Speaker Mike Johnson on Monday revised his claim last week that President Donald Trump was an “FBI informant” in the Jeffrey Epstein case, telling reporters Monday that he possibly didn’t use the “right terminology.”
“What I was referring to in that long conversation was what the victims’ attorney said more than a decade ago,” Johnson said, adding that Trump “kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago” and was generally helpful in law enforcement investigations of the convicted sex offender.
“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,” Johnson told reporters Monday.
A spokesperson for Johnson also suggested last week that the speaker wasn’t revealing that Trump was an FBI informant. The White House declined to comment at the time.
Johnson told reporters Thursday that Democrats had “impure motives” for seeking to release Justice Department records related to Epstein and said Trump was actually “an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.” Trump has made no such claim publicly and no evidence has emerged to support the claim of law enforcement cooperation.
“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 Johnson spokesperson said Friday of the speaker’s comments.
On Monday, Johnson said he was simply “recounting what others have said.”
“The president and I have talked about the Epstein evils many times. He’s as disgusted by it as everybody else. He has long had a history of acknowledging that, and he has said repeatedly he wants everything to come out, all credible information, everything for the American public to decide.”
Yet Trump has continued to flummox many House Republicans by insisting that the push for more Epstein transparency is a “Democratic hoax” and that the Justice Department has already supplied all the necessary documents.
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