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President Donald Trump said, “I’m all for it,” when asked by a reporter if he would sign a bill that would force the Justice Department to release all its files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein.
Trump made the remark in the White House on Monday as the House of Representatives is preparing to vote on the bill Tuesday afternoon.
“We have nothing to do with Epstein. The Democrats do. All of his friends were Democrats,” Trump said. “All I want is I want for people to recognize a great job that I’ve done on pricing, on affordability, because we brought prices way down, but they go way lower. On energy, on ending eight wars and another one coming pretty soon, I believe. We’ve done a great job, and I hate to see that deflect from the great job we’ve done. So I’m all for it.”
When asked again about signing the bill if it reaches his desk, Trump added, “Sure I would.”
HOUSE GOP BRACES FOR EPSTEIN FILES VOTE AS CONCERNS REMAIN DESPITE TRUMP’S GREEN LIGHT
“Let the Senate look at it. Let anybody look at it. But don’t talk about it too much, because honestly… it’s really a Democrat problem,” Trump also said. “The Democrats were Epstein’s friends, all of them. And it’s a hoax. The whole thing is a hoax, and I don’t want to take it away from really the greatness of what the Republican Party has accomplished over the last period of time.”
GOP lawmakers who spoke with Fox News Digital Monday evening said they would vote for the bill and were optimistic their colleagues would as well — though many of them said they still had concerns about how it was written.
TRUMP CALLS ON HOUSE REPUBLICANS TO VOTE TO RELEASE EPSTEIN FILES: ‘WE HAVE NOTHING TO HIDE’
It comes after House Speaker Mike Johnson, R-La., who had been against the bill but had been pushing parallel transparency efforts in Epstein’s case, said he hoped it would undergo material changes when it reached the Senate to give more protection for innocent people whose names may appear in the files against their wishes.
The legislation is coming to the House floor on Tuesday afternoon via a mechanism called a discharge petition led by Rep Ro. Khanna, D-Calif., and Rep. Thomas Massie, R-Ky.
In a Truth Social post on Sunday, Trump urged House Republicans to vote in favor of releasing the documents.
Trump also argued that if the Democrats “had anything,” it would have surfaced prior to last year’s presidential election.
“Nobody cared about Jeffrey Epstein when he was alive and, if the Democrats had anything, they would have released it before our Landslide Election Victory,” Trump said. “Some ‘members’ of the Republican Party are being ‘used,’ and we can’t let that happen. Let’s start talking about the Republican Party’s Record Setting Achievements, and not fall into the Epstein ‘TRAP,’ which is actually a curse on the Democrats, not us. MAKE AMERICA GREAT AGAIN!”
Fox News Digital’s Elizabeth Elkind and Sophia Compton contributed to this report.
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