Vice President JD Vance said he is worried people are taping highly sensitive conversations in the White House’s Situation Room, after a New York Times report on a meeting held in the location discussing convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Last week, two New York Times reporters released an excerpt of their new book detailing meetings held in the highly secure Situation Room, which centered on conversations top officials, including Vance, had about how to approach the Epstein case.
After its publication, Vance weighed in on the “very weird story,” warning that any leaking of taped audio from the Situation Room to the media would be considered a felony offense. His comments came after Axios reported that top White House officials believed New York Times reporters Maggie Haberman and Jonathan Swan somehow obtained audio recordings of Situation Room meetings, despite independent recording devices in that location being forbidden.
“There was this story about Epstein that came out in the New York Times, and like half of it or so was BS, and about half of it … there’s always an element of truth, there’s always an element of non-truth,” the vice president said during an appearance Tuesday on The Megyn Kelly Show.
“But there were certain things in there that legitimately made me worried that people were, like, taping, which, by the way, is like a felony,” he said. “So that was weird. That story was very bizarre. It was sort of a nothing-burger of a story, in the sense that everybody sort of knew all those details anyway.”
The Epstein case has plagued the White House for months, since the Justice Department’s rollout of millions of files related to the deceased New York financier stoked controversy and accusations that it was hiding information.
Questions over Epstein’s connections to Trump and a slew of other famous and powerful figures have persisted ever since his death in a jail cell in 2019. Epstein’s death was ruled a suicide at the time, but questions have lingered over the circumstances of the night he died and the life he led.
In the excerpt of their book, Regime Change: Inside the Imperial Presidency of Donald Trump, Haberman and Swan wrote that Vance and other administration leaders held meetings in the Situation Room last summer to strategize public relations for the Epstein case.
Vance pushed for supposed “maximum transparency” in releasing information and “also floated to colleagues an extraordinary P.R. gambit — that the White House enlist Tucker Carlson to interview Epstein’s longtime girlfriend and co-conspirator, Ghislaine Maxwell, in prison,” according to the book.
“It might help the president if Maxwell was willing to state that Trump had not been part of any wrongdoing with Epstein,” the authors wrote, describing an encounter between top officials during a Situation Room meeting on July 17, 2025.