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The White House is throwing everything it’s got at making people talk about anything but Jeffrey Epstein, including a murderer, the Nobel Peace Prize, and trade deals with a whopping three countries.

They were all floated Wednesday by Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt at a press briefing that wound up being almost entirely about the 2016 presidential election. But the path Leavitt took to get there suggested her goal was to say whatever it would take to get people to pay attention to President Donald Trump’s greatness rather than any unanswered questions over his administration’s handling of the Epstein files. As The Wall Street Journal reported mere hours later, Trump’s name appears in the files “multiple times.”

Taking to the podium appearing frazzled, Leavitt opened with a message she said Trump had for the families of victims of the “brutal murder case in Ohio,” quickly correcting herself to say she actually meant the murder case “in Idaho,” in which Bryan Kohberger had just been sentenced to four life sentences for the grisly murders of four college students in 2022.

Apparently seizing on discontent in the high-profile case over Kohberger’s refusal to explain his motives, Leavitt told reporters, “If it were up to the president, he would’ve forced this monster to publicly explain why he chose to steal these innocent souls.”

Ditching her somber tone, Leavitt visibly perked up as she praised Trump’s accomplishments “in just six months.” She rattled off a list that included getting “native-born American workers” more jobs, initiating mass deportation, signing the “largest tax cuts for the middle class,” and securing the “lowest murder rate on record.”

Also, she said, “The president has already received three different Nobel Peace Prize nominations for his peace-making efforts.”

After that positive note, Leavitt moved on to what reporters were really there to hear about: Barack Obama. Describing the president who left office more than eight years ago as a cartoon villain, Leavitt said the Trump administration had “shocking new evidence” that Obama “went to great and nefarious lengths” to destroy his successor.

Spy chief Tulsi Gabbard, the source of these latest claims against Obama, then took to the podium to present her evidence, all of which she’s been feverishly pushing out on social media with snazzy infographics in recent days after announcing she’d referred her findings to the Justice Department for possible criminal prosecution.

But she also took aim at Trump’s rival in the 2016 election, Hillary Clinton, claiming Russia had dirt on the Democratic candidate including “possible criminal acts” and DNC emails warning of her “psycho-emotional problems” and “uncontrolled fits of anger,” as well as a reliance on “heavy tranquilizers.” Democratic officials “suppressed” this information during the 2016 election, Gabbard claimed, in a conspiracy she said amounts to a “historic scandal.”

She brushed off a reporter’s question about why she was essentially beating a dead horse: Clinton lost the election, and a bipartisan Senate Intelligence Committee investigation in 2020 concluded there was no political interference in the 2016 election. A separate Justice Department investigation drew the same conclusion.

“Look at the evidence and you will know the truth,” she said.

Her comments came after she declassified more documents targeting Obama on Wednesday, the latest tranche of what she says is “irrefutable evidence” of a “yearslong coup” against Trump. Many of her most brazen claims appear to leave out key facts or conflate two completely separate issues. She has pointed to an imagined discrepancy between two different intelligence reports as evidence of conspiracy, for instance, with one finding that the Kremlin did not “hack” the election and the other concluding Russia had waged an “influence campaign” during the election. Both these things are true, but Gabbard appears to have conflated cyberattacks with more hands-off influence campaigns.

Asked by a reporter if she might be trying to ingratiate herself with Trump by attacking Obama, Gabbard dodged the question before Leavitt took over the podium and lashed out at the reporter, accusing the media of constantly trying “to sow distrust and chaos … and it’s not working.”

White House Uses Murderer to Distract From Epstein Scandal

White House Uses Murderer to Distract From Epstein Scandal