Vice President JD Vance is being set up as the White House’s sacrificial lamb in the escalating Jeffrey Epstein scandal, according to Donald Trump’s longtime biographer Michael Wolff — who declared flatly that the administration is throwing its own number two overboard to protect the president.
Speaking on the latest episode of the Daily Beast’s “Inside Trump’s Head” podcast alongside co-host Joanna Coles, Wolff described Vance as having been “thrown in front of the bus” following bombshell reporting by The New York Times that placed the vice president at the center of chaotic, behind-the-scenes efforts to manage the fallout from Trump’s long-scrutinized ties to the disgraced convicted sex offender.
The New York Times Report That Lit the Fuse
The Times reporting — drawn from an excerpt of the forthcoming book “Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump” by Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan, due out June 23 — describes a White House in full damage-control mode after the Justice Department and FBI released a memo last July declaring there was no Epstein client list and that the financier died by suicide in federal custody.
According to the excerpt, top administration officials, including Vance and White House Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, gathered in the Situation Room on July 17, 2025 — without Trump — to debate how to contain the mounting outrage among MAGA voters who had been promised Epstein transparency and felt betrayed. The closed-door session was one of several emergency meetings convened as the administration scrambled to manage what Vance himself described to colleagues as a “huge problem.”
According to the Times, Vance took a notably aggressive posture inside those meetings, pushing colleagues to release the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) millions of Epstein files in full — even if some of the contents reflected poorly on Trump. He offered to personally go on television to defend the administration’s handling of the matter and floated the idea of enlisting Tucker Carlson to interview convicted sex trafficker Ghislaine Maxwell inside prison as a public relations gambit. His colleagues largely dismissed his suggestions, choosing instead to close ranks around the president at all costs.
Wolff: The Message Is Clear
For Wolff, a veteran journalist and author who has had extraordinary access to Trump throughout his political career, the Times report is far less notable for what it says about Epstein than for what it does to Vance.
“More interesting, probably than what it says about Epstein, is JD Vance, who is really dumped … thrown in front of the bus here,” Wolff told co-host Coles on the podcast. He described the story as a carefully directed piece of messaging aimed squarely at one person.
The report sends a signal directly back to Trump, Wolff argued — that his vice president was not a loyal soldier during the crisis, but rather someone operating on a different set of priorities. In Wolff’s telling, Trump’s position on Epstein has always been simple and unwavering: there is nothing to discuss, anyone raising the subject is an enemy, and any aide who treats it as a genuine problem is — by definition — not on his side.
In that context, Vance’s push for transparency, his offers to go public, and his expressed belief that full disclosure was survivable all paint him as someone who fundamentally misread the president. “The White House is throwing JD Vance over the side,” Wolff said flatly. “That’s what’s going on here.”
Vance emerges from the Times account as a figure described in unflattering terms by the very colleagues who presumably leaked the story — depicted as panicked, out of step with Trump’s instincts, and convinced he understood the political moment better than the president whose loyalty he depended on.
White House Hits Back at Wolff
The White House did not engage with the substance of Wolff’s analysis. White House Communications Director Steven Cheung, reached for comment by the Daily Beast, responded with a pointed personal attack, calling Wolff “a lying sack of ****” who had “been proven to be a fraud.” The administration offered no denial of the Situation Room meetings or of Vance’s reported behavior inside them.
Wolff, who rose to national prominence with his 2018 account of the early Trump White House, “Fire and Fury,” has faced persistent pushback from Trump allies over his sourcing and characterizations.
Vance Breaks His Silence
Vance himself has since weighed in — and his comments have done little to put the story to rest. Appearing on ABC’s “The View” on June 16, the vice president appeared to acknowledge the Situation Room meetings, telling co-host Sunny Hostin that officials had wanted to release the remaining Epstein files but faced court approval hurdles. He also confirmed that Chief of Staff Susie Wiles privately views him as an Epstein conspiracy theorist. “I love Susie, but absolutely, she thinks I’m a conspiracy theorist on the Epstein stuff,” Vance said, adding that he had pushed for full transparency because the situation “really bothered” him.
On June 18, 2026, Vance told SiriusXM’s “The Megyn Kelly Show” that he was “legitimately worried” that audio recordings of the Situation Room conversations had been leaked to The New York Times — remarking that secretly taping such meetings would constitute a felony.
What It Means for 2028
The broader stakes are hard to miss. Vance has spent much of Trump’s second term positioning himself as the heir apparent within MAGA — attending rallies, managing congressional relationships, and carefully mirroring the president’s style and rhetoric. Either way, the damage to his 2028 positioning could prove significant.
According to Newsweek’s analysis of the Times reporting, senior officials were primarily concerned about losing support among core MAGA voters rather than political opposition — underscoring how internal fears about the base, not the broader electorate, shaped every decision the White House made during the crisis. The political fallout has now extended to Capitol Hill. On June 11, Rep. Robert Garcia, Ranking Member of the House Committee on Oversight and Reform, formally demanded that Vance, FBI Director Kash Patel, Chief of Staff Susie Wiles, and other senior officials be called to testify about the Situation Room meetings. Vance’s instinct to get ahead of the story was, by that measure, a direct challenge to the president’s read of his own supporters.
As Wolff put it on the podcast, in the Trump White House everything is an audience-of-one performance — and by the time the Times excerpt hit newsstands, JD Vance’s reviews were already in.