President Donald Trump continues to be hounded by questions about Jeffrey Epstein and recently hung up on CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski when asked about newly resurfaced photos and video.
Appearing on Erin Burnett OutFront on Tuesday (July 22), Kaczynski spoke about his abrupt conversation with Trump, which allegedly ended with the President calling CNN “fake news” and hanging up the phone after refusing to answer questions about his friendship with Epstein.
The conversation came about after CNN’s KFile released new photos of Epstein attending Trump’s Plaza Hotel wedding to his second wife, Marla Maples, in 1993. Another image showed Epstein socializing with Trump and his children at a Harley-Davidson Cafe that same year. There was also a video of Trump and Epstein talking with each other at the Victoria’s Secret Fashion Show in New York in February 1999.
As Kaczynski pointed out, the video and photos pre-date any of Epstein’s legal troubles; the late financier was first accused of sexual assault of a minor in 2005. He also noted in an accompanying article that the photos were available on Google Images and content library Shutterstock, but none of them had been widely reported until this point.
Kaczynski told Burnett he called Trump shortly before publishing the article, but the call didn’t last very long.
“We were not on the phone very long. I think our call was about 30 seconds or so,” he shared. “But when I asked him about the wedding photo, he said… he sort of paused for a second and then said, ‘You’ve got to be kidding me,’ before calling CNN ‘fake news’ and then hanging up on me.”
In a statement to CNN, White House Communications Director Steven Cheung said, “These are nothing more than out-of-context frame grabs of innocuous videos and pictures of widely attended events to disgustingly infer something nefarious.”
He continued, “The fact is that the President kicked [Epstein] out of his club for being a creep. This is nothing more than a continuation of the fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media.”
Earlier this month, the Department of Justice (DOJ) and Federal Bureau of Investigation (FBI) released a statement claiming their Epstein investigation determined that there was “no incriminating ‘client list.”
The report led to backlash online, even among some of Trump’s most loyal MAGA supporters, many of whom have been demanding the release of the so-called “client list” for years. There have also been calls for Attorney General Pam Bondi to resign after she said in February that Epstein’s “client list” was “sitting on my desk right now to review.”
Erin Burnett OutFront, Weekdays, 7/6c, CNN