Trump has ‘private’ dinner with Rupert Murdoch at the White House amid Epstein lawsuit: report

President Donald Trump reportedly had a private dinner with Rupert Murdoch Tuesday, despite his ongoing $10 billion lawsuit against The Wall Street Journal – which is owned by the billionaire media mogul.

The pair sat down together at the White House amid a legal back and forth that has been going on for over six months, an official and a person familiar with the meal told CNN’s The Source.

The Independent has contacted the White House and Murdoch via News Corp representatives for confirmation and comment on the reports.

Murdoch, 94, owns News Corp, which operates hundreds of local, national, and international publishing outlets around the world including in the U.S.,, such as The WSJ and Fox News.

Tensions between Murdoch and Trump apparently began last July after the president launched a massive lawsuit against The WSJ over an article exposing his alleged ties to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.

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The bombshell report revealed that the president had allegedly signed a “bawdy” birthday letter to Epstein in 2003. Trump denied the claims and has not been accused of any criminal wrongdoing.

Despite the hefty suit and insistence by the publication’s lawyers that “the article is true” and the complaint is an “affront to the First Amendment,” Murdoch has apparently remained friendly with the commander-in-chief.

In September 2025, just two months after the suit was filed, the pair both attended a state banquet at Buckingham Palace in the U.K., held in Trump’s honor. One month later Murdoch and several of his key lieutenants dined again with the president at the White House.

Despite the ongoing pleasantries The WSJ has been unrelenting in its criticism of Trump and some of the administration’s policies, denouncing the president’s ongoing claims that the 2020 election was stolen from him as “nonsense” in a December editorial.

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“Mr. Trump will never admit his 2020 claims were partisan nonsense. But Republicans who care about the future could do their man a favor by refusing to keep indulging them,” the board pointed out.

As of Tuesday Trump’s war, centering on elections offices in Georgia, continues. Newly unsealed documents showed that the FBI raided an office in Fulton County and seized ballots from the 2020 presidential election in connection with a federal investigation into “deficiencies or defects” into Trump’s loss in the state.

Elsewhere other outlets under the News Corp umbrella have shown signs of questioning the administration policies, including the heavy-handed, immigration crackdown in Minnesota.

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Late last month several prominent members of Fox News, including Brian Kilmeade, the co-host of Trump’s favorite morning talk show Fox & Friends, and Sean Hannity, appeared to appeal to the president to soften operations in the wake of the killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti by federal officers in Minneapolis.

On January 26, Kilmeade implored the president multiple times to send in border czar Tom Homan to “settle things down,” which Trump announced later that day via Truth Social.

Hannity – Trump’s close confidant who has been a vocal proponent of the administration’s heavy-handed mass deportation operation – also took to the airwaves later that evening to say that ICE should stop “going into Home Depots and arresting people,” adding that it wasn’t a “good idea.”

Such shifts have occurred following a significant decline in Trump’s popularity ratings, despite his claims to the contrary, driven by public opinion on immigration enforcement and the administration’s handling of the economy ahead of the midterm elections.