The president has faced pressure from his supporters to release the files about Epstein, which they believe will reveal a cover-up.
President Donald Trump told reporters that his name may have been planted in the Jeffrey Epstein files by former Attorney General Merrick Garland or former FBI director James Comey.
Trump was asked in Turnberry, Scotland, “You had said you had not been briefed that your name was in the Epstein files, doesn’t the AG have to tell you?”
The president responded, in part, “Well, I haven’t been overly interested in it. It’s a hoax that’s been built up by those, way beyond proportion. Those files were run by the worst scum on earth. They were run by Comey, they were fun by Garland, they were run by Biden. Those files were run for four years by those people.”
“The whole thing is a hoax. They ran the files. I was running against somebody that ran the files. If they had something they would have released.”
Trump also referenced discredited and uncorroborated claims in the Steele dossier, a collection of unverified intelligence reports compiled in 2016 by former British spy Christopher Steele. Commissioned as opposition research during the presidential election, the dossier contains allegations about Trump’s ties to Russia, including claims of collusion between the Trump campaign and the Kremlin, as well as salacious and compromising personal material.
He continued, “Now, they can easily put something in the files that’s a phony. As an example, Christopher Steele, wrote a book, we call the ‘fake news dossier.’ The whole thing was a fake. The whole thing was a fake. They can put things in the file that was a fake. Those files were run by sick, sick people.”
Trump was also asked again Monday about the possibility of pardoning Ghislaine Maxwell, reiterating that he is “allowed” to do so.
