Speaker Mike Johnson's (R-LA) latest story about the ties between President Donald Trump and disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein is too strange to be true, according to two analysts.
Last week, Johnson claimed that Trump was an FBI informant working against Epstein.
"When he first heard the rumor, he kicked him out of Mar-a-Lago," Johnson told CNN's Manu Raju, according to reports. "He was an FBI informant to try to take this stuff down.”
Sarah Longwell, publisher of the conservative news outlet The Bulwark, and Will Sommer, senior reporter at the outlet, discussed Johnson's line of defense on a new episode of "Bulwark Takes" on Sunday.
"What's funny here is that this kind of hearkens back to this really popular QAnon and broader Trump grassroots rationalization of why we have these videos of Trump hanging out with Epstein," Sommer said. "They say he was this FBI informant."
"There's zero evidence of this," Sommer added.
Trump has tried to distance himself from the Epstein files story for more than two months since his administration declined to release more information, as they promised to do on the campaign trail.
Over that time, Trump has revived multiple Trump world narratives to distract from the Epstein files. Some examples include reinvestigating the January 6 insurrection and going after people in the intelligence community who worked on the 2016 investigation into ties between Trump's campaign and the Russian government.
Longwell said Johnson's new explanation is by far the "strangest" one yet.
"It is the strangest thing I've ever heard," she said. "If you talk about it for five seconds, you go, 'This doesn't make any sense.'"
