Joshua Partlow and Mariana Alfaro at WP:
House Speaker Mike Johnson (R-Louisiana) on Sunday backed off his claim that President Donald Trump was an FBI informant in the case of sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
While Trump has said that he kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago, his members-only club in Florida, he has also recently called the latest demands for the release of more information on the Epstein case a “Democrat hoax that never ends.”
Last week, Johnson told reporters on Capitol Hill that Trump cares deeply about the crimes Epstein committed and said that Trump “was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.”
On Sunday, his office released a statement modifying that claim.
“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,” the statement from Johnson’s office read.
Emily Brooks and Mike Lillis at The Hill:
The debate will resume immediately this week, since an Oversight panel subpoena gave the Epstein estate a Monday deadline to deliver a host of documents that could shed light on the elite associations maintained by the disgraced financier, who died by suicide in 2019 in a jail cell where he was awaiting trial on charges of sex trafficking.
The list of records sought by the committee includes Epstein’s will, the travel logs for his private plane, anything resembling a client list, and a notorious “birthday book” assembled by Maxwell when Epstein turned 50 in 2003. That leather-bound volume reportedly contains a lewd note written by Trump when he was still a private citizen in New York, which the president has denied.
