J.D. Vance Admits Trump Administration Is 'Guilty' of 'Mishandling' Epstein Files: 'We Should Have Dropped Everything at the Beginning'

Vice President J.D. Vance admitted the Trump administration mishandled the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

"If people want to say we mishandled the Epstein release, guilty. We did mishandle it, especially the communications of it," Vance told Joe Rogan on the Wednesday, July 15, episode of "The Joe Rogan Experience."

However, he firmly denied they were attempting to hide any information.

“What do you think should have been done?” asked Rogan, who said “there was a tremendous amount of resistance to those files being released” inside the administration.

“I think that we should have just dropped everything at the very beginning and, like obviously, it takes a little time to review the stuff, to find the stuff, to redact things where you have victims and so forth, but we should have just done it as quickly as possible,” Vance said.

The vice president largely blamed former Attorney General Pam Bondi — whom President Donald Trump fired in April — for inflating public expectations.

Bondi infamously claimed that an alleged Epstein "client list" was sitting directly on her desk, only to claim later there was no such list.

Vance explained that Bondi "overstated what we had and what we didn't have," which caused her to get publicly roasted and led the public to mistrust the administration's transparency efforts.

Despite the criticism, Vance asserted that he likes Bondi and believes she was trying to "respond to the political moment" rather than acting maliciously.

“Was there some, you know, b------- and moaning, and was there some back and forth? Yes,” Vance confessed.

Awkwardly addressing the delay in the rollout of files, Vance noted that the review and redaction process required significant time because distinguishing between victims and co-conspirators in the documents proved incredibly difficult.

"We did release all these files,” he said. “Did it take longer than it should have taken? Yes.”

Approximately 2.5 to 3 million documents in the Justice Department's investigative files on Epstein have yet to be made public.

He argued that some individuals who were victims were also allegedly leveraged to facilitate the s-- trafficking, making it hard for the Department of Justice to draw a clear line.

Vance maintained that, while the complexity justified the time taken, the administration should ultimately have bypassed the prolonged messaging campaign and released the available files as quickly as possible.

He also defended Trump, who is said to appear in the Epstein files “more than a million times,” according to Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin.

“I’ve never seen a single piece of credible evidence that the president of the United States engaged in wrongdoing with minors. Ever,” he stated.

According to The New York Times, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles has called Vance an Epstein conspiracy theorist, a moniker he proudly owns up to.

“But where Susie Wiles, the White House chief of staff, says, ‘Well, we know J.D.’s a conspiracy theorist on this.’ Like, I am actually,” Vance spilled.