A newly released Department of Justice document from a 2019 FBI interview with former Palm Beach Police Chief Michael Reiter describes a phone call in which Donald Trump allegedly contacted Reiter about Jeffrey Epstein — and praised the investigation into him.
According to the document, Trump told Reiter:
"Thank goodness you're stopping him, everyone has known he's been doing this."
Trump also allegedly told the police chief that Ghislaine Maxwell "is evil and to focus on her." Reiter told the Miami Herald the call took place in July 2006. The document describes Trump as "one of the very first people to call when people found out that they were investigating" Epstein.
White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt addressed the document at Tuesday's press briefing — and turned it into a message for the assembled press corps.
As reported by Breitbart, Leavitt did not claim certainty about the call's occurrence, but she made clear what it means if the account is accurate:
"Look, it was a phone call that may or may not have happened in 2006. I don't know the answer to that question. What I'm telling you is that what President Trump has always said is that he kicked Jeffrey Epstein out of his Mar-a-Lago club because Jeffrey Epstein was a creep."
"And that remains true, and this call, if it did happen, corroborates exactly what President Trump has said from the beginning."
Then she went further — directly addressing the reporters in the room and the years of insinuation they've carried:
"And I'm sure many of you, when you read that alleged FBI report, probably thought to yourself, 'Wow, this really cracks our narrative that we've been trying to push about this president for many years.' So we're moving on from that."
The details here matter more than the spin — from any direction. The FBI sat down with Reiter in 2019. The former police chief described a sitting reality-TV host and real estate mogul calling him unsolicited to express relief that Epstein was being investigated, to name Maxwell specifically, and to confirm that he'd already expelled Epstein from Mar-a-Lago.
This wasn't a man being dragged into the conversation. It was someone volunteering information to law enforcement's attention, through the local police chief leading the investigation.
For years, media outlets have treated any past association between Trump and Epstein as a damning thread worth pulling. Photos at parties. A quote about Epstein liking women "on the younger side." The suggestion, always just below the surface, that proximity equaled complicity.
What never received equal airtime was the other side of that ledger — the decision to cut Epstein off, the willingness to engage with investigators. The document released by the DOJ doesn't settle every question about those years. But it does introduce something that years of coverage conveniently omitted: a contemporaneous account, from a law enforcement official, describing Trump actively supporting the investigation.
The broader media handling of the Epstein saga has been, to put it charitably, selective. The story implicates powerful people across industries, political parties, and continents. Yet the press's interest in who knew what — and when — has always seemed to fluctuate depending on whose name comes up.
When the name is Trump, every connection is treated as a smoking gun. When the names belong to figures more friendly to establishment media, the coverage turns cautious, procedural, and deferential. The same outlets that spent years mining Trump's social history for Epstein connections have shown remarkably little curiosity about others on the flight logs.
That asymmetry is exactly what Leavitt was pointing at. She didn't need to name it explicitly. Everyone in that briefing room understood.
The DOJ's release of this document comes amid the broader push to make Epstein-related materials public — a move that has broad public support and that the current administration has backed. Every new document that surfaces reshuffles the deck. Some will be damning for certain individuals. Some will be exculpatory. The public deserves to see all of it, not just the pieces that confirm a preferred narrative.
This particular document doesn't close the book on anything. But it does something the press should have done a long time ago: it complicates a story that was never as simple as they wanted it to be.
The facts don't always cooperate with the framing. That's the thing about releasing the documents — they talk back.
