A former Palm Beach, Florida, police chief who investigated Jeffrey Epstein in the mid-2000s told the FBI he received a call from Donald Trump at the time saying, “thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” according to an FBI account of an interview with the ex-police chief in 2019.
The Miami Herald was the first to report on the FBI document.
President Trump has repeatedly denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and has said he cut off contact with his former friend more than 20 years ago. Trump has also claimed he removed Epstein from Mar-a-Lago after discovering Epstein was poaching employees from the club’s spa.
The police chief’s name — Michael Reiter — is redacted from the document on the Department of Justice website, but details in the FBI account align with previously public information about Reiter’s role in the investigation that began in 2005.
Reiter’s detectives were investigating Epstein for allegedly recruiting girls as young as 14 to provide massages that turned sexual.
The information about Trump’s alleged call appears as one part of a four-page FBI report summarizing Reiter’s testimony in October 2019, two months after Epstein’s death.
“DONALD TRUMP told [Reiter] that he threw EPSTEIN out of his club. TRUMP called the [Palm Beach Police Department] to tell him ‘thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,’” the FBI report states.
A source familiar with the timing said the alleged call occurred in July 2006, around the time details of the police investigation became public.
“TRUMP told him people in New York knew EPSTEIN was disgusting. TRUMP said MAXWELL was EPSTEIN’s operative, ‘she is evil and to focus on her,’” the report continues. It also says Trump told Reiter he had been around Epstein once when teenagers were present and that Trump “got the hell out of there.” The report adds that Trump was “one of the very first people to call” when people learned law enforcement was investigating Epstein.
A Department of Justice official told ABC News in a statement that the agency was “not aware of any corroborating evidence” that the president contacted law enforcement 20 years ago.
On Tuesday, White House press secretary Karoline Leavitt did not directly address questions about the apparent discrepancy, instead reiterating that Trump kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago and ended their relationship. Pressed on whether the call happened, she said she did not know.
“Look, [that] phone call that may or may not have happened in 2006 — I don’t know the answer to that question,” she said. “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.”
The account of Trump’s alleged call to Reiter, as summarized in the FBI document, had not previously been reported.
Reiter was a central figure in the first law enforcement probe of Epstein in Florida. After clashing behind the scenes with local prosecutors, Reiter went public in 2006, criticizing the local prosecutor’s decision to take the case to a grand jury instead of charging Epstein directly.
Reiter apologized to the victims for how the case had been handled and then coordinated with federal authorities to launch another investigation, which ultimately ended in Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement in 2008.
Reiter did not immediately respond to a request for comment about his statements to the FBI.
