There’s a genre of conspiracy theory that goes like this: A politician, faced with a particularly uncomfortable or embarrassing scandal, manufactures another story — a distraction — to divert attention and alleviate pressure on themselves.
Democratic and Republican presidents alike have been accused of using distraction tactics. President Barack Obama was criticized for focusing on kidnapped Nigerian schoolgirls instead of a congressional probe into the deaths of four Americans in Benghazi. George W. Bush, critics said, juiced the terror alert level to boost poll numbers and deflect criticism over the Iraq War. In 1998, congressional Republicans suggested President Bill Clinton had deployed missiles to Sudan and Afghanistan to change the subject away from his affair with Monica Lewinsky, which he had admitted to three days earlier.
Rep. Dan Burton, R-Ind. — known for his anti-vaccine congressional hearings and a backyard watermelon ballistics test aimed at proving a former White House aide’s suicide was actually a murder — said at the time, “I’d hate to think this was a ‘Wag the Dog’ type thing,” referencing the 1997 dark comedy in which a president fabricates a war with Albania to distract from a sex scandal.
The theory works because it contains an obvious truth: Of course politicians and governments try to control narratives.
The theory works because it contains an obvious truth: Of course politicians and governments try to control narratives. Daily White House press briefings are a reminder of just how much.
But proving intent is usually harder. Unless we’re talking about President Donald Trump.
At gaggles, in interviews and on his social media platform, he has made explicit his desire to shift attention away from Jeffrey Epstein — the disgraced financier found dead from suicide in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges. Epstein’s depravity, escape from accountability, immense wealth and high-profile friends (including Trump) has made him a fixture of public conspiracizing for years.
As a reminder, in July, Epstein again took over the national narrative when the Department of Justice, after months spent dangling the promise of new revelations, published a memo stating that no further disclosure would be appropriate or warranted, there was no client list to pursue and that Epstein had, in fact, killed himself. MAGA was apoplectic, demanding to know how their long promised payday could end with such a thud. Conservative crowds lined up at Turning Point USA’s annual summit to express their frustrations and lob allegations that Trump, his DOJ and the FBI had become the Deep State. Mainstream press took up the subject, too, in coverage that revealed new details of the friendship between Epstein and Trump and followed the fight for the release of the so-called Epstein files as was being called for by a strange new consortium of Democrats, MAGA followers and some of Epstein’s victims.
In the weeks since, Trump has openly attempted to redirect the national conversation, insisting people focus instead on flooding in Texas, or America’s success, or most recently, the revival of a familiar conspiracy theory: that Obama and the intelligence community framed Russia for interfering in the 2016 election all in an effort to undermine Trump’s presidency.
“People should really focus on how well the country is doing, or they should focus on the fact that Barack Hussein Obama led a coup,” Trump said in July, when asked about Epstein.
Here’s where the theorizing kicks in. Following Trump’s look-over-there suggestions, Director of National Intelligence Tulsi Gabbard revived a thoroughly investigated and disproven claim: that Obama ordered U.S. spy agencies to manufacture a narrative that Russia meddled in the 2016 election on Trump’s behalf — a “hoax” the current president has railed against for years, claiming it was orchestrated to undermine him.
Gabbard announced on July 18 that she had found evidence of “a treasonous conspiracy,” that the Obama administration “manufactured and politicized intelligence to lay the groundwork for what was essentially a years-long coup against President Trump.”
The Russiagate rollout has been a slow burn. The drip-drip-drip timing of the releases has helped sustain MAGA attention — and keep it off of Epstein. After her initial claim on July 18 came the release of a declassified 5-year-old Republican House Intelligence Committee report on July 23, a whistleblower twist on July 30, the release of a formerly classified annex on July 31, and finally, reports that Attorney General Pam Bondi had launched a grand jury investigation based on Gabbard’s reports, targeting not just Obama, but also his former directors of national intelligence, the CIA and the FBI.
It should be noted here that outside of right-wing media, no reputable news organization has found anything incriminating in any of these new documents. Obama spokesperson Patrick Rodenbush said in a statement the claims were “outrageous,” “bizarre” and “a weak attempt at distraction.” The New York Times reported the newly declassified documents, in fact, disproved Gabbard’s allegations, noting the emails presented as smoking guns by right-wing media were almost certainly fabrications made by Russian spies. The Bulwark’s Cathy Young called the releases “a nothingburger.” And Renée DiResta, an associate research professor at Georgetown and a contributing editor at Lawfare, likened it to an attack “by document — flooding the zone with memos and annexes most people on X will never read, relying instead on influencers and partisan media to shape the narrative for them.”
