In interview with the New York Times, the former Trump loyalist Marjorie Taylor Greene has alleged the following:

After Marjorie Taylor Greene held a news conference at which she threatened to name abusers in the Epstein files, Trump called her.

Greene was in her Capitol Hill office. Everyone could hear him yelling at her.

According to Greene, Trump replied, “My friends will get hurt.”…

— Kyle Griffin (@kylegriffin1) December 29, 2025

If true, it would explain why Donald Trump’s Department of Justice (DoJ) have been heavily redacting the recently released Epstein Files.

It’s a big club

The interview with Greene is incredibly damning of Trump, as this section shows:

For Greene, the decades that Epstein spent eluding justice for exploiting and sexually assaulting countless girls and young women while amassing a fortune, and the seeming efforts by the government to cover up the injustice, “represents everything wrong with Washington,” she told me. This September, Greene spoke with several of Epstein’s victims for the first time in a closed-door House Oversight Committee meeting. She knew that the women had paid their own way to come to Washington. She saw some of them trembling and crying as they spoke. Their accounts struck her as entirely believable. Greene herself had never been sexually abused, but she knew women who had. In her own small way, Greene later told me, she could understand what it was like for a woman to stand up to a powerful man.

After the hearing, Greene held a news conference at which she threatened to identify some of the men who had abused the women. (Greene says that she didn’t know those names herself but that she could have gotten them from the victims.) Trump called Greene to voice his displeasure. Greene was in her Capitol Hill office, and according to a staff member, everyone in the suite of rooms could hear him yelling at her as she listened to him on speakerphone. Greene says she expressed her perplexity over his intransigence. According to Greene, Trump replied, “My friends will get hurt.”

When she urged Trump to invite some of Epstein’s female victims to the Oval Office, she says, he angrily informed her that they had done nothing to merit the honor. It would be the last conversation Greene and Trump would ever have.

Redaction tactics

As we reported, Trump’s DoJ has been releasing the Epstein Files because it’s legally required to do so due to the recently passed Epstein Files Transparency act. While the act allowed for redactions to protect victims, it did not permit them to save potential co-conspirators from embarrassment. As people have uncovered, however, many redactions are seemingly there to hide criminal acts:

EPSTEIN FILES: UNREDACTED FILES SHOWS BRIBERY AND PAYOFFS TO SILENCE VICTIMS AND WITNESSES.

DOJ used Adobe to redact some files that can be undone by copying/pasting & searching.

Here they are: https://t.co/jREFfA9as0 pic.twitter.com/UeI3qlUarV

— Maine (@TheMaineWonk) December 23, 2025

Is this a case of Trump protecting his friends?

The chain of events certainly gives that impression, and the comments from Greene only add to that.

Featured image via NARA & DVIDS

By Willem Moore

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