TPM: Intriguing theory about Mike Johnson's "informant" remark [View all]

[allegorical oracle]

Talking Points Memo - By Josh Marshall
|September 6, 2025

Yesterday Speaker Mike Johnson was on the Hill talking to reporters running Trump defense on the Epstein files. It sounds like pretty standard stuff — and then he says this: “When he first heard the rumor he kicked [Epstein] out of Mar-a-Lago. He was an FBI informant who tried to take this stuff down.”

snip

Well, this reminded me of something I saw in one of those recent interviews with journalist Michael Wolff, who has been out in the media letting everyone know that he has some large quantity of taped interviews with Epstein from during Trump’s first presidency but before his rearrest and eventual suicide.

Wolff said that Epstein suspected that Trump was the guy who ratted him out to the authorities. So maybe some version of Johnson’s claim isn’t that far-fetched. But of course this isn’t actually exonerating at all. In fact, it implicates Trump about as badly as anything we’ve heard to date.

Epstein was trying to buy a South Florida estate. He brought Trump along to see it one time. A short time later Epstein found out that Trump had gone behind his back and placed a higher and ultimately successful bid on the property. He’d snatched it out from under him with a much higher bid. The problem was that Trump’s entire empire in 2004 was teetering on the edge of bankruptcy. It made no sense that Trump was coming up with $41 million to buy this property. Epstein suspected that Trump was acting as a front for a Russian oligarch as a money-laundering scheme. And in fact Trump did purchase and flip the estate two years later to a Russian oligarch named Dmitry Rybolovlev for $95 million, or a profit of over $50 million dollars.

To sum up: Epstein may have planned to turn djt in for money laundering... djt turned Epstein in on pedo charges first.

https://talkingpointsmemo.com/edblog/is-this-the-hidden-part-of-the-trump-epstein-drama