Former President Donald Trump hung up on CNN reporter Andrew Kaczynski when asked about newly rediscovered photos showing Jeffrey Epstein in attendance at Trump’s 1993 wedding to his second wife, Marla Maples.
The photos, released by CNN’s KFile, show Epstein entering the reception area at Trump’s wedding and then again in the background of a photo featuring radio host Howard Stern and television personality Robin Leach.
A second, newly resurfaced photo shows a smiling Trump and his children alongside Epstein earlier the same year at the opening of the Harley-Davidson Cafe in New York City.
I had brief phone call with President Trump this morning. When asked about the wedding photos showing Epstein attended, he responded, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” before repeatedly calling CNN “fake news” and hanging up.
— Andrew Kaczynski (@KFILE) July 22, 2025
When asked about the photos by Kaczynski, Trump said, “You’ve got to be kidding me,” before repeatedly calling CNN fake news and hanging up the phone just thirty seconds into the conversation.
“We were not on the phone very long. I think our call was about 30 seconds or so,” Kaczynski told CNN anchor Erin Burnett. “But when I asked him about the wedding photo, 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.”
Kaczynski said that the importance of the photos comes from the fact that they “have not been widely reported and pre-date any of Epstein’s known legal issues.”
White House communications director Steven Cheung described the photos as “nothing more than out-of-context frame grabs of innocuous videos and pictures” and called the continued coverage of Epstein “fake news stories concocted by the Democrats and the liberal media.”
Cheung also said that Trump removed Epstein from a club of his “for being a creep.”
The photos come at a time of intensifying scrutiny and political infighting around the Trump administration’s handling of the Epstein scandal. Right-wing conspiracy theorist Alex Jones called it “horses**t” while Trump has referred to his supporters who follow the case as “weaklings.”
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