White House Press Secretary Karoline Leavitt has flatly rejected House Speaker Mike Johnson’s claim that President Donald Trump served as an FBI informant on child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Johnson told CNN reporter Manu Raju last week that Trump “was an FBI informant to try to take” Epstein down, although he was backtracking by Monday, saying, “I don’t know if I used the right terminology.”
The speaker’s claim reportedly perplexed the White House, which is desperate to distance Trump from Epstein, his one-time friend. “What the hell is he doing?” one senior Trump administration appointee told the Rolling Stone when asked about Johnson’s comment.
On Tuesday, Leavitt shot down the issue during her press briefing, declaring, “I can affirm that is not true.”
She continued, “I think the speaker was referring to the fact that President Trump kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago property for reasons the president has already discussed.”
Her explanation differed slightly from Johnson’s earlier attempt to walk back his remarks.
“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 said Monday, when pressed on what he had meant.
The Republican leader appeared to be alluding to comments made by Brad Edwards, a longtime lawyer for Epstein survivors.
Edwards said last week 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.
The attorney slammed Trump for changing his tune since then, noting that the president now dismisses the investigation into Epstein’s crimes as a “hoax.”
Trump and Epstein were friends from the late 1980s until a falling out in the early 2000s, before the financier’s child sex abuse was first exposed.
It was originally believed that the pair fell out around 2004 over a Palm Beach real estate deal. In July, Trump claimed he cut ties with Epstein because the financier “stole” young workers from Mar-a-Lago around 2000.
But Trump allegedly sent a lewd letter to Epstein for his 50th birthday in 2003, with a message telling him, “May every day be another wonderful secret.”
Moreover, Epstein continued to be a member of Trump’s luxury private members club until Oct. 2007, according to Mar-a-Lago membership documents seen by the authors of the book The Grifter’s Club, more than a year after he was indicted and released on bail.
