going to theoretically if we need to buy steel from them, it's going to cost us more. I mean, again, Brian, you kind of put this in context. Every penny we get from them is being passed to the U.S. consumer.”

“Not necessarily right?” said Kilmeade.

“Yes necessarily. Some companies, some companies will eat it for now but remember companies don't report to the president. They report to shareholders. And they have a fiduciary responsibility for profit margins. And at some point and, and that point is coming, I mean, you can see it, there are there are having price increases on certain goods. I mean, there's no doubt. And, you know, this this deal has just been cut. So I would just say this is good. It's good to have a trade deal. It's better than. And by the way, 15% is manageable. So they're going to blow up the global system. But, let's be real clear here. You know tariffs cost. They're a tax. That tax often gets passed on to consumers,” said Gasparino.

“Right. Unless they want to make it here. And that's also a goal,” said Kilmeade.

PBS on Trump’s Tariffs

On Thursday the PBS News Hour invited economist Jason Furman of the Harvard Kennedy School to discuss Trump’s trade policies. Furman penned an op-ed for The New York Times that morning titled “The Tariffs Kicked In. The Sky Didn’t Fall. Were the Economists Wrong?”

“We're starting to see them, but some of the predictions were pretty dire. You also write in your piece. Economists, including me, suffer from tariff derangement syndrome. We find ourselves disproportionately worked up every time they're increased. Business leaders and financial markets can suffer a touch of this at times, too. Tell me more about that. Do you feel like the reaction has been disproportionate and what's behind that?” asked co-anchor Amna Nawaz.

Furman echoed some of the points Gasparino said on “Fox & Friends.”

“Yeah. Look, I think tariffs are a rather dumb way to raise revenue. There are so many better ways to get money that do less damage to consumers, less damage to workers, and less damage to our international standing. But, you know, they're not the only thing in the world. They're not necessarily even the worst thing in the world. And so when we hear them, we get sort of worked up and probably sometimes make them sound even worse than they are. But don't get me wrong. You know, they're still not good” said Furman.

Nawaz then asked him about Trump’s trade policies overall. He did not show much enthusiasm for tariffs.

“Let's not mistake it. The tariffs that we have done hurt us. So whatever other countries did, we were hurting ourselves with these tariffs that they've made some of these concessions to open their markets to invest in the United States. That takes away some of the sting. But it's all much, much smaller than the direct effects of our own tariffs on our own economy,” said Furman.

Stories Fox News Ignored

Every week I compare the hours I’ve analyzed on Fox News to five hours of the PBS News Hour. The following list are stories that PBS covered that Fox News did not. Source - PBS News Hour transcripts. This list is slightly truncated due to space.

Updates to the War in Ukraine
- Officials in Ukraine say Russian drone and missile attacks killed at least 13 people and wounded more than 130 others in Kyiv. The air assault hit dozens of locations across the capital, damaging more than 100 buildings. More casualties are expected as rescue teams search the rubble for survivors. (PBS News Hour)
- Also, in Kyiv, Ukrainians celebrated after Parliament approved a bill to restore the independence of two main anti-corruption agencies. President Volodymyr Zelenskyy tried to bring the watchdogs under his government's oversight, but the move led to rare and widespread protests. Zelenskyy quickly reversed course and today signed the new bill into law. (PBS News Hour)
- Russian attacks killed at least 27 people across Ukraine. Ukrainian authorities say four powerful bombs hit a prison in the country's southeast, killing at least 16 inmates and wounding more than 90 others. And in Central Ukraine, Russian strikes hit a building and a maternity hospital, killing at least five people, including a pregnant woman. (PBS News Hour)
Climate disasters
- In Southern Europe and the Balkans, searing heat, dry conditions and strong winds are fueling deadly fires and prompting evacuations in places like Greece, Bulgaria and Turkey. Wildfires there have threatened Turkey's fourth largest city of Bursa, forcing more than 3,000 people to flee. At least 17 rescue workers and volunteers have now died battling the blazes since late June. (PBS News Hour)
- In China, nearly a year's worth of rain drenched the Beijing area in a matter of days, triggering floods and landslides that have killed at least 38 people. Some areas saw as much as 21 inches of rain, which peaked on Monday, sweeping away entire cars. More than 130 villages on the outskirts of China's capital lost power. (PBS News Hour)
A federal judge blocked a Trump administration effort to defund Planned Parenthood, ruling that all clinics must continue to receive Medicaid reimbursements. A provision in the president's recently passed One Big Beautiful Bill banned Medicaid payments to providers that perform abortions and make more than $800,000 in a given year. The judge ruled that could amount to what's called legislative punishment, which is unconstitutional, since Planned Parenthood is one of the only providers that meets that threshold. (PBS News Hour)
Health Secretary Robert F. Kennedy Jr. reportedly intends to remove all 16 members of the United States Preventive Services Task Force. The highly influential panel plays a key role in determining what treatments insurers must cover and makes recommendations about care that are followed by doctors across the country. PBS spoke with Dr. Bobby Mukkamala the president of the American Medical Association who was against the proposed changes. (PBS News Hour)
The state of Colorado is suing a local sheriff’s deputy, accusing him of aiding federal immigration agents with the arrest of a college student with an expired visa. Attorney General Phil Weiser says the deputy violated state laws that ban state and local government employees from cooperating with federal officials on immigration enforcement. Weiser joined PBS co-anchor Geoff Bennett to discuss the case. (PBS News Hour)
As pressure continues for President Trump to release files related to Jeffrey Epstein, the president’s evolving answers about his relationship with Epstein, and why it ended, have raised more questions. Amna Nawaz discussed more with Julie Brown of the Miami Herald. Brown’s reporting in 2017 and 2018 led to sex trafficking charges against Epstein and identified nearly 80 of his victims. (PBS News Hour)
On Thursday Gaza health officials say that, at least 91 people were killed and more than 600 others were wounded while trying to get aid. That includes 54 people waiting for food in Northern Gaza. Israel says it fired warning shots into a crowd that swarmed an aid truck, but is not aware of any injuries. After weeks of ignoring the conflict Fox News finally included a segment about the Israel-Hamas war. The network included one short segment about it on “Fox & Friends” only to parrot the Israeli government’s position that there is no impending famine in Gaza. (PBS News Hour)
Fed Governor Adriana Kugler announced she's stepping down early. That leaves President Trump a position to fill on the Central Bank's powerful board. Kugler's term would have ended in January. Instead, she's leaving next Friday. This comes as President Trump continues to attack Fed Chair Jerome Powell over his decision not to lower the Central Bank's short-term interest rate. Fox News included several segments that were critical of Powell. (PBS News Hour)
Lawmakers in El Salvador have approved constitutional changes that will lengthen presidential terms to six years and remove term limits. The party of President Nayib Bukele has a supermajority and quickly passed the changes, meaning he could seek reelection indefinitely. Critics says Bukele is removing checks on the presidency in order to consolidate power. He has become widely popular for cracking down on gang violence in El Salvador, though human rights groups have condemned his tactics. (PBS News Hour)
The Smithsonian's National Museum of American History has temporarily removed all references to President Trump's impeachments from an exhibit about presidential power. That exhibit features materials about the Watergate scandal and the impeachments of Presidents Andrew Johnson and Bill Clinton. But mentions of Mr. Trump's two impeachments were taken down last month. The White House has repeatedly targeted interpretations of American history. The Smithsonian said the references will be restored once the exhibit is updated following a review. (PBS News Hour)
And musical satirist and mathematician Tom Lehrer has died. Lehrer made a name for himself in the 1950s and '60s with songs like "Poisoning Pigeons in the Park," which blended joyful music with more sardonic subject matter. His targets for satire included marriage, politics, racism and the Catholic Church, among others. Lehrer was a math prodigy who graduated from Harvard at the age of 18. He eventually left music to return to teaching at Harvard and elsewhere. A longtime friend said Lehrer died at his home in Massachusetts. Tom Lehrer was 97 years old. (PBS News Hour)