One of MAGA’s feistiest congresswomen has yet again knifed her own party over the Donald Trump administration’s handling of developments in the Jeffrey Epstein sex trafficking case.
“I told them, ‘You didn’t get me elected. I do not work for you; I work for my district,” Marjorie Taylor Greene told the New York Times in a wide-ranging interview from her Capitol Hill office Monday.
Greene claims to have made the comments after receiving word from a White House aide that backing an ongoing, bipartisan congressional push for further disclosure on the Epstein case, as she consistently has since earlier this month, would be received as a “very hostile act.”
The firebrand Georgia representative apparently called the aide right back to tell them she wouldn’t stand for it. “We aren’t supposed to just be whipped on our votes because they’re telling us what to do with this scary threat, or saying ‘We’ll primary you,’ or that we won’t get invited to the White House events,” she explained.
Greene is currently just one of four Republicans—alongside GOP Reps. Thomas Massie, Nancy Mace and Lauren Boebert—to have signed a bipartisan “discharge petition” to force a House vote on whether to demand the Justice Department release further documents pertaining to Epstein’s crimes.
President Trump has long courted far-right conspiracy theorists who believe Epstein and his co-conspirator Ghislaine Maxwell were members of an international pedophilic cabal. His administration’s findings earlier in June that Epstein’s 2019 death in police custody was a suicide, and that the disgraced financier kept no “client list” of uber-wealthy accomplices, has prompted ferocious backlash from even the most ardent among his support base.
His own relationship with Epstein is now also back in the spotlight, with the Wall Street Journal reporting on a birthday card Trump is alleged to have sent the pedophile in 2003, featuring a crude sketch of a nude woman and a bizarre imagined exchange between the two men about “enigmas” and “wonderful secrets.” The president is suing the newspaper for $20 billion.
Herself a longstanding proponent of conspiracy theories about Epstein’s crimes and death, Greene has now emerged as an aching thorn in the side of the Trump administration over the issue.
She’s claimed the White House’s handling of recent developments in the case has crossed a “red line” for even staunch MAGA supporters like herself, repeatedly torn into her party colleagues for their perceived inaction on the matter, begged with Trump himself to meet with the sex trafficker’s survivors, and even threatened to read out the names of Epstein’s alleged accomplices in Congress should she ever get hold of them.
While Greene has thus far been at pains to avoid anything resembling outright criticism of the Trump himself, still referring to him as “my favourite president” in her Monday sitdown with the NYT, it would appear even that line in the sand is beginning to fade for her.
“It changes when someone goes into office,” she told the newspaper. “Any president—they’re in a cone of information that they’re being provided. That’s a serious factor happening.”
“If I can move President Trump out of there, I think he’s on the right page,” she added. “I think it’s a matter of who is talking in his ear.”
It’s not just the Epstein case that Greene’s taking issue with either, speaking with the NYT on a range of other policy areas where she’s parted with the GOP over the past several months, from the decision to bomb nuclear facilities in Iran and wavering on providing Ukraine with weapons to efforts at expanding the AI sector and even, perhaps most controversially, the White House’s stance on the war in Gaza.
“You can’t un-see dead children,” she said of her decision earlier this year to become the first member of the Republican Party to describe the conflict as a genocide against the Palestinian people. “That’s not fake. It’s not war propaganda. They’re not actors. And journalists getting murdered and blown up? I don’t see that happening in any other war, and that’s shocking to me.”
The Daily Beast has reached out to the White House for comment.
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