JD Vance Attempts to Pivot Away From Epstein Talk During ‘The View’ Appearance

Vice President JD Vance was grilled during his appearance on The View, but there was one topic he didn’t seem to want to talk about: Jeffrey Epstein.

“I wanted to have full transparency,” Vance, 41, said during his Tuesday, June 16, appearance on the daytime talk show. “What I disagree with is the idea that the White House wasn’t committed to full transparency.”

The politician went on to defend President Donald Trump, who he claims “reported Jeffrey Epstein to the police.”

“[Trump] was very frustrated that the Democrats were making this about him when he was like, ‘I threw the guy out of my club,'” Vance defended. “He eventually came to say, ‘You know what, let’s just get everything out there.'”

When Sunny Hostin pushed the VP on the remaining 2.5 million unreleased documents, Vance claimed the unreleased documents were “duplicates of things that have already been released.”

“We’re not holding anything back,” he added before being cut off by Whoopi Goldberg to go to commercial break. “And let’s talk about my book. I’m here to sell books. Communion, please,” Vance said before the break.

Elsewhere in the interview, the soon-to-be father of four — who received a lackluster welcome from the studio audience — walked back his decade-old anti-Trump statements.

Vance famously referred to himself as “a never-Trump guy.” However, during his appearance on The View, he worked hard to justify some of the president’s “most controversial” statements.

“One of the things I underappreciated about Donald Trump is that so many of the things that people said about him weren’t true,” Vance claimed. “I was led to believe that Donald Trump said that all Mexicans were rapists. He never said that.”

However, Vance’s justification, that Trump said certain Central American countries “were releasing criminals into our country,” was met with backlash from the cohosts who called him out for having “no evidence” to back up his statements.

At the launch of his first presidential campaign in 2015, per the Miami Herald, Trump told the crowd that Mexican immigrants are “bringing drugs. They’re bringing crime. They’re rapists. And some, I assume, are good people.”