Georgia Republican Marjorie Taylor Greene explained her growing feud with Donald Trump on Sunday while questioning whether the president was remaining true to his MAGA brand and suggested that a foreign government could be involved in covering up the Jeffrey Epstein story.
She was on CNN’s State of the Union Sunday morning as a growing divide within the MAGA base threatens to split apart Trump’s coalition in the first meaningful way since the January 6 attack.
On CNN, Greene told host Dana Bash that Trump’s embrace of a foreign policy-focused agenda at the expense of centering domestic issues like rising inflation and cost-of-living price hikes amounted to an abandonment of the “America First” agenda he ran and won on.
"What the American people voted for with MAGA was to put the American people first,” said Greene. “Stop sending foreign aid, and stop being involved in foreign wars... they very much deserve to be put first. Cost of living is far too high. Health insurance is completely out of control, and that’s – those are two issues I’ve been very vocal on for months and months now, long before Republicans were shocked when those big losses came on this past Tuesday’s election.”
Bash responded: "Sounds like you are saying that he is not representing the MAGA movement that he started?"
"Promoting H-1B visas to replace American jobs, bringing in 600,000 Chinese students to replace American students’ opportunities in American colleges and universities; those are not America first positions,” said Greene. “Continuing to, really, travel all over the world doesn’t help Americans back at home.”
She added that she wanted to see “nothing but a constant focus in the White House on a domestic agenda”.
The congresswoman also took questions about the administration’s ongoing refusal to release the Jeffrey Epstein investigation files, now a scandal that has enveloped the president and led to new insinuations of his involvement in Epstein’s child sex trafficking ring after the publication this week of new emails sent to and from Jeffrey Epstein, released by a congressional committee investigating the government’s handling of the case. Trump has repeatedly denied any wrongdoing.
In those emails, Trump tellingly explained to Fire and Fury author Michael Wolff that Trump “knew about the girls”. The White House and Trump have denied that the president had any knowledge of Epstein’s illegal activities when they were friends.
On Sunday, Greene explained to CNN that she believed it was possible that a foreign government was putting pressure on the Trump administration to cover up further releases of information pertaining to Epstein’s crimes. Referencing reports in Drop Site News, Greene suggested that Epstein’s extensive communications with former Israeli defense minister Ehud Barak could suggest that Epstein was an Israeli intelligence asset.
"I think the right question to ask is, ‘was Jeffrey Epstein working for Israel?’" Greene told Bash.
Pressed by CNN to say whether she believed that it was Israel directly pressuring Trump on the matter of Epstein, Greene backed off.
“No,” she responded.
“I simply just asked, out loud, ‘is there a foreign government’ — it could be any foreign government — but is a foreign government pushing to cover this up?” Greene said.
Bash shot back that it was “pretty obvious” Greene’s suspicions fell on Israel, given her mention of AIPAC in a tweet about the story.
“I’m questioning that government in particular, and I’m questioning any other foreign government [that could be involved],” said Greene.
The president has been consumed by controversy over the Epstein issue since early last week, when a government shutdown ended, the House of Representatives returned to work, and the chamber’s members resumed their push for the files.
Every Democrat in the chamber has rallied behind the push for the government to release the totality of its gathered information on Epstein, who was convicted for soliciting an underage girl as a prostitute in 2008 in a “sweetheart deal” orchestrated by his defense attorney, Alan Dershowitz, and a prosecutor who would go on to become Donald Trump’s Labor secretary in his first term.
This comes despite Trump’s insistence that the issue is more damaging to Democrats like Bill Clinton, who has been out of office for decades. And while Epstein’s connections to Democrats (including Larry Summers, the former Obama-era economic director) are significant, his ties to Trump are even more well-documented.
Over the past week, Democrats on the House Oversight Committee released a handful of emails obtained from Epstein’s estate which mention Trump specifically. The committee’s Republicans, in response, released a batch of 20,000 more. The batch of emails date from 2011 to 2019, the year Epstein was found dead in his cell in a secure Manhattan federal detention center, as he awaited trial on a much more serious set of charges.
Epstein wrote in one email that he knew “how dirty Donald is,” while in others he called Trump “f***ing crazy” and “borderline insane”. The sex trafficker and pedophile also boasted in one message that he was "the one able to take him down.”
Trump’s furious response has elicited even further suspicions, both among his MAGA base and the wider American public.
The president has personally targeted four Republican members who’ve defied him in Congress on the issue by signing their names to a discharge petition that will force a vote on a bill that would require the federal government to release all of its files pertaining to the investigation. Trump could still veto the bill if it reaches his desk, but in the meantime he’s shifted back and forth between lobbying and outright threats as he now seeks to punish those wayward Republican members: Greene, Thomas Massie, Lauren Boebert and Nancy Mace.
Against Greene, he’s openly soliciting primary challengers. The president has already made similar statements about Massie; both Boebert and Mace told reporters that Trump called them ahead of the discharge petition reaching the necessary 218 signatures to force a vote. They denied that Trump openly threatened them, with Mace also denying that the president threatened to withhold his endorsement as she runs for governor.
In his rare statements about the issue, Trump has insisted that any mentions of him in the files are a distraction, or were planted by Democrats.
“This is another Russia, Russia, Russia Scam, with all arrows pointing to the Democrats,” Trump said this week.
“Epstein was a Democrat, and he is the Democrat’s problem, not the Republican’s problem!” the president wrote on Truth Social. “Ask Bill Clinton, Reid Hoffman, and Larry Summers about Epstein, they know all about him, don’t waste your time with Trump. I have a Country to run!”
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt addressed the issue at a news conference this week, and claimed that Trump kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago “for being a creep to his female employees[.]” The president himself gave a different story in the past year; his breakup with Epstein occurred because Epstein was hiring young women, including sex trafficking victim Virginia Giuffre, away from the club where they were employed. It has also been claimed that the two fell out over a real estate deal.
“The Democrats selectively leaked emails to the liberal media to create a fake narrative to smear President Trump,” Leavitt said.
