The White House Situation Room is misleadingly named. It’s not a room, but instead a whole complex, staffed by more than 100 intelligence and national security staff, and it is decked out with enough top-end technology to conduct and monitor a global war. The most sensitive and secretive operations of the US Government are managed from here.
According to an extensive new report from The New York Times, on Wednesday, 13 August 2025, the Situation Room hosted an extensive discussion during which US Vice President JD Vance argued for the release of claims about Donald Trump and the alleged abuse of a woman’s nipples.
Senior Trump officials were meeting to discuss a crisis of their own making, over the release of the Epstein Files – something the campaign had promised, repeatedly, throughout 2024, only to find themselves reluctant to do so once in government, not least because of Trump’s own longstanding association with Epstein.
They had spent months trying to deflect and deny their way out of the story, and to change the narrative, but their usual tricks were not working. The Trump base was determined to see the files and would not be moved off the issue. The August meeting was convened to discuss how the White House should handle the Epstein crisis.
Vance soon seemed to find himself outnumbered in the meeting, according to The New York Times. He pushed for releasing as many of the files as possible, as quickly as possible, even when they mentioned Trump. This quickly turned to a specific claim that had arisen in a previous Epstein-related case, that a woman claimed “Trump had a predilection for nipples and that he had aggressively flicked and sucked hers”.
Vance apparently insisted the White House should release documents including this unproven claim, because it had been released before, claiming that Trump himself would not care. He was reportedly quickly overruled by White House chief of staff Susie Wiles, who insisted that the US President would, in fact, care about that.
Vance was overruled and the White House only eventually published the Epstein Files after being forced to do so by Congress – and even months later, there are multiple ongoing rows over redactions and withheld documents.
In response to The New York Times report a White House spokeswoman said that Trump was innocent in all Epstein-related matters, adding that “by releasing thousands of pages of documents, cooperating with the House Oversight Committee’s subpoena request, signing the Epstein Files Transparency Act and calling for more investigations into Epstein’s Democrat friends, President Trump has done more for Epstein’s victims than anyone before him.”
On paper, Vance is the second most senior figure in the federal government, Trump’s right-hand man, just one heartbeat away from the presidency. But increasingly, he seems like a marginal figure in Trump’s administration, often out of line with the views of the president and his senior officials.
Vance’s version of “America First” is incredibly hostile to any kind of US involvement overseas. He did not want to send US money or weaponry to Ukraine, even in the face of a full-scale invasion by Russia. He was against the war on Iran, even though he had been publicly saddled with the responsibility of trying to end it with a peace deal – a public show of power by Trump, putting Vance in his place.
But Vance also seems to have been sidelined by many of Trump’s top team over Epstein.
He was one of the most aggressive of Trump’s team during the 2024 campaign in promising to release the documents – not least because many Trump influencers shared conspiratorial beliefs that Epstein was much more closely associated with Democrats than Republicans.
Vance became such an evangelist on the issue that Trump’s top officials – people who work for a president who boosted the QAnon conspiracy theory and who falsely claimed the 2020 election was “stolen” – started worrying that Vance had gone too far down the conspiracy rabbit hole, believing Epstein was at the centre of some elite cabal. Vance had somehow managed to be too much even for Trump’s White House.
Maybe there is more at play here. Vance is not exactly the most consistent of operators. He was once a vocal Trump critic, who likened the US President he now works for to Hitler. But when he realised that supporting Trump was essential to his political career, he swapped sides.
Now, Vance is eyeing up a presidential run in 2028, and Trump is deeply unpopular. It is perhaps not a bad time to be publicly at odds with Trump on certain issues and to be visibly on the periphery of others. Maybe, all of this could work in Vance’s favour.
The reasons almost don’t matter. Maybe Vance has become a full-blown conspiracy theorist, or maybe he’s simply on manoeuvres against his boss’s interests. Either way, we now have a much clearer picture of why Vance is sitting on the sidelines.
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