U.S. President Donald Trump speaks on the day he is set to sign an executive order on "Fostering the Future" in the East Room of the White House, in Washington, D.C., U.S., November 13, 2025. REUTERS/Jonathan Ernst
Behind closed doors, President Donald Trump has been increasingly "frustrated" about the emails from deceased sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein that the House Oversight Committee released on Wednesday.
That's according to CNN White House reporter Alayna Treene, who told the network on Thursday that White House sources confirmed the administration is "thinking about" the bipartisan Epstein files discharge petition that reached its decisive 218-signature mark on Wednesday. She also remarked that it was unusual for the administration to bring Rep. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) into the Situation Room in an attempt to cajole her into taking her name off the petition.
"Obviously that wasn't successful, and so now they have to figure out where to go from here," Treene told CNN host Dana Bash. "There is a lot of frustration. The president himself is frustrated at all of this."
Treene went on to point out that "a lot of the people in the White House were the same ones ... that were calling for this transparency" during Trump's third campaign for the presidency. Bash added that FBI Director Kash Patel had also repeatedly promised in several podcast interviews that he would push to have the Department of Justice's (DOJ) remaining documents pertaining to Epstein released under a second Trump administration.
According to Treene's sources, administration officials are walking a fine line between their arguments that Trump himself is not implicated in the Epstein files, while also defending his continued opposition to making them public. Congress is also poised to vote in favor of compelling the DOJ to release the Epstein files, possibly as soon as next week.
"They have a tough thing right now, because I think the emails, for whatever they were yesterday ... I don't think there's any legal implication for Donald Trump, for the president, in those emails. But they are of course, embarrassing," Treene said. "But I think the serious question it poses is, has the president known more that he is keeping quiet, and has he really been as transparent as they always promised? And having all this come out is, I think, the problem that they are trying to protect him from."
Watch the segment below: