Vice President JD Vance has simultaneously revived the debunked Pizzagate conspiracy theory and reignited scrutiny of the Epstein files.
During a sparsely attended Turning Point USA event at Akins Ford Arena in Athens, Georgia, on Tuesday, Vance, 41, appeared to try to woo the more conspiratorial members of the crowd who are still frustrated over the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein files. It was perhaps a good chance for Vance to score points for a potential 2028 White House run after it emerged earlier this week that he ranks as the least popular VP in modern history.
During a Q&A session, he was asked for his stance on whether a “formal investigation” should be opened to check if the Justice Department shielded any powerful figures who were implicated in the Epstein files. Instead of directly answering the question, he touted his own conspiracy theory cred to apparently try and set himself apart from other administration officials.
“I’m probably more obsessed with this than most officials,” he said, telling the audience that he’d read an email in the Epstein files in which someone had written to the convicted child sex offender about “some really nice, like, pizzas and grape sodas or something like that.” He acknowledged the language “sounded like the Pizzagate conspiracy theory” but insisted the message still warranted investigation.
“My reaction to that was, ‘We should absolutely investigate that person,’” he said. “I’m going to follow up on that to see whether we’ve investigated that person because we should. We absolutely should when you see evidence of sexual assault, sexual misconduct regardless of whether you are powerful or not, you should probably investigate it more, if you’re a powerful person.”
President Donald Trump’s acting attorney general, Todd Blanche, said in an interview earlier this month that the Epstein files “should not be a part of anything going forward,” suggesting federal prosecutors considered the matter closed. He made similar remarks in a podcast interview in March where he said the Pizzagate theory had already been firmly debunked and dismissed the suggestion that certain words in the files might be code words that should be investigated.
Pizzagate is a debunked conspiracy theory that emerged during the 2016 presidential election and falsely claimed that hacked emails belonging to Hillary Clinton’s campaign chair, John Podesta, contained coded references to a child sex-trafficking ring operated by prominent Democrats out of a D.C. pizzeria.
Law enforcement agencies quickly dismissed the allegations, but the theory generated real-world violence. That same December, Edgar Maddison Welch, a 28-year-old man from Salisbury, North Carolina, drove to the restaurant and discharged an AR-15-style rifle three times inside the restaurant in an attempt to “self-investigate” the alleged ring. No one was injured.
Welch was sentenced to four years in prison by then-U.S. District Judge Ketanji Brown Jackson and was later killed by police in North Carolina in January 2025 after pointing a gun at officers during a traffic stop.
Vance, in his comments on Tuesday, also seemed to play up other Epstein-related theories that Trump’s DOJ has dismissed. He told the crowd the late sex offender “clearly had extraordinary connections with intelligence services, both inside the United States and outside the United States.” Blanche has said there’s no evidence of Epstein being connected to foreign intelligence.
Vance’s conspiracy-adjacent comments came at a bruising moment. As the Daily Beast reported Sunday, CNN’s chief data analyst Harry Enten has found him to be the least popular VP in modern history at this point in his tenure. His net approval has plunged 21 points—from plus 3 to minus 18—since taking office in January 2025.
The Financial Times piled on a day later, publishing a column on Monday by veteran commentator Ed Luce headlined “The Ever-Shrinking JD Vance.” In it, Luce argued that Trump, 79, had deliberately sent his running mate on impossible missions—including the failed Iran peace talks in Islamabad and a campaign-trail appearance for Hungary’s Viktor Orbán, who was then routed in a landslide election—and that Vance was “no longer Trump’s obvious successor.”
Vance also used Tuesday’s event to defend Trump from Epstein-related questions, insisting there was “no evidence of misconduct” on the president’s part and calling the suggestion that the two men were close friends “a hoax.”
“If you look at the emails, it’s obvious that Jeffrey Epstein hated Donald J. Trump,” Vance said. “The fact that Jeffrey Epstein hates Donald J. Trump is a pretty good thing for Donald J. Trump.”
A February New York Times analysis of the 3.5 million pages released by the Justice Department under the Epstein Files Transparency Act found more than 5,300 files containing over 38,000 references to Trump, his wife, his Mar-a-Lago club, and related terms.
The president has consistently denied all allegations of wrongdoing in connection with Epstein, maintaining that their relationship ended in the early 2000s.
Vance’s flirtation with Pizzagate-adjacent thinking is, though, not new. In 2021, he tweeted that he thought about a column for The Week, headlined “The Jeffrey Epstein case is why people believe in Pizzagate,” roughly once a month.
In the same period, he retweeted prominent conspiracy theorist and conservative influencer Jack Posobiec—who has since become a fixture in Trumpworld—while publicly musing about a government cover-up of Epstein’s crimes.
As a senator in 2024, he told a podcast that authorities should “release the Epstein list,” a demand his team was later obliged to quietly retire once he was in a position to act on it.
The Daily Beast has contacted the Office of the Vice President for comment.
