Anna Paulina Luna Discusses Why She Thinks Epstein Was an Intelligence Agent and Trump Opposed Releasing the Files

New York Times opinion columnist Ross Douthat sat down with Rep. Anna Paulina Luna (R-FL) for a wide-ranging interview published on Friday. During the sit-down, Douthat challenged the Florida Republican on why President Donald Trump didn’t want the Epstein files released and asked her to detail her ongoing crusade to have as many classified documents released to the public as possible.

Paulina Luna also offered her take on who Jeffrey Epstein really was, arguing that she believes he was a foreign intelligence agent, given some of the items found in his safe.

“How about this? Why do you think that the president was so reluctant to release the Epstein files?” Douthat asked during the interview.

Paulina Luna doesn’t directly answer the question, concluding, “But I actually remember calling over and saying, ‘Hey, I think you guys should just release these. Give the files to oversight.’ And they said OK. The problem is that the timeline and the second order of documents came out of a judge from New York. So you had the D.O.J. that allocated, I think it was 500 attorneys at once, trying to go through and redact victim information. That in itself wasn’t ideal. However, why did it take so long?”

Douthat later circled back to the topic a bit, asking, “But also, during this time, the president was out giving public comments, saying this is now ‘a Democrat hoax,’ and so on. It wasn’t simply a matter of that there was a slow process to release the files. It was also clear that he himself had some objections to the kind of release that you were pushing for.”

Paulina Luna replied, “I think when he said “Democrat hoax,” and I think that Karoline Leavitt clarified this, in that when you have someone that’s accusing you of trafficking people and saying that you are a rapist, that you are going to get upset and you’re going to call it, like, if I was being accused of that, I would probably say the same thing.”

“However, I want to be clear that my conversations with him were not personal and nasty, and I was the biggest proponent of releasing these things,” she added, breaking from the narrative of how Trump used negative pressure to try to stop Reps. Lauren Boebert (R-CO) and Marjorie Taylor Greene (R-GA) from pushing to release the files.

Below is the rest of their conversation about Epstein:

Douthat: So you think basically that the harder-core Epstein conspiracy theories are still likely to be true?

Luna: Well, there’s a lot of them, so which ones?

Douthat: Not the hardest, but,

Luna: Well, tell me what they are. [Laughs.]

Douthat: So I looked at the material that was released, and I’m not going to tell you that I read every single document.

Luna: That’s almost impossible.

Douthat: But I was very interested in the Epstein story for a long time, and I thought that there were clearly things there that were hidden or mysterious, and I wanted to know what was going on.

And to me, the upshot of the huge data dump was that there was maybe less than I thought. It seemed like maybe he had connections to Israeli intelligence or some foreign intelligence, but was not actually working for them, in the sense that I didn’t see evidence that he had carried out any kind of blackmail. Maybe that was a possibility, but there wasn’t evidence there.

The exposure reduced my sense that there was a truly profound and dark secret here, and made me more likely to think the guy was a sexual predator who had a lot of rich and powerful friends, and they helped cover up for him. It’s still an interesting story, but it’s not the most interesting story.

Luna: So I discovered a document in going through some of the records unredacted over at the D.O.J., and he did have an alias. It was a passport, and his address was located, I think, in Saudi Arabia. I believe it was an Austrian passport. And that was in his safe that he had with a bunch of other cash, diamonds, et cetera.

Most people don’t have a completely fake name in a safe with that type of information. That was my first kind of, all right, he definitely had intel connections. I think the guy dealt in intelligence and exchange of information.

The thing that will always be a question for me, and I don’t think that we’re ever going to get the answer on this, is: What happened with the alleged evidence that was destroyed? And also, this type of operation could not have existed without the intelligence agencies knowing about it, so what exactly was he doing?

Watch the full clip above.

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