Marjorie Taylor Greene says Trump’s stance on Epstein files is “a huge miscalculation”
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Washington — Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said Friday that President Trump’s opposition to releasing files from the federal investigation into convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein is a “huge miscalculation.” In an exclusive interview on “CBS Mornings,” Greene said she doesn’t believe the president has anything to hide, noting that some of Epstein’s victims have said Mr. Trump “has done nothing wrong.”
Greene, of Georgia, was among the four House Republicans who joined all Democrats in signing on to a discharge petition that forces a vote in the House on a measure compelling the Justice Department to release materials related to its probe into Epstein. The vote is expected next week.
Mr. Trump has slammed the focus on Epstein as a “hoax” pushed by Democrats to deflect the blame for the government shutdown, which was the longest in U.S. history and ended Wednesday.
“Some Weak Republicans have fallen into their clutches because they are soft and foolish,” he wrote on Truth Social on Friday. “Epstein was a Democrat, and he is the Democrat’s problem, not the Republican’s problem! Ask Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, and Larry Sommers about Epstein, they know all about him, don’t waste your time with Trump. I have a Country to run!”
A few hours later, he posted again, calling for the Justice Department and FBI to investigate Epstein’s ties to prominent Democrats and financial institutions.
But Greene told “CBS Mornings” she doesn’t understand Mr. Trump’s opposition to releasing the material related to Epstein.
“I think it’s a huge miscalculation, and I truly just stand with the women, and I think they deserve to be the ones that we’re fighting for,” she said.
Greene said she has spoken with many of Epstein’s victims, and the president has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
“I believe the women and the women have said over and over again that Donald Trump did nothing wrong,” she said. “Even Virginia Giuffre said it under oath and she wrote it in her book. And so if we listen to the women, they say Donald Trump has done nothing wrong.”
Giuffre, the most high-profile of Epstein’s accusers, died by suicide in April. She said she was approached by Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell and hired to give Epstein massages in 2000, just before she turned 17. At the time, Giuffre was working at the spa at Mar-a-Lago, Mr. Trump’s South Florida club. Giuffre wrote in her memoir that she met Mr. Trump once at Mar-a-Lago, and said he “couldn’t have been friendlier.”
Separate from the effort to push the Justice Department to release its files on Epstein, the GOP-led House Oversight and Reform Committee has been investigating the federal government’s handling of the investigation into Epstein and Maxwell.
This week the panel released more than 20,000 pages of records it received from Epstein’s estate, which include text and email exchanges with the disgraced financier that reference Mr. Trump.
In one email from Epstein to author Michael Wolff in January 2019, Epstein wrote, “Of course he knew about the girls as he asked ghislaine to stop,” referencing Mr. Trump.
In another email from Epstein to Maxwell in April 2011, he wrote, “I want you to realize that that dog that hasn’t barked is trump.. virginia spent hours at my house with him ,, he has never once been mentioned.”
The emails and text messages released by the Oversight panel, on which Greene sits, provide a look into Epstein’s contacts with high-profile people. Among them are Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump; Kathryn Ruemmler, a top executive at Goldman Sachs who served as White House counsel to former President Barack Obama; and an array of figures in business, entertainment and academia.
Green said the documents offer the public a “very interesting view into a world that most of us have never seen.”
“It’s kind of like a web of global affairs, business connections, very high and powerful people, foreign leaders,” she said. “And it’s just an interesting world. And even the Intel community.”
Mr. Trump and Epstein ran in the same social circles in New York and Florida from the late 1980s to the early 2000s. But the president said they had a falling out around 2004.
State and federal authorities investigated Epstein between 2005 and 2006. In late 2007, federal prosecutors reached a deal with Epstein that allowed him to avoid federal charges in exchange for pleading guilty to two state prostitution charges and serving an 18-month prison sentence. He ended up serving less than 13 months and was released in 2009.
Epstein was later indicted by a federal grand jury in New York in 2019 on sex trafficking charges. He died by suicide in a Manhattan correctional facility while awaiting trial.
