President Donald Trump has claimed the Jeffrey Epstein files were "made up" by his political enemies — but a former FBI official is debunking his timeline as impossible.
The president was asked whether Attorney General Pam Bondi had told him if his name was cited in the case files, and he said no, but then Trump went on to say the documents had been fabricated by Barack Obama, James Comey and Joe Biden's administration. CNN's John Berman asked former FBI special agent Mike Feinberg to unpack those claims.
"What's wrong with that timeline?" Berman said.
"What's wrong with that timeline," Feinberg replied, "is that the Epstein investigation, arrest and suicide took place during the first Trump administration. It emphatically was not something that the Biden DOJ had anything whatsoever to do with."
"And not only that," Berman added, "I mean, his original arrest and conviction in Florida was during the Bush administration, right? The ultimate arrest, conviction and suicide were during the Trump administration. Comey was actually out of the FBI by the time that all happened, because Trump had pushed him out.
"It's farcical on its face. So when you see that kind of timeline again, from the president, if you're in the FBI, if you're still there, if you were there in the late 2010s, what are you supposed to think?"
Feinberg said the episode exemplified the problems Trump created by naming loyalists to high-ranking positions in law enforcement, rather than veteran investigators.
"I'll just say this," Feinberg said. This is one of the very many reasons that the senior leadership of the FBI has traditionally been drawn from a pool that includes the judiciary and the legal and policy world. When you bring in a group of people who, just to be blunt, are fundamentally unserious and have gained most of their professional experiences through the lens of conspiratorial podcasting, they're going to have difficulty running what is a complex, sober-minded, pragmatic organization."
FBI Deputy Director Dan Bongino, a former Secret Service agent-turned-conservative podcaster, had pushed out Feinberg earlier this year and is now openly feuding with the attorney general. The bureau veteran described a key detail that set this administration apart from previous administrations.
"It is very rare for any of the senior FBI leadership to have as much interaction with the president as we see under this administration, so that in and of itself is an anomaly," Feinberg said. "But if that's going to happen and that relationship is going to become strained at the same time that the relationship with the main DOJ becomes strained, it has a real effect on the FBI's ability to do its job.
"FBI agents don't like to admit this, but it's a really difficult for them to move their cases forward without the assistance of federal prosecutors, and to the extent there's a lot of friction between those two buildings, the mission suffers."
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