Conspiracy theorist Alex Jones claimed during his InfoWars show this week that White House officials have been calling him in an effort to get him to stop talking about the late sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. Jones even suggests he’s been offered some kind of quid pro quo to shut up. And while it’s important to take everything you hear from Jones with a huge grain of salt, the claim is close to other reporting from reputable news outlets.

Jones insisted at the top of his show with Nick Fuentes on Wednesday that “of course” he would expose Trump “if he’s screwing kids.” Jones insisted “I’m not tied to that wagon,” suggesting that he’s not all-in for Trump as a political entity, despite all evidence to the contrary. But later Jones made clear that he’s been getting calls telling him to stop talking about Epstein in order to make Trump happy.

“I got a bunch of calls the last three weeks, and the calls go like this, ‘what do you want?’ And I’ve never asked for anything. What I want is good policy. I always want to be the outsider,” said Jones.

“And I’m just like, what do I… what do I want? I want to make America great again. I want America first. So there’s a real understanding of this administration that we’re it, we’re in charge. This is the way it is,” Jones said, referring to Trump-aligned influencers having real power.

Jones went on to make it abundantly clear that he was talking about powerful people in the Trump administration. “And the fact that I get these calls like… the top of the administration and they’re just cut and… they’re cut and dry. What do you want? And I’m just like, uh huh, uh huh…” Jones said ominously.

[embed]https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rnig9YOOKQ[/embed]

Epstein died in prison during Trump’s first term in 2019, and almost immediately, many people assumed he must have been killed by powerful forces to silence anything he might know. Trump has been asked for weeks now about why the Department of Justice closed its investigation into Epstein despite promises by people like FBI Director Kash Patel and Attorney General Pam Bondi that they’ll get to the bottom of it. But Trump can’t make the story go away, especially as new details seem to come out daily. That hasn’t stopped Trump from trying to get his own folks to shut up behind the scenes.

Rolling Stone reported on July 17 that the White House has been engaged in a “senior-level outreach campaign” to right-wing influencers to get them to shut up about Epstein. The magazine even reports that Trump himself has worked the phones, and for a time, it did seem like Fox News tried to move on to other stories. But it’s much harder to control the internet, where MAGA influencers like Benny Johnson, Charlie Kirk, and Laura Loomer can’t just ignore Epstein without their audiences getting very suspicious.

One tactic that Trump supporters have tried, with only mixed success, is repeatedly insisting that Trump’s political enemies are the ones who don’t actually want the truth about Epstein to come out. Trump was reportedly told by the DOJ that his name is in the files, but other prominent figures, like Bill Clinton, were associated with Epstein. Trump even recently called out Clinton by name, saying that people should be investigating the former Democratic president.

Jones insisted on Wednesday that the Democrats and the Anti-Defamation League were the ones who actually don’t want to discuss Epstein. And mentioning the ADL wasn’t just some random aside, as the show was promoted as a “debate” with white supremacist Nick Fuentes, a Holocaust denier who’s previously praised Adolf Hitler. Fuentes is one of the most prominent antisemites in the country and has been appearing on Jones’s show more frequently these days.

Jones and Fuentes tried to present the Epstein controversy through the lens of Israeli foreign influence by claiming Epstein was an agent of Mossad, a claim that’s never been proven. Julie K. Brown, one of the most important journalists on the Epstein beat, recently told Ross Douthat of the New York Times that she didn’t believe Epstein was engaging in sex trafficking of minors for traditional blackmail purposes and instead was just engaging in criminally predatory behavior with other powerful men because they enjoyed it. That said, Brown wants the Department of Justice to release any classified assessments of Epstein from a national security angle to hopefully learn more about any potential connections to intelligence agencies.

Fuentes kept talking about Trump with Jones, and the white supremacist demonstrated perfectly why the story is bad for Trump, even giving the president the benefit of the doubt.

“I don’t even think it’s necessarily true that Trump was on the island or that Trump was raping kids or that there’s a videotape of Trump. I don’t think that’s even likely,” Fuentes said.

“But when he has covered it up in the way that he has, and as he’s dug this hole deeper and deeper—having the DOJ cover it up, asking the FBI to look for his name, they told him his name was in there. Now he says his name was planted in there. He says the whole thing’s a hoax. You actually have to draw a negative inference and assume if he’s covering it up, there must be something there.”

Obviously, this isn’t the story Trump wants his defenders like Jones and Fuentes to be talking about right now. And it doesn’t seem like it’ll go away anytime soon.