Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-Ga.) has made one of the most damaging accusations of the year against President Donald Trump. She says Trump personally directed then-Attorney General Pam Bondi to keep the Epstein files buried. And she says he did it flat out, with no room for misinterpretation.
Greene joined “The Shannon Joy Show” on Tuesday to discuss her now-infamous public break with Trump. Trump had labeled her a “traitor” for demanding the release of the files tied to the late convicted sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. What Greene revealed on that podcast has since sent shockwaves through Washington and reignited one of the most politically charged transparency fights in recent memory.
“He had his administration, the White House, telling [House Speaker Mike] Johnson and [Senate Majority Leader John] Thune, ‘Stop this, do not pass any resolution to release the Epstein files,’” Greene told conservative podcaster Shannon Joy. She spoke with a directness that left little room for doubt. The claim places Trump at the very center of the effort to suppress public access to the files.
She went further, implicating Trump directly in his instructions to the nation’s top law enforcement official.
“He told Pam Bondi at the DOJ — no matter what you think of Pam Bondi — he flat out told her, ‘Do not release the Epstein files,’” Greene said. “He was blocking everybody.”
To understand how significant this accusation is, it helps to go back to where the story began. Epstein died behind bars in a Manhattan federal jail in August 2019, in what officials ruled an apparent suicide, while he awaited trial on federal sex trafficking charges. His death, and his well-documented relationships with some of the most powerful people on Earth, fueled years of speculation about who else may have been involved in his crimes.
The promise of a so-called “client list” became central to public demands for accountability. One prominent administration official had already suggested the public would get answers about Epstein after Trump returned to the White House. Bondi herself fanned those expectations in February 2025, claiming the list was “sitting on my desk right now” and promising full transparency. She later reversed course entirely, saying her words had been misconstrued and that no such list existed, a reversal that drew immediate outrage from both sides of the political aisle.
According to Greene, the reason for that sudden reversal may have had everything to do with a private conversation between Bondi and Trump. Bondi reportedly told Trump in May 2025 that his name is all over the files. Almost immediately after that disclosure, Trump began calling it a Democratic “hoax,” a dramatic shift in tone that did not go unnoticed.
Despite that public messaging, enormous bipartisan pressure eventually forced Trump’s hand. He signed the Epstein Files Transparency Act on November 19, 2025, amid enormous bipartisan pressure, which passed the House by a stunning vote of 427 to 1. The law required the Department of Justice to publish all unclassified records from the Epstein investigation in a searchable, downloadable format. But what was ultimately released was riddled with heavy redactions, leaving the public with more questions than answers.
The House Oversight Committee recently subpoenaed Bondi for a deposition about her role in the incomplete release of the files. But she did not comply, arguing the subpoena had no legal force since she was no longer serving as attorney general. An NPR investigation later found that dozens of pages related to sexual abuse accusations had been quietly removed or withheld from the public database entirely, deepening suspicions that the release was never meant to be complete.
Joy asked Greene directly on Tuesday whether she believes Trump, rather than Bondi, was the true architect of the suppression effort.
“I know he did,” Greene replied. “And I don’t have any knowledge of him and Pam Bondi’s personal conversations, but I know he was telling everyone not to release the files. And his reasoning was, is people are going to get hurt, is what he said. He kept saying that.”
Greene said Trump’s public persona and his private behavior were two entirely different things.
“He was publicly saying it’s a Democrat hoax… saying all this stuff and shaming people,” she said. “But behind the scenes, he was telling all of us, he was telling Mike Johnson, he was telling everybody, telling Pam Bondi, ‘People are going to get hurt.’”
Greene had first hinted at all of this in a New York Times profile published in December 2025. She revealed at the time that Trump called her “to voice his displeasure” after she threatened to publicly name every one of Epstein’s co-conspirators if the DOJ failed to act. That phone call, she now makes clear, marked the beginning of the end of their relationship.
She described the moment their relationship broke down for good during Tuesday’s interview.
“When he had really had it with me, because I wouldn’t take my name off the discharge petition and I was publicly saying over and over again, ‘Release the Epstein files,’ he told me, ‘My friends will get hurt,’” Greene recalled. The warning was personal. Trump was not talking in abstractions.
“He told me, ‘People you know, Marjorie, people at Mar-a-Lago. They’re going to get hurt,’” she said.
Greene did not let that go without a fight. She pushed back directly, and her response was pointed.
“And I said, ‘People have already gotten hurt. There’s over 1,000 women that have been raped by Jeffrey Epstein — and are accusing others.’”
Greene acknowledged that she had long assumed the only wrongdoers connected to Epstein were on the Democratic side of the aisle. She said the Epstein survivors she had spoken with personally told her Trump had done nothing wrong. That belief made her shock all the more striking when he flat-out refused her repeated pleas for transparency on the case.
“And then, you saw, everybody saw, how it unfolded,” she said.
What unfolded was a story about a president who ran on government accountability and then used every lever of executive power to prevent Americans from seeing documents his own attorney general had promised to release. The House Oversight Committee is still fighting for answers. Bondi is still refusing to testify. And the files that were released remain so heavily redacted that they reveal almost nothing of substance. The cover Greene once helped maintain is now the cover she is actively tearing apart, one interview at a time.
