The Republican congresswoman tasked with revisiting “federal secrets” surrounding the assassinations of John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. — and Jeffrey Epstein’s so-called “client list” — is among a new class of GOP insurgents and Donald Trump loyalists who recently floated a bill to put Trump’s face on Mount Rushmore.
Florida Rep. Anna Paulina Luna, a member of the far-right House Freedom Caucus who was elected to the House in 2022, has repeatedly pushed for “transparency” in federal government — specifically, to dive into conspiracy theories surrounding unidentified flying objects, the origins of COVID-19, and the September 11 attacks, all of which will be at the center of her task force.
“The federal government has been hiding information from Americans for decades,” she said in a statement Tuesday.
The government has spent years investigating political assassinations and “other government secrets without success,” she claimed, and “it is time to give Americans the answers they deserve.”
The Independent has requested additional comment from Luna.
Before her election to Congress — where she’s one of a group of MAGA-fueled digital natives using their offices and social media to blow up the institutions they now control — the 35-year-old lawmaker spent six years in the military, serving in the Air Force and Oregon Air National Guard.
She also worked as a cocktail waitress at a gentlemen’s club and as a swimsuit model for several publications, including Liberty Belles, which included women in camouflage bikinis holding firearms, and made a name for herself as an Instagram influencer as she pivoted into far-right politics.
After graduating from the University of West Florida with a degree in biology, Luna served as the director of Hispanic engagement for Turning Point USA, landing a spot on Fox News in 2018 in which she compared Hillary Clinton to herpes, prompting the network to apologize to viewers.
She spent most of her life up to that point as Anna Paulina Mayerhofer, using her father’s last name. Her grandfather immigrated from Germany after serving in the Wehrmacht army in Nazi Germany. She formally changed her last name to Luna, recognizing her Mexican-American mother’s ancestry.
Shortly after becoming the 12th member of Congress to give birth while in office, she released the children’s book The Legend of Naranja, which she co-wrote with her husband, Andrew Gamberzky. In the book, a Joe Biden-esque Senor Banana is depicted plotting a “scheme” to steal Fruitlandia’s presidential election from the title character in a plot echoing conspiracy theories from the 2020 presidential election.
Luna similarly, falsely, believes Trump won the 2020 election.
Within her relatively short time in office, she joined Republicans who initially refused to support former House Speaker Kevin McCarthy, sponsored resolutions to impeach former Attorney General Merrick Garland, FBI Director Christopher Wray, Secretary of Homeland Security Alejandro Mayorkas, and Washington, D.C., U.S. Attorney Matthew Graves.
Following Trump’s executive order to release government files connected to JFK’s assassination, Luna blamed “corrupt bureaucrats” who have “hidden this information from the American people for far too long.”
“Americans deserve to know the truth, whether it makes the government look good or not,” she said at the time, promising to use her role as a member of the House Oversight Committee to deliver the “truth” regarding JFK’s killing.
On Tuesday, Oversight Committee chair James Comer announced the formation of the “Task Force on the Declassification of Federal Secrets” to comply with Trump’s order.
At a press conference, Luna said she hopes to interview “attending physicians at the initial assassination and then also people who have been on the various commissions looking into — like the Warren Commission — looking into the initial assassination.” All members of the Warren Commission are dead.
She also said she wants to revisit investigations that she claims have been “rinsed and repeated by the media to push a certain narrative that we don’t agree with.”
“I believe there were two shooters,” she told reporters.
Then-President Lyndon B. Johnson’s Warren Commission determined Lee Harvey Oswald acted alone and that there was no evidence of a conspiracy, but the 1963 assassination has fueled conspiracy theories for decades.
On Tuesday, the FBI also said it discovered more than 2,000 new records related to the Kennedy assassination as the agency complies for Trump’s order. FBI officials are working to transfer those records to the National Archives and Records Administration to be included in the declassification process, according to the agency.
A vast majority of that collection, which includes more than 5 million pages, has been made public for years. It’s unclear what kind of new information the FBI discovered.
Hundreds of pages of unsealed court documents have also already identified more than 150 people associated with Epstein, including victims, friends and others, as well as many people who appear to have no direct link to the disgraced financier, who died by suicide in 2019 following federal charges for sex trafficking minors. Being named in the court documents did not indicate any wrongdoing.
Among the names in those documents: President Trump, as well as Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Trump’s nominee to lead the massive Department of Health and Human Services.
Trump and the financier met in the 1980s though eventually fell out over a real estate dispute in the 1990s, years before Epstein’s first arrest for soliciting prostitution in 2006, and Trump has denied any knowledge of Epstein’s abuse.
“I was not a fan of his, that I can tell you,” he said in the Oval Office the day after New York authorities took Epstein into custody in July 2019.
Asked about Ghislaine Maxwell’s alleged role in the sex trafficking conspiracy during a White House press briefing in 2020, Trump said he knew her from their time in Palm Beach, Florida, and that they've met "numerous times."
A reporter also asked the president whether he believed Maxwell was going to “turn in powerful men.”
“I don’t know, I haven’t really been following it too much,” he said. “I just wish her well, frankly. I’ve met her numerous times over the years, especially since I lived in Palm Beach and I guess they lived in Palm Beach. But I wish her well, whatever it is. I don’t know the situation with Prince Andrew, I just don't know. Not aware of it.”
In September, Trump told podcaster Lex Friedman that he never visited Epstein’s private Little St. James in the U.S. Virgin Islands.
When Friedman asked whether Trump had “some hesitation” about releasing the so-called Epstein files, Trump replied: “I don’t think – I mean, I’m not involved... I never went to his island, fortunately, but a lot of people did.”
