Trump Yelled 'My Friends Will Get Hurt' at Marjorie Taylor Greene for Threatening to Name Epstein Abusers, She Claims

Georgia Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene is offering more details about her falling out with President Donald Trump, saying the final straw revolved around her push for more government transparency surrounding sex offender Jeffrey Epstein's crimes.

In an exhaustive new profile for The New York Times that chronicles the longtime MAGA ally's fracture with her former leader, Greene told journalist Robert Draper that her small disagreements with Trump throughout the year likely got on his nerves, "but it was Epstein" that drove the ultimate wedge between them. "Epstein was everything."

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“The Epstein files represent everything wrong with Washington,” Greene, 51, told the Times for the Dec. 29 profile, which was based on multiple interviews with the outgoing Republican congresswoman. “Rich, powerful elites doing horrible things and getting away with it. And the women are the victims.”

In September, Greene spoke directly to Epstein survivors during a closed-door House Oversight hearing, which moved her to fight for accountability on their behalf. After leaving the hearing, she rallied reporters and publicly threatened that, if necessary, she would work with victims to reveal the names of Epstein's associates who perpetrated sexual abuse against women and girls.

That threat, she said, resulted in a hostile phone call from the president — their last proper conversation.

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According to the Times, which heard about the call through both Greene and one of her staffers, Trump, 79, rang her Capitol Hill office to voice his frustration with her public advocacy on the issue. The whole office could allegedly hear him yelling at her on speakerphone, according to her staffer.

Greene claimed that when she expressed confusion to Trump on the call over his resistance to outing Epstein's potential conspirators, the president told her, "My friends will get hurt."

When she suggested that the president could invite Epstein survivors to the Oval Office to show that their stories were being heard, the president allegedly said that they had not done anything to earn such an honor, according to Greene's account of the conversation.

When reached by PEOPLE for comment, the White House dismissed Greene's comments to the Times as "petty bitterness."

“President Trump remains the undisputed leader of the greatest and fastest growing political movement in American history — the MAGA movement," White House spokesperson Davis Ingle said in a statement. "On the other hand, Congresswoman Greene is quitting on her constituents in the middle of her term and abandoning the consequential fight we’re in — we don’t have time for her petty bitterness.”

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Greene — who is formally resigning from Congress on Jan. 5 over her refusal to be a so-called "battered wife" to Trump — previously described her explosive phone call with Trump during a recent 60 Minutes interview.

“We did talk about the Epstein files, and he was extremely angry at me that I had signed the discharge petition to release the files,” Greene told CBS News' Lesley Stahl at the time, referring to her decision to sign a U.S. House petition pushing the government to release all documents related to Epstein.

When Stahl asked Greene to further describe what Trump said, she paused. “He said that it was going to hurt people,” the congresswoman replied.

With Greene's help, the House passed the Epstein Files Transparency Act in a stunning 427-1 vote on Nov. 18, and the bill was unanimously approved by the Senate.

Trump signed the bill into law the following day, which gave the federal government 30 days to release all remaining files related to the sex trafficking investigation into Epstein. The bill allowed for some exceptions — such as withholding anything that is classified, or that could identify victims or interfere with an active federal investigation — giving the Department of Justice the ability to be selective about what they release and what information is redacted.

The DOJ missed the deadline to release all files by Dec. 19, and has been uploading thousands of pages of files on a rolling basis, often with major redactions that omit significant context.

So far, information that has been released includes photos of Epstein with powerful men like Trump, Bill Clinton and Michael Jackson — none of whom have been accused of wrongdoing in relation to Epstein — and an uncorroborated rape claim made against Trump shortly before the 2020 election, which the DOJ characterized as "untrue and sensationalist."

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There were also some dubious pieces of visual evidence that ended up on the DOJ website, including a clearly fake video of Epstein's jail-cell suicide that was uploaded and later removed.

On Dec. 23, PEOPLE discovered an unauthenticated suicide note from "J. Epstein" to sex offender Larry Nassar among the files, which accused Trump of sharing their "love of young, nubile girls."

The White House initially declined to comment on the unverified note, instead referring PEOPLE to a DOJ statement about how the Epstein files include some "unfounded" allegations against the president.

Hours after PEOPLE and other outlets had reported on the strange note that appeared in the files, the White House reached back out to PEOPLE with new statements from the DOJ that said an FBI investigation had just determined the note was "FAKE" and warned not to trust the legitimacy of all documents included in the Epstein files, seemingly casting doubt on the newly unsealed evidence as a whole.

Reacting to the messy rollout of the files, Epstein survivor Haley Robson, a Republican, told CNN, "I am no longer supporting this administration. I redact any support I've ever given to him, Pam Bondi, Kash Patel. I am so disgusted with this administration."

"I think that Pam Bondi and Kash Patel both need to resign, and I would love to see No. 47 get impeached over this," Robson added.

She then appeared to reference comments from Trump made on Dec. 22, when the president said it's a "terrible thing" that photos of famous people were being released in the Epstein files, because some "had nothing to do with Epstein" and simply happened to cross paths with him at some point.

"If you're telling the public and the world and the survivors that just because somebody is in a picture with him doesn't automatically mean they were involved in the crimes against children — which I understand, and I get that fully — then why are you so scared to release the files and why has there been so much resistance?" Robson wondered aloud.

"If it's just a picture, why are you going above and beyond to hide the identities of these men?"