Question

Trump sending troops to LA is a distraction due to renewed scrutiny over his ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

Answer 1

Opinion. This claim can't be proven true or false because it's about what Trump was thinking when he made the decision, and we can't read people's minds. While it's true that Trump sent troops to LA and that there's been talk about his Epstein connections, saying one was meant to distract from the other is just speculation. Just because two things happen around the same time doesn't mean one caused the other. Without being inside Trump's head or having access to his private conversations, this kind of claim about his motives is really just political opinion rather than something that can be fact-checked.

Answer 2

For some context around the claim:
Trump indeed sent National Guard troops to LA in response to ICE-related protests, as reported by Reuters. The second piece refers to a now-deleted post that Elon Musk made claiming that the real reason the Epstein files hadn't been released was because Trump was mentioned in them. Such a narrative of events was spread in places like Jon Stewart's late-night talk show. 

However, there is no substantiated evidence that this military action was orchestrated as a diversion from renewed scrutiny of his connections to Jeffrey Epstein. There could be a question of the prudence of the deployment, with California officials suing the Trump administration over the events, but Trump's team is pushing a law-and-order case, with Trump saying, "If we didn’t do the job, that place would be burning down," as reported by the AP. 

Still, the motive attribution of the above claim is speculative and unsupported by any reliable source.