An oft-painted rock south of the Wyoming-Colorado border is demanding the release of the Epstein files.
So are Wyoming leaders on the political left and right.
Haystack Rock on U.S. Highway 287 wears many faces, as people paint it with roving sentiments like “F.U. Rams,” “Go Pokes,” or other messages ranging from memorials to birthday wishes to political outrage.
On Wednesday afternoon, someone painted “RELEASE EPSTEIN FILES” on the boulder's highway-facing side, in all-capital red letters on a jagged white backdrop, fringed with deep blue.
Laramie-based attorney Travis Helm was headed back from a visit to Fort Collins (where he had a good gyro and ran errands) when he noticed it.
The rock said nothing about the Epstein files when he drove out in the morning, he said. It bore a weeks-old image of some stick figures at that point.
But in the grey afternoon, the demand blazed on the boulder's face.
“So I flipped around to take a picture of it,” said Helm. He shared the photo to his Facebook page.
Before Jeffrey Epstein’s 2019 death, which authorities blame on suicide despite irregularities in the record, he was accused of sex trafficking minors and conspiring to abuse dozens of teenage girls between 2002 and 2005.
The release of the “Epstein files” or the names of clients he served, has been a longtime demand of the political right amid theories that Epstein trafficked to powerful, prominent customers.
While still campaigning for his second term in 2024, President Donald Trump said he’d have “no problem” releasing more official files relating to Epstein, including the “client list.”
But this summer Trump’s Department of Justice walked back reports that Epstein kept a “client list” and declined to make more of the files public.
The war cry to release the list expanded to the political Left.
Former top Trump adviser Elon Musk, CEO of X, posted to the platform June 7 that Trump was “in the Epstein files.”
The Wall Street Journal later ran a story that sourced anonymous sources, saying Trump was in the files but not necessarily implicated in wrongdoing.
Release The Kraken
Helm wants the administration to release the list.
The “why” of that is “a dumbfounding question,” said Helm.
“Certainly, if numbers of children are being harmed, everyone should be concerned about that,” he said.
He referenced facts and reports that Trump had socialized with Epstein or, as Helm put it, “so intimately connected with Epstein.”
“There’s been a whole contingency on the right claiming that’s the most important thing in the world, and the thing the most wanted to get to the bottom of,” he said. “It seems like a full-spectrum, bipartisan concern.”
Helm speculated that Trump is “so enmeshed in the Epstein files that it is impossible to redact him out of them,” and said Trump’s “own words” show “he has very problematic views and relations with women of all ages."
Probably Not On It Though
Helm, a persistent critic of Trump, is in unexpected company.
Wyoming Republican Party Chair Bryan Miller declined to speak on behalf of the party, but as an individual, he agreed that the government should release the list.
Where Miller diverges from Helm’s view is, Miller doesn’t think the list implicates the president in wrongdoing.
“If there’s anything that’s been negative regarding the president in the Epstein files, I think the previous administration would have released them,” said Miller.
President Joe Biden’s administration investigated and prosecuted Trump’s reaction to his 2020 election loss, leading to a U.S. Supreme Court ruling immunizing the president for possible crimes committed during “official acts.”
“They will come out,” said Miller. “My opinion is, the Epstein files are of great national interest and they should be released for public scrutiny.”
State Rep. Tom Kelly, a libertarian-leaning Republican out of Sheridan, agreed on both points.
“Unless there’s something involving imminent national security, people should know about it,” said Kelly. “And I highly doubt there’s anything in the Epstein files that would sacrifice national security.”
It would be irresponsible as a public official, Kelly added, for him to share his own “blanket, baseless speculation” as to why the files have not been released.
Deliver On Your Promises
State Rep. Karlee Provenza, a Laramie Democrat with noteworthy impact in Wyoming, said the Epstein list has evolved into a symbol of “powerful people committing crimes with no accountability.”
“I am not shocked that people have taken that frustration out on a rock in a highly trafficked area,” she wrote in a Thursday text message to Cowboy State Daily.
That can happen when a candidate runs his campaign around an issue and doesn’t deliver on his promises, she said, adding that she agrees the files should be released — “in a way that protects victims and only victims.”
Now that the rock is painted, “maybe they should put the rock on a truck and ship it to Washington, D.C., to put on the lawn of the White House so the right people see it,” said Provenza.
First Amendment Billboard
The Northern Water Conservancy District of Colorado might resist that, however. The district bought the land where Haystack rock sits in the mid-1980s, and staffers include it as a stop on tours, NPR News, Colorado Stories reported in 2019.
Northern Water's communications director in that story called the rock “a First Amendment billboard through the years.” He guessed people have been painting it for more than a century, but said he’d never actually witnessed someone painting it.
Helm said he’s driven that road for 20 years and never witnessed a paint-over either. He always assumed people were painting it at night.
The Libertarian Party of Wyoming, speaking via direct message from its official Facebook page, figures Trump is in the files. And Democrats didn't release it when they held the White House "because they are too," the party page added.
"People are discouraged. People are angry. People don't trust the government, they don't trust political parties, and they don't trust the very system."
Trump's refusal to release it "reinforces the systemic corruption that has taken over our entire political system."
Wyoming Democratic Party Chair Lucas Fralick did not return a voicemail request for comment by publication time.
Neither did Wyoming Freedom Caucus Chair Rep. Rachel Rodriguez-Williams, R-Cody.
Clair McFarland can be reached at clair@cowboystatedaily.com.
