How Mike Johnson Screwed Trump's Epstein Story
The speaker claimed Trump was an FBI informant working the Epstein beat
As tempting as it is to mock the idea of Donald Trump: Undercover Agent, the surprise reveal by Speaker Mike Johnson (R-LA) isn’t as absurd as it sounds. It also poses a much bigger political threat to Trump than the Beltway media seem to recognize.
Johnson’s Thursday night claim that Trump was an FBI informant isn’t as nuts as it seems. As Alternet pointed out, we already had past instances of pre-political Trump engaging with the FBI.
And the fact that Johnson and Trump even discussed this gives weight to a theory I’ve been pushing for a while now: That Trump’s primary concern is what The Epstein Files™ say about what he knew when and what he did about it.
After all, if Justice Department documents do contain new allegations of criminal behavior by Trump, we reasonably could have expected that to come out during the four years Pres. Joe Biden was in office. But if the documents address Trump’s communications with law enforcement about Epstein, that’s likely not a criminal matter to merit Democrats releasing it. But it sure as shit will be a political matter.
There are many logical problems with Johnson’s account and how it squares with Trump’s already unsquared account(s). But let’s start with the timeline problem and look at what Johnson said, with the good stuff in bold:
Johnson: "What Trump is referring to is the hoax that the Democrats are using to try to attack him. He has never said or suggested or implied — I've talked to him about this many times, many times. He is horrified. [Crosstalk]. 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. 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. The president knows1 and has great sympathy for the women who have suffered these unspeakable harms. It is detestable to him. He and I have spoken about this as recently as 24 hours ago. What he’s talking about is the Democrats who are doing this with impure motives. If they cared so much about this, why didn’t they do something during the four years of the Biden administration when the Biden DOJ had all the records? They didn’t say a word about it. Now they're doing it for political purposes. Not everybody, but a lot of them and that's what the president's frustrated about. And we all are. That they're creating a hoax just like they did with the Russian dossier because they think it's going to somehow be mud thrown on him. It's not. He has no culpability in this thing at all. The president has clean hands. He wants all the records out. He has told me that himself.”
Q: “Will he meet with the victims?”
Johnson: "I suspect he probably will, yeah. He has great compassion for them. The president has a very compassionate heart. He hates the fact that these women suffered those harms. He hates what Epstein is accused of and who he was. And when he recognized that, he realized Epstein wasn't just some sort of, you know, socialite, he was an evil person alleged to have been involved in evil schemes. And the president distanced himself — before he was president — from that because that's not who he is. And I think he's being falsely accused and maligned. And that's a frustration of all of ours. That's what he's talking about when he says the hoax."
While there’s plenty of bullshit in Johnson’s remarks, the danger for Trump is that some of them might have been true. That could mean that Trump sat for years on his suspicions that Epstein was raping children.
Trump himself has denied Johnson’s story and said Epstein’s exile was due to recruiting employees away from Mar-a-Lago. Maybe Trump realized that if he admitted cutting ties with Epstein over child rape, someone might ask whether there was anything Trump could have done other than revoke Epstein’s club membership.
But now Johnson says that Trump kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago when he first heard “the rumor” about Epstein. Except we know that Epstein wasn’t stripped of his Mar-a-Lago membership until 2007. And as I wrote earlier this summer, Trump advisor Roger Stone described Trump as being “uncomfortable with the strange ratio of men to much younger women” in an incident that happened no later than 2002.
And Stone also writes that “Trump cut Epstein and his underlings off the instant he heard about the Palm Beach investigation,” which began in 2005 and became public in 2006.
Then there’s Trump himself telling New York Magazine in 2002 that he was aware of Epstein’s proclivity for beautiful women, “many of them on the younger side.”
So when, exactly, and how, in Johnson’s account, did Trump first hear “the rumor”?
Johnson appears uninterested in accuracy, because when asked about his new FBI claim, Johnson’s office said, “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.”
So, now it’s not FBI, it’s prosecutors. And while it’s true that victims’ lawyers said Trump helped them, those were civil suits. No prosecutors!
Is it possible Johnson’s staff are just sloppy and indifferent to the distinctions here? I mean, we’ve seen their legislation.
But all the fuzziness and narrative switchbacks just underscore Trump’s central problem: We still don’t know what he knew when and what he did about it.
Johnson’s claims — which presumably have been part of his many, many discussions with Trump about this — are a mess for other reasons, too.
For one thing, if Trump told the FBI, or prosecutors, anything, when was that? Was it when Trump first heard “the rumor”? Because if he was an informant, the last thing the FBI would want Trump to do would be to sever his ties to Epstein. They’d tell Trump to get closer, get more info.
So if Trump told the FBI when he first heard, why’d he also sever ties?
And if Trump severed his own ties with Epstein when he first heard “the rumors” but didn’t tell the FBI then, or the cops, well, why not?
(I speculated earlier this summer that it was Trump who dropped the first anonymous dime on Epstein in 2004 not out of altruism, but out of pique, using knowledge about Epstein he’d had for years to punish Epstein for their rivalry over a property they both wanted. I later read that Epstein, too, believed Trump dropped that dime.)
Johnson’s primary bullshit is his claim that Trump “wants all the records out. He has told me that himself.” It’s easy to believe Trump has said that to Johnson. It’s even easier to believe Trump was lying.
In fact, as we learned this week, the White House has been lobbying House Republicans — so you’d think Johnson knows this! — against a resolution to release all The Epstein Files™ within 30 days. Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) said so publicly. So that’s a flat-out lie; Trump’s or Johnson’s or both.
An equally flat-out lie is Johnson’s evasive characterization of the “hoax” Trump keeps talking about. Johnson knows he’s full of shit about the supposed Democratic “hoax” because he doesn’t even bother to say what it is Democrats are claiming that isn’t so. He pretty much admits they’ve said nothing untrue when he explains that, “What he’s [Trump’s] talking about is the Democrats who are doing this with impure motives.”
That’s not a hoax. That’s politics.
And even that doesn’t make sense. Johnson blasts Democrats for not calling for The Epstein Files™ to be released while Biden was president. But at the time, because Biden was president, Democrats had no reason to suspect anything damning was in the files.
It was Trump himself, and his supporters, who were demanding the release. It’s Trump’s opposition and slow-walking now that’s making it look suspicious and therefore worthy of release. Are Democrats hyping it for political gain? Fuck yes. So’s The Fucking News. That doesn’t make it a hoax, kids, that makes it politics in a democracy.
Which apparently we still have because we’re still free to demand the release of the damn Epstein Files™. So release the damn Epstein Files™!
Of course it now seems quite possible that Trump, in fact, did not go to the FBI with what he knew about Epstein. Which now, thanks to Johnson, raises the question…why not?
So now it’s time to release the FBI’s Trump Files™.
TFN creator and writer Jonathan Larsen co-created Up w/ Chris Hayes and wrote for Countdown with Keith Olbermann at MSNBC, helped launch CNN’s Anderson Cooper 360° and Air America Radio, and has also worked at The Daily Show with Jon Stewart and The Young Turks.
I suspect Johnson didn’t mean to say Trump knows the women in question — though he literally said that! — and started to express the thought that Trump knows about their pain or something.
Didn’t Massie say that one of the billionaires who is on the list has been bankrolling Johnson? That would explain a lot.
I thought it was The Onion it was so nuts