House Speaker Johnson breaks with Trump, says Epstein scandal ‘not a hoax’

US House Speaker Mike Johnson said the Jeffrey Epstein scandal was “not a hoax,” directly countering President Donald Trump’s repeated attempts to downplay the issue as fresh disclosures continue to stir unrest within the Republican Party.

“It’s not a hoax. Of course not,” Johnson said in an interview with CBS News, released on Thursday.

Trump, who had known Epstein personally, has repeatedly dismissed the renewed scrutiny as “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” and called on Republicans to drop the matter. His efforts have so far failed to unite the party, which remains divided over how to proceed.

On Tuesday, Johnson said he would send lawmakers on their summer recess a day earlier than planned, partly to avoid a contentious debate over releasing more documents related to Epstein. Epstein died in a New York City jail in 2019, a death ruled as suicide by the city’s chief medical examiner.

Even so, a Republican-controlled subcommittee of the House Oversight Committee on Wednesday approved a subpoena seeking all Justice Department files on Epstein. Three Republicans joined five Democrats to back the effort, in a sign that Trump’s party was not ready to move on from the issue.

”We want full transparency. We want everybody who is involved in any way with the Epstein evils — let’s call it what it was — to be brought to justice as quickly as possible. We want the full weight of the law on their heads,” Johnson told CBS in the interview, conducted on Wednesday.

A disclosure on Wednesday about Trump’s appearance in the Justice Department’s case records threatened to deepen a political crisis that has engulfed his administration for weeks.

The Wall Street Journal reported that U.S. Attorney General Pam Bondi told Trump in May that his name appeared in investigative files related to Epstein.

With inputs from agencies