US House Speaker Johnson says Epstein case ‘not a hoax’

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WASHINGTON (Reuters) -Republican House of Representatives Speaker Mike Johnson said the Jeffrey Epstein scandal was “not a hoax” in an interview released on Thursday, as the case continued to stoke turmoil within President Donald Trump’s party.

Trump has denounced the furor over his late friend, a disgraced financier and convicted sex offender as “the Jeffrey Epstein Hoax” and urged his fellow Republicans without success to drop the issue.

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

Johnson said on Tuesday he would send lawmakers home a day early for a five-week summer recess to avoid a political fight over whether to make public additional files on Epstein, who hung himself in a New York City jail in 2019, according to New York 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.

(Reporting by Doina Chiacu; Editing by Daniel Wallis)