Tucker Carlson Trashes Ben Shapiro for ‘Absurd’ Epstein Comments

Tucker Carlson ripped fellow conservative Ben Shapiro on Friday night over Shapiro’s defense of the Trump administration’s handling of the Jeffrey Epstein files.

On Sunday, Axios obtained and published the contents of a memo from the Department of Justice and the FBI, which concluded that the late child sex trafficker did not have the long-rumored “client list” of powerful figures many believe he kept. The memo also restated the DOJ’s conclusion that Epstein committed suicide in a Manhattan jail cell in 2019.

President Donald Trump has bristled at questions about the findings this week, asking one reporter, “Are you still talking about Jeffrey Epstein?”

Many Trump supporters who held out hope that Trump would expose some rich and powerful people as pedophiles have expressed outrage, bafflement, or both. Others, however, have defended the administration.

“I don’t have any reason to believe those people are lying to me, and they have better information than I do,” Shapiro said on Wednesday. “All I can do, rationally speaking, from my own perspective, is say that I believe them.”

Shapiro’s comments irked Carlson, who appeared at the conservative Student Action Summit in Tampa on Friday night.

“I watched Ben Shapiro yesterday,” he began, prompting some boos from the crowd. Carlson then dialed up the sarcasm. “No, before you boo him, I thought he made a really solid point. He’s like, ‘It happened a long time ago. Who cares? And by the way, we should trust the government and whatever the bureaucrats tell us. And by the way, it’s wrong to ask a lot of unauthorized questions.'”

Carlson dropped the sarcasm and said, “I just wanna go on the record to say that, no, that’s absurd. And it’s exactly the kind of thinking that I personally voted against in the last election.”

The Trump administration’s about-face has been a stunning development considering the administration’s top law enforcement officials – Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and Deputy FBI Director Dan Bongino – pledged full transparency on the Epstein case. On Friday, Patel and Bongino were reportedly considering resigning if Bondi remains as attorney general.

Elsewhere at the summit, Carlson’s former Fox News colleague Laura Ingraham also expressed skepticism of the administration’s handling of the Epstein files.

“How many of you are satisfied?” she asked. Not surprisingly, the answer turned out to be nobody in the crowd.

Watch above via C-SPAN.