“It sounds like you’re just trying to shift attention from something to something else. So how does this benefit the Trump family, is my question,” Ms Lacerda said.<\/p>\n
But survivor Lisa Phillips praised Melania Trump for countering the Department of Justice’s narrative that they were closing the chapter on the Epstein files.<\/p>\n
Ms Phillips told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme that her call to have survivors telling their stories was a “bold move”. But she also challenged the first lady to follow her words with actions.<\/p>\n
“What I would do is I would call her bluff and I would, you know, push her a little bit and say, okay, Now that you’ve said that, what can you do? What can you do to help us? And what can you do to move us along?”<\/p>\n
The chairman of the House Oversight Committee, which is investigating the Epstein files, told Fox News on Friday that he always planned to hold hearings with survivors of Epstein’s crimes once the committee finishes its investigation. “I agree with the first lady and appreciate what she said,” Republican James Comer said. “We will have hearings.”<\/p>\n
Barry Levine, author of The Spider: Inside the Tangled Web of Jeffrey Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell, says the fact that Melania Trump included and acknowledged the victims is very significant because she’s chosen to go against her husband’s stance.<\/p>\n
He says President Trump has always turned a cold shoulder to the victims.<\/p>\n
“He had been given many opportunities to say something supportive of the survivors in terms of getting accountability for them and he has continually said the files are nothing but a hoax.”<\/p>\n
His wife Melania, says Levine, is very much her own person who speaks her own mind. “Even the president has previously acknowledged this.”<\/p>\n
Tammy Vigil, author of Melania and Michelle: First Ladies in a New Era, told the BBC that the fact that her statement didn’t include her husband shows a fissure in the White House between the president and first lady and the agendas they’re forwarding.<\/p>\n
“She’s pushing an agenda that by all outward appearances he doesn’t want to push. So she’s helping her own agenda. It’s a very independent statement and we’ve seen her do that a few times before.”<\/p>\n
Democrats, meanwhile, see this as a political gift.<\/p>\n
Melania Trump has now placed herself squarely into the Epstein story and put herself at odds with the administration, which wants to end the investigation.<\/p>\n
The highest-ranking Democrat on the House Oversight Committee, Robert Garcia, has said that he was stunned by the speech and the Trump administration must now follow the first lady’s lead.<\/p>\n
“If Melania Trump wants real justice, she should ask her husband to release the rest of the Epstein files and ensure that Pam Bondi testifies,” he said.<\/p>\n
President Trump, who socialised with Epstein in the 1990s and appears in the files many times but has denied any knowledge of his crimes, has called the Epstein files uproar a politically motivated hoax.<\/p>\n
But this time he cannot accuse the person putting the story back into the headlines of having malicious intentions.<\/p>\n
It is the enduring crisis that the administration cannot get past, and Melania Trump’s announcement has just breathed fresh life into it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"“It sounds like you’re just trying to shift attention from something to something else. So how does this…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":524436,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[2],"tags":[49,50,51,47,52,48],"class_list":{"0":"post-524435","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-headlines","8":"tag-headlines","9":"tag-news","10":"tag-top-news","11":"tag-top-stories","12":"tag-topnews","13":"tag-topstories"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524435","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=524435"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/524435\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/524436"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=524435"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=524435"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/uk\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=524435"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}