Is Donald Trump Lying? POTUS Told Police 'Everyone Knew' of Epstein Despite Denials

History has a nasty habit of resurfacing in the least flattering form: not as a grand revelation, but as a scrap of bureaucracy, a four-page summary, a remembered phone call. And this week, it is Donald Trump's voice reported second-hand, preserved in an FBI account that is doing the haunting.

An FBI report summarising a 2019 interview with former Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter records Reiter saying that Trump rang him in July 2006, during the original Epstein investigation, to offer encouragement. The line attributed to Trump is blunt: 'Thank goodness you're stopping him; everyone has known he's been doing this.' The rhetorical move is clear: by speaking as if the matter were common knowledge, Trump positions himself as the candid outsider rather than someone who may have lingered too close to the fire.

Trump has repeatedly denied any knowledge of Jeffrey Epstein's crimes and has said he cut off contact with the financier more than 20 years ago. He has also claimed he booted Epstein from Mar-a-Lago after learning Epstein was poaching employees from the club's spa. Yet the Reiter account, as captured by the FBI, reads less like a staffing gripe and more like a knowing pat on the back to police for finally 'stopping' a man everyone allegedly 'knew' about.

Donald Trump and the Phone Call Problem

Reiter's detectives began investigating Epstein in 2005 amid allegations he recruited girls as young as 14 for 'massages' that turned sexual. The FBI summary says Trump told Reiter that 'people in New York knew EPSTEIN was disgusting' and that Ghislaine Maxwell was Epstein's 'operative,' adding: 'she is evil and to focus on her.' Reiter also told investigators Trump said he had been around Epstein once when teenagers were present and 'got the hell out of there.'

There is an obvious question here, and it is not especially comfortable: if 'everyone' knew, what exactly did Trump know and how did he know it? The White House, for its part, has not met that question head-on. A Department of Justice official told ABC News the agency was 'not aware of any corroborating evidence that the President contacted law enforcement 20 years ago.'

Then came the verbal fog machine. White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt, asked directly about the apparent discrepancy, replied: 'Look [that] phone call that may or may not have happened in 2006. I don't know the answer to that question,' before repeating that Trump kicked Epstein out because he was 'a creep.' It is a peculiar posture: not quite denial, not quite confirmation, more the politics of plausible fuzziness.

Donald Trump, Old Quotes and an Unavoidable Pattern

RadarOnline, which amplified the newly surfaced FBI interview, also pointed back to Trump's own version of the Mar-a-Lago split an account he gave reporters last July. Trump said 'People were taken out of the spa, hired by him. In other words, gone,' adding: 'I didn't know that,' before describing how he warned Epstein, 'Listen, we don't want you taking our people,' and later ordered, 'out of here.' The problem is not that this story is impossible; it is that it feels like a self-portrait carefully airbrushed to keep the uglier details off-frame.​

RadarOnline also reproduced Trump's now-infamous 2002 remark about Epstein: 'I've known Jeff for 15 years. Terrific guy. He's a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.' In 2002, it was the kind of sleazy, wink-wink bravado that powerful men used to get away with. After everything known about Epstein, it reads less like banter and more like a cultural confession.​

And the proximity, documented in bits and pieces, does not vanish just because the White House would prefer it to. At Maxwell's 2021 trial, RadarOnline notes a witness known as 'Jane' testified Epstein took her to meet Trump at Mar-a-Lago when she was 14, while also stating no misconduct was alleged against Trump. The same report says flight logs submitted in that proceeding indicated Trump flew on Epstein's plane seven times, sometimes with family members including Marla Maples and their daughter Tiffany.​

Against that backdrop, the administration has leaned hard on a broader warning: that the Justice Department's Epstein document release included public tips that 'may contain fraudulent or inaccurately submitted images, documents, or videos.' The DOJ statement also said some documents include 'false and sensational allegations against President Trump' submitted to the FBI just before the 2020 election, adding: 'these claims are baseless and untrue.' That caution is sensible any large dump of raw submissions invites rubbish but it does not neatly explain away an FBI summary of a named lawman's account of his own actions.​

What cannot be ignored is the moral asymmetry of it all: Trump wants credit for cutting Epstein off, wants applause for spotting the 'creep,' and yet if Reiter's account is accurate also wants us to believe he was merely an appalled bystander in a world where 'everyone' somehow already knew.