Speaker Mike Johnson appeared to walk back his statements on Trump working as an FBI informant in the Epstein case.
Last week CNN reporter Manu Raju asked Speaker Johnson why President Trump keeps calling the Epstein case a hoax.
“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 said to reporters on Thursday.
Johnson: What Trump is referring to is the hoax that the Democrats are using to try to attack him. 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. 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. The president knows and has great sympathy for the women who have suffered these unspeakable harms. It’s detestable to him. 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. They didn’t say a word about it. Now, they’re doing it for political purposes. Not everybody, but a lot of them, and that’s what the President’s frustrated about, and we all are, that they’re creating a hoax, just like they did with the Russian dossier, because they think it’s going to somehow be mud thrown on him. It’s not. He has no culpability in this thing at all. The president has clean hands. He wants all the records out. He has told me that himself.
WATCH:
In a statement to the Washington Post, Speaker Johnson clarified his comments on Trump working as an FBI informant on the Epstein case.
“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,” Johnson’s statement read.
