Podcaster Joe Rogan criticized President Donald Trump for how his administration handled the Epstein files and for not protecting the victims of the sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein.
“It’s crazy,” Rogan said on his latest show, discussing the botched release of the Epstein files. “The whole thing is crazy because like… why have you protected people?”
When talking about a torture video that was supposedly sent to Epstein by Sultan Ahmed bin Sulayem, a major businessman from Dubai, Rogan asked, “Why is his name redacted?
Why would your name be redacted if you’re not a victim?”
“Like, this is what’s crazy about all this,” Rogan continued. “How come you redact some people and you don’t redact other people? Like, what is this? This is not good. None of this is good for this administration.”
Rogan also responded to Trump’s claim that the Epstein files were part of a “Democrat-inspired hoax.”
He said, “It looks terrible for Trump when he was saying that none of this was real. This is all a hoax. This is not a hoax. Like, did you not know? Maybe he didn’t know, if you want to be charitable, but this is definitely not a hoax. And if you’ve got redacted people’s names and these people aren’t victims, you’re not protecting the victim. So, what are you doing?”
“And how come all this s–t is not released?” he added. While the Justice Department has released over 3.5 million files from the investigation into the late pedophile, it is in possession of roughly 6 million files in total. Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche said that the second and most recent file dump would be the last.
Rogan, whose podcast regularly tops the charts on YouTube, Apple, and Spotify, supported Trump in the 2024 election because he was worried about Vice President Kamala Harris’ running mate, Minnesota Governor Tim Walz.
Trump appeared on The Joe Rogan Experience shortly before the election to try and influence undecided younger male voters.
However, Rogan has since criticized Trump, accusing him of causing chaos through ICE raids across the U.S. to divert attention from the administration’s delay in releasing the Epstein files.
On a January episode of Rogan’s podcast, comedian Ehsan Ahmad pointed out that the Trump administration hadn’t released any new files “for a minute,” but that the outrage had been “drowned out by everything else that’s been going on with like Somalians and the ICE shooting.
It feels like that’s completely drowned out anything about it.”
“I think some of that’s on purpose,” Rogan whispered in response.
Rogan had previously criticized ICE’s aggressive tactics, comparing them to those of the Gestapo, Adolf Hitler’s secret police.
“Are we really gonna be the Gestapo?” Rogan said on his podcast in January. “‘Where’s your papers?’ Is that what we’ve come to?”
He also criticized the president for comments he made following the murder of beloved director Rob Reiner and his wife Michele.
“Look, there’s no justification for what [Trump] did that makes any sense in a compassionate society. It’s no different than people that were celebrating when Charlie Kirk got shot,” Rogan told Shane Gillis in December.
Rogan has also seemingly been reckoning with the fact that the man he endorsed for president may not be fit for office, agreeing with Tom Segura in December when the comedian said Trump was “losing it.”
“I think everybody does when you get to a certain age,” Rogan replied.
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