Khanna’s admission contradicts his staff’s initial attempt at spinning his viral claim about Epstein visiting CIA headquarters
Rep. Ro Khanna now admits that a photo of Jeffrey Epstein that the California Democrat claimed was taken at CIA headquarters was actually snapped at Hermès, a luxury French design studio.
Khanna, a potential 2028 presidential hopeful, made the bombshell claim in interviews with YouTube hosts Andrew Callaghan and Shawn Ryan last month. “It shows that he has a picture at the CIA headquarters,” Khanna told Callaghan. The photo, which was part of a trove of 3 million documents contained in the Epstein files, shows Epstein wearing a sweater with an American flag on the sleeve standing next to an unidentified woman. Social media users noticed that several storage bins in the photo had the initials “CIA” printed on them.
“I think it’s inside [CIA headquarters], I mean, but the picture is out there publicly. Like, why?” Khanna told Callaghan.
Following a Washington Free Beacon investigation undermining Khanna’s claim, he acknowledged to the Washington Post this week that “the photograph which had online buzz about being at CIA headquarters was apparently at Hermès.”
The Free Beacon found that the photo appears to have been taken at Hermès in Paris. Photos from the Epstein files show Epstein and director Woody Allen chatting with Hermès CEO Axel Dumas. Epstein is wearing a jacket similar to the one in the viral photo, and a storage bin in the background has the same “CIA” acronym printed on it. That likely stands for “control inspection assemblage,” and not Central Intelligence Agency.
The Post detailed Khanna’s key role in pushing for the release of the Epstein files, which Khanna has used to raise his national profile ahead of a likely 2028 presidential run. But Khanna, as Post contributor James Kirchick notes, has peddled several unfounded Epstein conspiracy theories along the way.
“Ever since appointing himself chief congressional inquisitor in the Epstein investigation, Khanna has been deceiving the American people with conspiracy theories,” wrote Kirchick.
In addition to the CIA headquarters flub, Khanna last month falsely identified four men as having connections to Epstein, who killed himself in jail in August 2019 after his arrest for trafficking dozens of underage girls. Khanna read the names of the four “powerful” men on the floor of the House of Representatives. But it turned out that the men he named were actually part of an FBI line-up for the Epstein case, and had no connection to the pedophile at all.
On Tuesday, Khanna said that longtime Epstein accountant Richard Kahn told lawmakers in a deposition that the Epstein estate paid a settlement to a woman who alleged that she was raped by Epstein and Donald Trump in the 1980s. Kahn clarified later in his deposition that he was not referring to any settlements paid to Trump accusers.
Khanna’s staff initially gave conflicting accounts of which CIA photo Khanna was referencing.
Sarah Drory, a Khanna spokeswoman, told the Free Beacon that Khanna was referring not to the viral photograph but to a July 9, 2017, email in which Epstein asked former president Barack Obama’s White House counsel Kathryn Ruemmler to arrange a meeting with former CIA director John Brennan. But that email does not include a photograph and makes no mention of a visit to CIA headquarters.
Drory, who reportedly proposed the idea for Khanna to use a procedural House vote to force the release of the Epstein files, said that Khanna “has always said that one of the photos that went viral on the internet was not accurate.”
She did not respond to questions about when Khanna purportedly made that claim.
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