Days after the capture of Venezuelan leader Nicolás Maduro, a viral audio clip appears to show President Donald Trump yelling at advisers to stop the release of the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein’s files.
“Leaked Donald Trump audio about the Epstein files and Venezuela,” reads the caption of a Jan. 5 Facebook post sharing the purported recording that drew over 2 million views.
“(We’re) not releasing the Epstein file, f— Marjorie Taylor Greene, I don’t care what you do, start a f—— war, just don’t let them get out. If I go down, I will bring all of you down,” Trump appears to say.
A reporter can then be heard asking Trump if he is all right, to which Trump says, “I feel great, I was shouting at people because they were stupid about something.”
That part of the recording is authentic. But the first part — about Epstein and Greene — isn’t.
The fake audio matches the audio in a TikTok video from Nov. 18, 2025, before the U.S. captured Maduro on Jan. 3. Fact-checkers from Lead Stories and Snopes found a similar version of the audio first published Nov. 5, 2025 by the @fresh_florida_air TikTok account, which is no longer available. The archived version of that video shows a Sora watermark, which is OpenAI’s video-generating platform. With the launch of Sora 2 on Sept. 30, 2025, the tool can generate audio-only results.
The TikTok account, @fresh_florida_air, posted another version of the “leaked” audio that featured a Sora watermark that said @bradbradt31. PolitiFact searched for that username on the Sora app, but that account is also unavailable.
The TikTok user, @fresh_florida_air, told Snopes that the videos were AI-generated. “My intent is creative expression, not presenting anything as factual,” the user said.
The second part of the audio clip in the Facebook post that features a reporter asking Trump if he’s OK is real, but it was taken out of context. On Nov. 17, 2025, a reporter questioned why the president sounded hoarse. A longer version of Trump’s response reveals he said he had been shouting during trade talks with a foreign country. Trump was not being asked about a leaked audio or the Epstein files.
Our ruling
A viral Facebook post claims to show “leaked Donald Trump audio about the Epstein files and Venezuela.”
The audio was created with artificial intelligence.
PolitiFact found the first part of the clip was generated with OpenAI’s video-generating platform, Sora.
The second part of the clip is real but it’s from November 2025, before Maduro was captured by the U.S. government. At that moment, Trump was not being asked about leaked audio or the Epstein files. We rate this claim False.
This story originally appeared on PolitiFact
