On Friday, House Speaker Mike Johnson told the world that President Donald Trump was actually an FBI informant collecting intelligence on Epstein, absolving him of any criminality. On Sunday, he admitted that he lied.
“[Trump] 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,” Johnson told reporters Friday. “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.”
Johnson’s comment, made very casually, lit up the airwaves.
“No officer i am an fbi informant tasked with smoking this weed,” one user posted ironically.
On Sunday, Johnson changed his story.
“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 office wrote in a statement to The Washington Post.
There’s a big difference between being “willing to help prosecutors” and being an actual FBI informant, which is exactly what Johnson said while surrounded by cameras and reporters.
The speaker shouldn’t be let off the hook so easily for such an absurd comment. The sitting president is only implicated in the case of a serial sexual abuser because he was acting as an informant for the FBI? Did Johnson expect us to think Trump was wearing a wire while he was hanging out with Epstein in the 1990s? And for him to introduce and walk back such a massive lie so offhandedly speaks to the ridiculous amount of deceit that is commonplace in this administration.
The Trump administration has handled the Epstein case with lies from the jump, back when Attorney General Pam Bondi said she had the Epstein files on her desk. Now we have the House speaker defending a president who thinks this is all a hoax, by promoting him to the level of secret agent.
“It was a fantastical story for about a day,” said GOP Representative Thomas Massie, who is leading the bipartisan discharge petition to force the release of the Epstein files in full. “What compelled (former career attorney) Mike Johnson to claim the President was an FBI informant?”
The post Mike Johnson Admits His Claim on Trump and Epstein Was Total Nonsense appeared first on New Republic.
