The woman who was once Donald Trump’s fiercest supporter on Capitol Hill has torn into the president for what she says was the fatal error of branding the Jeffrey Epstein scandal a “hoax.”
“He fought the hardest to stop these files from being released,” Marjorie Taylor Greene told podcaster Owen Shroyer on Sunday’s edition of The Owen Report. “It became a massive political problem—biggest political miscalculation in Donald Trump’s career was calling this a hoax.”
Late last year, before her resignation from the House of Representatives, the Georgia congresswoman helped spearhead a bipartisan push to force Trump into signing legislation mandating the release of an estimated 6 million Justice Department documents on Epstein’s crimes.
Those efforts came amid renewed scrutiny of Trump’s own once-cozy relationship with the pedophile and disgraced financier, who died in a Manhattan jail in 2019 while awaiting trial on sex trafficking charges.
Amid that pressure, Trump, who campaigned partly on a pledge for full transparency on the late sex trafficker’s crimes, has increasingly dismissed the case as a “hoax” perpetrated by the Democratic Party.
Greene was formerly a diehard Trump loyalist, but had drifted increasingly from the MAGA fold by the time he signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act, criticizing the administration on issues ranging from the strikes on Iran to inaction on the expiry of healthcare subsidies for poor families.
The last straw for Greene reportedly came last summer, after Trump refused to back her for a prospective gubernatorial run in her home state.
She announced her resignation from Congress in November, which took effect in January. In the intervening period, Greene further accused the president of fuelling threats against both her life and that of her son.
Trump, for his part, branded her “Marjorie ‘Traitor’ Green” in a vitriolic post on Truth Social. When she shared with him one of the death threats she had subsequently received, Greene claims he told her she had only herself to blame.
In Sunday’s podcast interview, the former Georgia congresswoman has since revealed more of her exchanges with the president in the weeks leading up to her resignation.
“He was very angry at me back in September,” she told Shroyer. “He said, ‘Marjorie, my friends are going to get hurt.’”
“I think it’s hard for a lot of people because they’re so good-hearted, and they have been a believer in Donald Trump for like over 10 years now,” she went on. “I certainly have always been one of those people, too. And they have a hard time believing that, that he would, oh, turn his back on them.”
The Daily Beast has contacted the White House for comment on this story.
The post MAGA Exile Marjorie Taylor Greene Shreds ‘Biggest Miscalculation’ of Trump’s Career appeared first on The Daily Beast.