Multiple investigations — including a 2017 Intelligence Community assessment, special counsel Robert Mueller’s 2019 report, a 2020 Senate Intelligence Committee review and special counsel John Durham’s 2023 report — have all concluded that Russia interfered in the 2016 election in a bid to help Trump. None of the inquiries, including Durham’s, which was tasked with looking for it, has ever presented evidence of a plot by Obama administration officials to sabotage Trump or to fabricate intelligence.
But facts aside, if Gabbard’s disclosures were an effort to change the subject, the question remains: Did it work?
But facts aside, if Gabbard’s disclosures were an effort to change the subject, the question remains: Did it work? The perhaps unhelpful answer: sort of, for now.
“People are talking less about Epstein every day,” said Darren Linvill, a professor at Clemson University’s Media Forensics Hub who tracked mentions of Epstein over the month for MSNBC. The same evening Gabbard made her announcement, mentions of Epstein among right-wing influencers on X dropped off, according to data compiled by University of Washington professor and disinformation expert Kate Starbird. Starbird wrote on Bluesky that the apparent stand-down looked “coordinated like a flock of birds.”
Of course, the Epstein story hasn’t gone away completely. But the split in how it’s being covered is glaring. MSNBC mentions Gabbard’s claims mostly to debunk them and has stayed focused on Epstein, including on his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell’s recent prison transfer. Meanwhile, right-wing podcasters have treated Gabbard’s dossier like a second Watergate. Fox News ran 168 segments on Russiagate in July, according to Media Matters. Talk about Epstein on X, the platform where conservatives still chatter online, has slowed from millions of mentions per day to a couple hundred thousand, near the previous mean.
“It doesn’t mean that we’re going to let the Epstein Files go, because there’s justice that needs to be served there,” said Liz Wheeler, a MAGA podcaster who was among the first and loudest critics of the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein affair. “But something bigger broke since then, and it’s been more important to us for a long time.” Wheeler, who was among a handful of influencers invited to the White House in February and photographed holding binders of already-public Epstein documents, said the new Russiagate investigation didn’t distract her — it confirmed that Trump was listening to his base and delivering on their demands for justice, of some kind. “You say it’s a distraction. I think it is a response,” Wheeler said. Longtime conspiracy theory researcher Travis View, co-host of the “QAnon Anonymous” podcast and a producer at Cursed Media, said that even the most Epstein-obsessed, conspiracy-addled faction of MAGA had been pulled in by Gabbard’s revelations. And the drawn-out promise of prosecutions, however unlikely, can sustain this base indefinitely. “Trump promised to lock Hillary up and then didn’t — and that didn’t degrade his support in any meaningful way,” View said. “I expect them to treat this the same way. He can promise a special investigation and keep people in perpetual suspense of the big reveal that never comes.” Trump’s pivot to Russiagate, View said, is a cleaner narrative — especially given his uncomfortable association with Epstein. “Framing it as a deep-state coup turns Trump into the pure victim again. And it’s basically the same enemies in both stories. For them, it all leads to the same day of reckoning — the one where their enemies are exposed and everyone apologizes for ever doubting them.” “They’ve moved on,” he said. For those of us who still believe in quaint ideas like karma or shame — the regular folks forced to face the consequences of our own actions — it’s maddening to watch as Trump once again seems poised to slip free from another mess of his own making. But there may be more Epstein news coming. The House Oversight Committee has subpoenaed the Justice Department for its Epstein files and demanded testimony from 10 former officials, including Bill and Hillary Clinton. While the MAGA outrage has shifted — away from Trump and Epstein, and onto a narrative with familiar bad guys and less of the mess — the mainstream press won’t let go. On Thursday, Trump rolled out a new line when asked about a reported meeting between his vice president and DOJ leaders to discuss, among other issues, the Epstein strategy. “Look, the whole thing is a hoax,” Trump said. “It’s put out by the Democrats because we’ve had the most successful six months in the history of our country, and that’s just a way of trying to divert attention to something that’s total bullshit, OK?”
Brandy Zadrozny is a senior enterprise reporter for MS NOW. She was a previously a senior enterprise reporter for NBC News, based in New York. 
