House Speaker Mike Johnson claimed President Donald Trump acted as an “FBI informant” on Jeffrey Epstein.
Johnson was questioned Thursday by CNN reporter Manu Raju about how the president has been using the term “hoax” frequently in regard to Epstein. This, Johnson argued, was not about downplaying Epstein’s abuse of underage girls.
“What Trump is referring to is the hoax that the Democrats are using to try to attack him,” Johnson said.
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“He has never said or suggested or implied—I’ve talked to him about this many times, many times. He is horrified. It’s been misrepresented,” Johnson said. ”He’s not saying that what Epstein did is a hoax. It’s a terrible, unspeakable evil. He believes that himself. When he first heard the rumor, he kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago. He was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.”
When asked to confirm the claim that Trump was an “FBI informant,” a spokesperson for Johnson sent the Daily Beast the following statement: “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.”
The White House has previously said Trump kicked Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club after his 2006 sex trafficking indictment, though that took over a year to take effect, according to The Grifter’s Club: Trump, Mar-a-Lago, and the Selling of the Presidency.
Epstein had a slap-on-the-wrist plea deal in 2007. Former U.S. attorney Alex Acosta said that was because he had been told that Epstein “belonged to intelligence.” Acosta would later become Trump’s secretary of labor.
In July, Trump told reporters that he grew apart from Epstein after he learned he was hiring workers from Mar-a-Lago.
“When I heard about it, I told him, I said: ‘Listen, we don’t want you taking our people—whether it was spa or not spa—I don’t want you to take our people,’" Trump said. “And he was fine, and then not too long after that, he did it again. And I said: ‘Out of here!’”
Trump said nothing then about being an FBI informant.
Johnson’s remark came the day after some of Epstein’s victims went to Capitol Hill to urge lawmakers like himself to vote to release files related to the sex offender, who at one point claimed to be Trump’s closest friend.
“The president knows and has great sympathy for the women who have suffered these unspeakable harms. It is detestable to him,” Johnson insisted.
“He and I have spoken about this as recently as 24 hours ago. What he’s talking about is the Democrats who are doing this with impure motives. If they cared so much about this, why didn’t they do something during the four years of the Biden administration when the Biden DOJ had all the records?”
Johnson added that Trump “hates the fact that these women suffered those harms.”
“He hates what Epstein is accused of and who he was. And when he recognized that, when he realized Epstein wasn’t just some sort of socialite, he was an evil person and alleged to have been involved in evil schemes, and the president distanced himself, before he was president, from that, because that’s not who he is,” he said.
“And I think he’s being falsely accused and maligned, and that’s a frustration of all of ours. That’s what he’s talking about when he says the hoax.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
