Trump, reportedly furious, lasted just 30 seconds on the call before hanging up.
“When I asked him about the wedding photo,” Kaczynski said on air, “he paused and said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ called CNN ‘fake news,’ and then hung up.”
White House Communications Director Steven Cheung doubled down, slamming the report as “disgustingly misleading.” He insisted that Trump had “kicked Epstein out of Mar-a-Lago for being a creep,” and dismissed the images as “out-of-context frame grabs of innocuous events.”
While Trump’s past social ties to Epstein and Ghislaine Maxwell are well-documented — including their appearances together at high-society events in the ’80s and ’90s — no charges have ever been filed against Trump in relation to Epstein’s sex trafficking network.
However, the CNN story comes amid growing backlash from Trump’s own base over how his administration has handled the Epstein case. Attorney General Pam Bondi’s recent conclusion that no further charges would be brought has enraged MAGA loyalists, who continue to fuel theories that Epstein was murdered in prison and that a hidden “client list” is being suppressed.
Facing pressure, Trump instructed Bondi to seek the unsealing of grand jury testimony from the Southern District of New York. Bondi also announced Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche will soon meet with Ghislaine Maxwell — currently serving a 20-year prison sentence — in a bid to extract more information.
Maxwell, the only Epstein associate so far convicted, is fighting to overturn her conviction, arguing her prosecution violated a 2008 plea deal Epstein struck. The DOJ has rejected her appeal request.
As for the photos, CNN admits they weren’t exactly “new” — just largely ignored until now. But they’ve reignited a storm of criticism, not just against Trump’s past but his present: a Justice Department still struggling to convince its base that the Epstein saga is truly closed.