She asked why nobody was talking about the Epstein files anymore. A former Israeli diplomat, a Republican congressman, and 52 percent of likely voters in one recent poll apparently had the same question.
Whoopi Goldberg went on live television Tuesday and said what plenty of Americans have clearly been asking. She asked why nobody was talking about the Epstein files anymore. She asked why Savannah Guthrie’s missing mother had fallen off the front page. Then she connected the dots. “This is meant to get us so worked up that we are unable to see anything else.”
Sunny Hostin summed it up in five words: “Very wag the dog feeling.”
🔥🚨BREAKING: Whoopi Goldberg just created a conspiracy on The View that suggests President Trump started conflict with Iran war “to distract” from Nancy Guthrie’s disappearance.
Whoopi: “Why haven’t we been talking about Savanah Guthrie,
This is mean to get us so worked up… pic.twitter.com/t0sWBHBh81
— Dom Lucre | Breaker of Narratives (@dom_lucre) March 12, 2026
The right-wing media machine cranked up immediately. Crazy Whoopi. Unhinged Whoopi. Conspiracy theorist Whoopi. The usual.
Then Al Jazeera spoke to Shaiel Ben-Ephraim, a former Israeli diplomat and analyst at Atlas Global Strategies, who pointed to a plunge in Google search interest in the Epstein files after the Iran war began. Not a little. A lot.
What Was Actually Happening Before the War
Rewind six weeks. On Jan. 30, the Justice Department said it had published nearly 3.5 million pages in response to the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which Trump signed on Nov. 19. What followed was not abstract. Goldman Sachs chief legal officer Kathy Ruemmler resigned. Paul Weiss chairman Brad Karp resigned. Larry Summers said he would leave Harvard at the end of the school year. Peter Attia stepped down as a CBS News contributor. Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor and Peter Mandelson were arrested in Britain-linked investigations tied to the widening Epstein fallout.
On March 6, as Operation Epic Fury dominated coverage, the DOJ released additional Epstein records it said had been incorrectly coded as duplicates. Those records included FBI interview notes with a woman who accused Trump of assault when she was a minor after being introduced to him by Epstein. The allegations remain uncorroborated, and the White House called them baseless.
By the time most people looked up from the Iran coverage, the new file drop had barely registered.
The Receipts Whoopi Didn’t Have on Air
Ben-Ephraim told Al Jazeera that search interest in the Epstein files had plummeted since the war began, and that the conflict was, at least temporarily, succeeding in taking up Congress’s time and the media’s attention.
A Newsweek report on a poll of 1,272 likely voters, conducted March 6 to 8, found 52 percent believed Trump was at least partly motivated to take military action against Iran to distract from the Epstein files.
That is not some fringe internet fever dream. It is the majority view among the likely voters in that poll.
And the bipartisan company Whoopi is keeping on this is worth noting. Republican Congressman Thomas Massie, who led the effort to force a House vote on releasing the files, said, “Bombing a country on the other side of the globe won’t make the Epstein files go away.” Marjorie Taylor Greene has also broken with Trump and Republicans over how the Epstein files were handled, which makes the backlash to Whoopi look even more selective.
The Part That’s Actually Crazy
Here is what’s genuinely strange about the pile-on Whoopi is getting.
She did not claim Trump personally engineered a war in a secret room to bury a news cycle. She said, on a daytime talk show, that a major war can bury other major stories, and asked whether that was convenient. That is not a conspiracy theory. That is a media observation.
The search collapse, the poll numbers, the timing of the March 6 release, and Massie’s own statement do not prove motive. They do show that Whoopi was voicing a suspicion shared well beyond daytime TV. Her instinct was not invented out of thin air. It was politically inconvenient.
Getting loudly mocked for raising a question that a majority of likely voters in one recent poll are also raising is a strange kind of punishment.
What Got Buried
The Epstein files are still there. NPR reported that even after the March 6 release, 37 pages of related records still appeared to be missing from the public database. The interview summaries are now public. The high-profile resignations happened. None of that went anywhere.
It just stopped trending.
If Whoopi is crazy for noticing that, what does it mean that a former Israeli diplomat, a Republican congressman, and a majority of likely voters in one recent poll noticed it too?
And who, exactly, benefits from the conversation being about whether Whoopi is losing her mind, instead of what is still in those files?
