Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) said she got “a lot” of pushback from the White House over supporting a discharge petition aiming to force the administration to release all of the documents related to late, disgraced financier and convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein.
“Oh, I got a lot of pushback. I got phone call after phone call last night. They didn’t want me to sign the discharge petition. They want to focus on the oversight investigation. They hate Thomas Massie more than they can hate any Democrat, which makes no sense to me. And they don’t want to work with Democrats at all,” Greene, an ally of President Trump, said during her Wednesday appearance on Real America’s Voice “Bolling!”
Greene, who has disagreed with some of the administration’s positions before, told host Eric Bolling that she does not blame the president, but some of his staff.
“Eric, you and I both know any president is insulated and in a cone of information based on the people that work directly with him, and I don’t think they’ve informed him on what a big deal this really is,” Greene said.
The Georgia Republican, who is one of the four members of the House GOP conference who signed on to the petition spearheaded by Rep. Thomas Massie (R-Ky.), said she told Trump Wednesday morning to host Epstein’s survivors at the White House.
“I want him to be the hero and champion of this issue,” she said. “And I want him to fight for these women, because I know him to be a fighter.”
Trump dismissed the pressure to release the files regarding Epstein, arguing it is a push to distract from the achievements of the administration.
“But it’s really a Democrat hoax, because they’re trying to get people to talk about something that’s totally irrelevant to the success we’ve had as a nation since I’ve been president,” Trump said on Wednesday.
Greene said Wednesday, “It’s not a hoax, because Jeffrey Epstein is a convicted pedophile. That takes away the whole hoax things. It’s not a hoax. It’s not a lie.”
Lawmakers hosted Epstein victims on Capitol Hill, where they urged Congress to act. Some of the Epstein accusers spoke with members of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, which is conducting its own probe regarding the Epstein case, on Tuesday behind closed doors for over two hours.
House GOP leadership is urging members not to sign onto the petition, which currently has the support of four Republican lawmakers, and to back the investigation done by the Oversight Committee. The panel released a large batch of files it got from the Justice Department after issuing a subpoena for materials related to Epstein. Democrats on the panel said that most of the files have already been made public.
“Helping Thomas Massie and Liberal Democrats with their attention-seeking, while the DOJ is fully supporting a more comprehensive file release effort from the Oversight Committee, would be viewed as a very hostile act to the administration,” a White House official told multiple news outlets this week.
“Every Republican should be able to sign on to this, and that’s the real hoax that they’re afraid to sign on to it, because somebody who, you know, who is a real coward from one of the Trump admin officials, came out and called this a hostile act against the Trump administration,” Greene said. “I take very big offense to that, because I put my life and my fortune on the line fighting to get that man elected.”
