House Speaker Mike Johnson is scrambling to dial back his bombshell claim that President Donald Trump served as an FBI informant on child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
In an attempt to defend the president’s repeated dismissal of the investigation into Epstein’s crimes as a “hoax,” Johnson said on Thursday, ”He’s not saying that what Epstein did is a hoax. It’s a terrible, unspeakable evil. He believes that himself.”
Johnson went on to repeat Trump’s oft-repeated account of booting Epstein from Mar-a-Lago before adding, “He was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.”
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Johnson’s claim that Trump was an informant for the FBI, offered without evidence or context, raised more questions than it answered, prompting Raju to intercept Johnson on Monday to press him on what he had meant.
“Alright, alright, I know,” the speaker said, apparently having anticipated the question. “What I was referring to in that long conversation was what the victims’ attorney said. More than a decade ago, President Trump kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago. He was one of the only people, or the only prominent people ... that he was willing to help law enforcement go after this guy.”
Johnson continued, “So the president was helpful in that,” adding, “I don’t know if I used the right terminology, but that’s common knowledge, and everybody knows that. So this is much ado about nothing.”
Asked whether Trump, 79, had told him about being an informant, Johnson exclaimed, “No! And I said I was recounting what others have said.”
The 53-year-old Louisiana congressman claimed he had no information about whether Trump had ever been asked to wear a wire.
“I was not breaking news there, OK? What I’m trying to emphasize is that the president is as disgusted about this as everyone is,” Johnson said.
Trump and Epstein were friends from the late 1980s until a falling out in the early 2000s.
Johnson’s office had previously walked back his claim in a statement to the Daily Beast.
“The Speaker is reiterating what the victims’ attorney said, which is that Donald Trump—who kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago—was the only one more than a decade ago willing to help prosecutors expose Epstein for being a disgusting child predator,” a spokesperson for Johnson said.
Roughly a dozen Epstein accusers gave emotional accounts outside the Capitol Wednesday about the abuse they suffered at the hands of Epstein and his accomplice, Ghislaine Maxwell.
Brad Edwards, a longtime lawyer for several victims, urged the president to “be on the side of the victims and stand with us” during the event. He said that Trump had helped him with his investigation into Epstein in 2009, just after the financier was sentenced to 18 months in prison for his crimes with minors as part of a slap-on-the-wrist plea deal.
“He didn’t think it was a hoax then,” Edwards said. He did not say whether Trump had helped law enforcement as Johnson claimed.
Johnson’s perplexing claim, which had also confused the White House, Rolling Stone reported, came as the survivors pushed for a vote in the House to release all the Epstein files.
GOP Rep. Thomas Massie has filed a discharge petition to force a vote on the Epstein Files Transparency Act, which he has sponsored, but only four of his Republican colleagues have signed on so far, with the rest of the support coming from Democrats.
The White House has pushed back on the legislation, and Republican House leadership introduced its own measure to direct the House Oversight Committee to continue its investigation.
Massie slammed the resolution as a “bill that does nothing, and then tries to pull the wool over the eyes of the American people.”
