After Cayden McBride finishes class in Rome, Georgia, the 19-year-old goes home, opens his laptop, and starts searching. For the past few months, he has been spending hours at a time combing through the Jeffrey Epstein files on the US Department of Justice (DOJ) website, and following others online who are doing the same.
Flight logs. Transcripts. Images. Videos. The material released by the DOJ has given new insight into the crimes of Epstein, the late convicted sex offender, and into his high-profile connections.
McBride believes the Epstein files still matter, even if the headlines have moved on to the Iran war recently.
"As a Christian, I don't believe anybody should endure what these women have been through," he says. "There is so much bad stuff in these files."
McBride was a self-described "Trump guy" and "very anti-establishment". He said he would always defend the president in the belief that Trump's "Make America Great Again" (Maga) movement stood for exposing corruption. But the DOJ's delay in releasing all the files, and the perceived lack of accountability afterwards, has left him and many others disheartened with the movement, the president and especially with Pam Bondi, Trump's former attorney general.
Bondi was removed from her post just last week, to be replaced, in the interim, by her deputy Todd Blanche.
Trump has lauded Bondi for doing a "tremendous job", and Blanche denied reports that his predecessor's handling of the Epstein files had been a factor in her departure.
But McBride hailed the changing of the guard, expressing hope that there could now be renewed focus on the Epstein issue.
His wish was granted this week, from an unlikely quarter. The Epstein story came crashing back into the news when First Lady Melania Trump unexpectedly denied she had ever had a relationship with him andcalled for a congressional hearingfor his victims.
It is unclear how much that will galvanise interest, but Bondi's removal has done little to quiet the discontent amongst Trump's supporters like McBride. He thinks she needed to go because she wasn't prosecuting "the people she needed to".
He thinks there might be some "high-status arrests", but after that then other things like Iran, ICE and the midterms will, in his words, sweep the Epstein story under the rug.
Many Epstein conspiracy theorists have long counted themselves amongst Trump's most ardent supporters. They believe that Epstein's death in prison was not a suicide, as the FBI has found. And for years they have insinuated that the government was involved with some sort of cover-up, protecting powerful people whom they believe participated in his crimes.
It's a belief that has been echoed by many of Trump's closest allies and former allies, such as Vice-President JD Vance, former Congresswoman Marjorie Taylor Greene and Kash Patel, whom he tapped to lead the FBI.
As long ago as 2021, Vance tweeted: "What possible interest would the US government have in keeping Epstein's clients secret?"
During his 2024 campaign, President Trump himself told Fox News he would "go a long way" towards releasing the Epstein files.
