Vice President JD Vance admitted that the Trump administration handled the release of the Jeffrey Epstein files poorly, shifting the blame to former United States Attorney General Pam Bondi.“I think the reason we screwed up the comms of the Epstein files is Pam Bondi said, ‘The client list is on my desk,’” Vance said on Wednesday’s episode of “The Joe Rogan Experience.”Vance said he didn’t know why Bondi made a spectacle of a supposed client list when there allegedly isn’t one. “I think Pam was trying to respond to the political moment,” Vance said. “I think she overstated what we had and what we didn’t have, and I think she got roasted for it publicly by a lot of people, including me.”Vance, who called himself an “OG Epstein conspiracy theorist,” spoke at length about the late sex trafficker, including the different conspiracy theories tied to him. Vance defended President Donald Trump and said he has seen no “credible evidence” that Trump “ever” engaged in wrongdoing with minors. However, the files contain an interview with a woman who alleged that Trump sexually assaulted her in the 1980s when she was a minor. Trump made releasing the Epstein files a cornerstone of his 2024 presidential campaign. After he was elected, in February 2025, Bondi went on Fox News and claimed Epstein’s alleged “client list” was sitting on her desk. The client list was never materialized, and in November 2025, the Epstein Files Transparency Act was signed into law and batches of the Epstein files were released, but some pages were completely blacked out. The Justice Department said less than 1% of the files had been released. Today, about 3 million of the 6 million pages of the files have been released. “We did release all these files,” Vance said. “Did it take longer than it should have taken? Yes, but we did release these files.”He added: “I think we should have just dropped everything at the very beginning ... We should have just done it as quickly as possible.”The release of the Epstein files has reportedly caused a public relations nightmare within the Trump administration. The New York Times reported in June that several top officials met in the White House Situation Room last summer to discuss how best to handle the bipartisan pushback of the handling of the release. Vance referenced that article during his interview with Rogan, saying the part about White House chief of staff Susie Wiles calling Vance a “conspiracy theorist” was true. “I’ve probably gone down every single rabbit hole,” Vance told Rogan. “We could go down most of them today.”