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.
Documents that were included in the U.S. Department of Justice release of the Jeffrey Epstein files are photographed Friday, Jan. 2, 2026.
Jon Elswick/AP
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.
Democrats on the House Oversight Committee have released additional photos from the estate of Jeffrey Epstein, including ones of Donald Trump and Bill Clinton.
House Oversight Committee Democrats
The alleged call from Trump came in July 2006, around the time the details of the police investigation became public, according to a source familiar with the timing.
“TRUMP told him people in New York knew EPSTEIN was disgusting. TRUMP said MAXWELL was EPSTEIN’s operative, ‘she is evil and to focus on her,’ the report continues. “TRUMP told [Reiter] that he was around EPSTEIN once when teenagers were present and TRUMP ‘got the hell out of there.’ TRUMP was one of the very first people to call when people found out that they were investigating EPSTEIN,” the report of Reiter’s statement said.
The account of Trump’s alleged call to Reiter, as summarized in the FBI document, has not previously been reported.
Reiter was a central figure in the first law enforcement probe of Epstein in Florida.
After repeatedly sparring behind the scenes with local prosecutors, Reiter went public in 2006, expressing his displeasure with the local prosecutor’s decision to take the case to a grand jury instead of charging Epstein directly.
Reiter apologized to the victims for the way the case had been handled by the prosecutor and then coordinated with federal authorities to launch another investigation into Epstein, which ultimately ended in Epstein’s non-prosecution agreement in 2008.
Reiter did not immediately respond to a request for comment about the account of his statements to the FBI.