One Republican congressman from Georgia, hoping to get President Donald Trump’s endorsement for next year’s U.S. Senate race, recently told a constituent he believed Trump was named in the Department of Justice’s (DOJ) unreleased files about convicted child predator Jeffrey Epstein.
According to a Tuesday Washington Examiner article, an audio clip from a Republican event earlier this month captured Rep. Mike Collins (R-Ga.) saying he thought Trump was mentioned in the Epstein files, but only in an innocent way. Collins is a two-term congressman from Georgia.
A constituent asked Collins at a Muscogee County Republican Party event in August: “Regarding the Epstein files, do you think Trump is in there?”
Collins replied, “Yeah, sure he’s in there! Because he’s the one telling the FBI about it. He’s the one that kicked the guy out of Mar-a-Lago, and then called the FBI. Yeah, he’s in there.”
The constituent then asked, “But what’s going to happen? I mean, are you going to vote to release [the files]?”
Collins answered, “Oh, we need to release them. I have no problem releasing them,” but added that judges should decide how to release the documents, with redactions to protect Epstein’s victims.
Attorney General Pam Bondi had told Trump in May that he was mentioned in the DOJ’s unreleased Epstein evidence. Earlier this year, when the FBI went through the files, they were instructed to “flag” Trump’s name whenever it appeared, according to Senate Judiciary Committee ranking member Dick Durbin (D-Ill.).
Although Collins said it’s up to judges to release the files, the Trump DOJ could still make public the estimated 100,000 pages of Epstein documents it holds. ABC News reported in July that the unreleased evidence includes a logbook of visitors to Epstein’s private island and a “document with names,” which might be the rumored “client list” Bondi has said does not exist.
