During a press conference in the Oval Office, President Donald Trump dismissed the new release of documents relating to convicted child predator Jeffrey Epstein as a "hoax" concocted by Democrats. His claims didn't pass muster after two CNN hosts conducted a prompt fact-check.
On Friday, CNN hosts Boris Sanchez and Brianna Keilar interrupted Trump's comments from the White House to make it clear to viewers that not everything the president was saying was factual. When a reporter asked Trump for his thoughts on the House Oversight Committee receiving a new tranche of Epstein files from the Department of Justice in response to a subpoena, the president said he was in favor of transparency but that some names in the files may not "deserve" to be there given the size of Epstein's rolodex.
"People shouldn't be hurt. But i'm in support of keeping it totally open. I couldn't care less," he said. "You got a lot of people that could be mentioned in those files that don't deserve to be, because [Epstein] knew everybody in Palm Beach."
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"I have said to [Attorney General] Pam [Bondi] and everybody else, give them everything you can give them because it's a Democrat hoax. It's just a hoax. The whole Epstein thing is a Democrat hoax," he continued. "So we had the greatest six months, seven months in the history of the presidency, and the Democrats don't know what to do. So they keep bringing up that stuff, but it affected them."
After Trump spoke about his meeting with Russian leader Vladimir Putin and ongoing negotiations with foreign trade partners, Sanchez and Keilar cut in to fact-check the president. Sanchez observed that Trump "notably tried to distance himself from anything related to the Epstein files," and took interest in his comments that "there could be people mentioned in those files that shouldn't be."
"He suggested again, that this is a Democratic hoax trying to detract from his accomplishments in the first eight months or so of his administration. It was actually a campaign promise that he and others in his orbit made that they would release all these files," Keilar added. "... Pretty creative, if it's a Democratic hoax, for it to have started as a Trump campaign promise."
As Keilar said, both Trump and Vice President JD Vance promised to release the full Epstein files on the campaign trail in 2024. However, the DOJ is reportedly sitting on roughly 100,000 pages of Epstein-related documents that have yet to see the light of day. Some of the unreleased evidence categorized by the FBI in 2019 reportedly includes a logbook of visitors to the convicted child trafficker's "Little Saint James" Island, which housed his private compound. Another item was described as a "document with names," which could be the rumored "client list" that Bondi has said publicly does not exist.
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Watch the segment below, or by clicking this link.