Marjorie Taylor Greene says Trump’s stance on Epstein files is “a huge miscalculation”
Washington- Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said Friday that President Trump’s opposition to releasing records from the federal investigation into convicted sex offenders Jeffrey Epstein is a “huge miscalculation”. In an exclusive interview on “CBS Mornings,” Greene said she didn’t think the president had anything to hide, noting that some of Epstein’s victims had said Mr. Trump “did nothing wrong.”
Greene, of Georgia, was among four House Republicans who joined all Democrats in sign a discharge petition it forces a vote in the House on a measure requiring the Justice Department to release documents related to its investigation of Epstein. The vote is expected next week.
Mr. Trump called the focus on Epstein a “hoax” pushed by Democrats to deflect responsibility for the case. government shutdownwhich was the longest in US history and ended on Wednesday.
“Some weak Republicans have fallen into their clutches because they are soft and stupid,” he wrote Friday on Truth Social. “Epstein was a Democrat, and that’s the Democrat’s problem, not the Republican’s! Ask Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman and Larry Sommers about Epstein, they know everything about him, don’t waste your time on Trump. I have a country to run!”
Hours later, he posted again, calling on the Justice Department and the FBI to investigate Epstein links to prominent Democrats and financial institutions.
But Greene told “CBS Mornings” that she didn’t understand Mr. Trump’s opposition to releasing the Epstein information.
“I think it’s a huge miscalculation, and I really stand with women, and I think they deserve to be the ones we’re fighting for,” she said.
Greene said she has spoken with many of Epstein’s victims and that the president has not been accused of any wrongdoing.
“I think women and 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 women, they say Donald Trump did nothing wrong.”
Giuffre, Epstein’s most high-profile accuser, death by suicide in April. She said she was approached by Epstein associate Ghislaine Maxwell and hired to give Epstein massages in 2000, just before he turned 17. At the time, Giuffre was work at the Mar-a-Lago spaMr. Trump’s South Florida club. Giuffré wrote in his memoirs that she met Mr. Trump once at Mar-a-Lago and said he “couldn’t have been friendlier.”
Separate from efforts to push the Justice Department to release its files on Epstein, the Republican-led House Oversight and Reform Committee has been investigating the federal government’s handling of the Epstein investigation and Maxwell.
This week, the panel released more than 20,000 pages of documents received from Epstein’s estate, including SMS and email exchanges with disgraced financier that reference to Mr. Trump.
In an email from Epstein to author Michael Wolff in January 2019, Epstein wrote: “Of course he knew about the girls when he asked Ghislaine to stop,” referring to Mr. Trump.
In another email from Epstein to Maxwell in April 2011, he wrote: “I want you to realize that this dog that didn’t bark is Trump…Virginia spent hours at my house with him, he was never mentioned.”
THE published emails and text messages by the Oversight Committee, on which Greene serves, provides insight into Epstein’s contacts with high level people. They include Steve Bannon, a former adviser to Mr. Trump; Kathryn Ruemmler, a senior Goldman Sachs executive who served as legal counsel to former President Barack Obama at the White House; and a range of personalities from business, entertainment and academia.
Green said the documents offer the public “a very interesting view of a world that most of us have never seen.”
“It’s sort of like a network of global affairs, of commercial relationships, of very high and powerful people, of 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 ultimately served 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 committed suicide in a Manhattan Correctional Facility while awaiting his trial.
