House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) walked back comments in which he claimed that President Donald Trump was an FBI informant against disgraced sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
Johnson suggested Monday that he misspoke in his original remark.
“I don’t know if I used the right word,” Johnson told reporters at the Capitol. “I said, ‘FBI informant,’ but I’m not sure. I wasn’t there. This isn’t my lane.”
“I’m just repeating what is common knowledge and has been out in the public for a long time: President Trump was never a hindrance to the Epstein investigation — he was trying to assist — and that he is disgusted,” he added.
Johnson told CNN last week that Trump “was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.” But the speaker said Monday that his comments last week were referring to the long friendship between Trump and Epstein.
“I mentioned that what the attorneys for the victims have been very clear about. … He kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago when he learned about this, the allegations of just evil behavior, evil acts, and that he was assisting, participating in some way, with law enforcement to bring about an end to that,” Johnson said.
The Trump administration has, for months, been embroiled in controversy surrounding Epstein after the Justice Department and FBI released a joint memorandum indicating that Epstein did not have a client list and that he died in jail by suicide in 2019. Several high-ranking members of the Trump administration, including Attorney General Pam Bondi, FBI Director Kash Patel, and FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, had, for years, touted theories about Epstein’s list of clients and his death.
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Reps. Thomas Massie (R-KY) and Ro Khanna (D-CA) have led a bipartisan push to force a vote for a full release of the Epstein files. Last week, the House Oversight Committee released 33,000 pages of files from the DOJ related to Epstein, much of which was already public.
Trump has attempted to push his supporters to forget about the topic, claiming it to be a “Democrat hoax” and that “nobody cares” about the sex offender.