A former police chief has told the FBI the US President once said of paedophile Epstein “thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this”
Donald Trump is named “more than a million times” in the unredacted Jeffrey Epstein files, US lawmakers have claimed.
The allegation came as it emerged a Florida police chief once told the FBI that the US leader once said to him, “thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this”. Senior Democrat Jamie Raskin spoke about Trump after reviewing the unreacted files, which he said cast doubt on the President’s longstanding claim that he threw the disgraced financier out of Mar-a-Lago.
The explosive claims came following the discovery of a 2019 FBI interview with former Palm Beach police chief Michael Reiter, who led the original 2005 investigation into Epstein. In a four-page summary, agents recorded the top cop’s account of a call he said he received from Trump in July 2006, as detectives probed allegations that Epstein recruited girls as young as 14 for sexualised “massages”.
According to the FBI document, “DONALD TRUMP told [Reiter] that he threw EPSTEIN out of his club. TRUMP called the [Palm Beach Police Department] to tell him ‘thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this.”
The report continues: “TRUMP told him people in New York knew EPSTEIN was disgusting. TRUMP said MAXWELL was EPSTEIN’s operative, ‘she is evil and to focus on her,’” before adding: “TRUMP told [Reiter] that he was around EPSTEIN once when teenagers were present and TRUMP ‘got the hell out of there.’ TRUMP was one of the very first people to call when people found out that they were investigating EPSTEIN.”
The alleged call has not previously been made public. Trump has repeatedly insisted that he cut ties with Epstein more than 20 years ago and expelled him from Mar-a-Lago after discovering he was poaching spa staff.
Yet the FBI account appears to contradict his claim.
After reviewing the unredacted Epstein files, Raskin said: “The idea that we could get through a meaningful fraction of them is just ridiculous. I mean, there’s tons of redacted stuff.… And [Trump’s] name, I think I put his name, and it appears more than a million times. So it’s all over the place.
“To me, this whole rollout of saying that members can come from nine to five to sit at those four computers is just part of the cover-up,” Raskin continued. He then claimed that an unredacted email he examined contradicts Trump’s account of having banished Epstein from his Florida club.
“Epstein’s lawyers synopsised and quoted Trump as saying that Jeffrey Epstein was not a member of his club at Mar-a-Lago – but he was a guest at Mar-a-Lago, and he had never been asked to leave,” Raskin said.
A Department of Justice official said the agency was “not aware of any corroborating evidence that the President contacted law enforcement 20 years ago.”
At the White House, press secretary Karoline Leavitt declined to confirm whether the call described in the FBI report took place.
Pressed by reporters, she said: “Look [that] phone call that may or may not have happened in 2006. I don’t know the answer to that question. What I’m telling you is that what President Trump has always said is that he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club because Jeffrey Epstein was a creep. And that remains true.”
Reiter, who clashed publicly with local prosecutors in 2006 over their handling of the case, later apologised to victims and coordinated with federal authorities in a separate investigation that resulted in Epstein’s controversial 2008 non-prosecution agreement.
He has not responded to requests for comment on his FBI interview. Epstein died by suicide in custody in 2019 while awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges.