A former police chief who investigated Jeffrey Epstein in the mid-2000s told the FBI he had received a call from Donald Trump at the time to say “thank goodness you’re stopping him, everyone has known he’s been doing this,” according to an FBI account.https://t.co/CElof3Q6Wv
— ABC News (@ABC) February 10, 2026
A former Palm Beach, Florida, police chief who investigated Jeffrey Epstein in the mid-2000s told the FBI he had received a call from Donald Trump at the time to say “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 document.
President Trump has repeatedly denied any knowledge of Epstein’s crimes and has said that he cut off contact with his former friend more than 20 years ago.
Trump has claimed that he booted Epstein from Mar-a-Lago after discovering that he 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’s website, but the information in the FBI statement tracks 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 years old to provide massages that turned sexual.
The information about Trump’s alleged call makes up just a small part of a 4-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 of Reiter’s statement says.