WASHINGTON POST: "Trump and Epstein had a relationship, but there’s no evidence of Trump wrongdoing"

Trump, Melania, Epstein, Maxwell

 

From The Washington Post:

“It’s all been a hoax that’s perpetrated by the Democrats. And some stupid Republicans and foolish Republicans fall into the net.”

— President Donald Trump, speaking to reporters, July 16

The Trump White House and Justice Department are under fire for failing to release, as promised, all of the files related to disgraced financier Jeffrey Epstein, who pleaded guilty in 2008 to soliciting an underage sex worker. In 2019, after he was charged in federal court with sex trafficking of minors, guards found Epstein dead in his cell at a federal jail in New York. Investigators said he hanged himself. Trump supporters have long suggested the existence of a client list that would implicate powerful people, while also calling into question whether Epstein’s death had been a suicide.

Trump has tried to damp down speculation, fanned mainly by Democrats, that the withheld files contain evidence of a deep connection between Trump and Epstein. Trump has reacted with outrage and disdain, even at members of his political base who have pressed for the files to be released.

A year ago, Florida Circuit Judge Luis Delgado unsealed nearly 200 pages of grand jury testimony related to the 2006 Florida case involving Epstein. The documents showed that prosecutors had heard testimony about Epstein assaulting teenage girls before they cut a plea deal with him in 2008 that was kept from victims and provided for lenient work release. “The details in the record will be outrageous to decent people,” Delgado wrote in his order. “The testimony taken by the Grand Jury concerns activity ranging from grossly unacceptable to rape — all of the conduct at issue is sexually deviant, disgusting, and criminal.”

At the time, we dug deep into the public record and awarded Four Pinocchios to a Democratic lawmaker who suggested Trump’s name was all over the files released by Delgado. Nothing has emerged since then to change our assessment that there is no public evidence of inappropriate behavior by Trump related to Epstein. As a reader service, our findings are presented below.

Pictures of him with Epstein

Trump has acknowledged that he and Epstein were in the same Palm Beach, Florida, social circle decades ago. But their relations appeared to have ended by the time Epstein’s legal troubles began.

There are numerous photos of Trump and Epstein. In 2019, NBC News released video of Trump keeping company with Epstein at a 1992 party with NFL cheerleaders. At one point, Trump points out someone to Epstein and appears to say, “She’s hot!”

In 2002, Trump was quoted in a profile of Epstein: “I’ve known Jeff for fifteen years. Terrific guy. He’s a lot of fun to be with. It is even said that he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side. No doubt about it — Jeffrey enjoys his social life.”

But as The Washington Post reported, the relationship soured in 2004 after the two men battled over acquiring a choice Palm Beach property, an oceanfront mansion called Maison de l’Amitie. Trump won the auction, and phone records — the call logs Rep. Ted Lieu (D-California) referenced last year — indicate that the two men did not communicate after that. Two weeks after the auction, Palm Beach police received a tip that young women were seen coming and going from Epstein’s home — which led to the grand jury investigation.

Multiple plane flights with Epstein

Many prominent people, including former president Bill Clinton, flew on Epstein’s jet. Trump took at least seven flights with Epstein in the 1990s, according to flight logs released as evidence in the trial of Ghislaine Maxwell, an Epstein associate who is serving a 20-year prison sentence for helping him sexually abuse girls. Lieu claimed that “young girls were on board,” but no evidence of that has surfaced. The ages of passengers were not recorded in the logs.

Trump took flights between Palm Beach and New York City airports. A June 1994 flight lists some of the other passengers as Marla and Tiffany, an apparent reference to Trump’s then-wife, Marla Maples, and their infant daughter.

Reference to Trump in files

Trump was briefly mentioned in about 1,000 pages of documents released in January in a separate case involving a defamation suit filed against Maxwell by an alleged victim, Virginia Giuffre. (Lieu’s staff sent an article about those documents.)

But these were minor references.

In a 2016 deposition of Giuffre that was released, she was asked about Trump. Giuffre said she had been recruited by Maxwell when she was a 17-year-old spa attendant at Mar-a-Lago.

“I don’t think Donald Trump participated in anything,” she said. “That would have to be another assumption. I never saw or witnessed Donald Trump participate in those acts, but was he in the house of Jeffrey Epstein.”

She said that anyone who visited Epstein’s house would have seen his many nude photos of women displayed on the walls. “These are salacious acts of girls, young girls doing things to each other that would be considered child pornography,” Giuffre testified. “If you walked foot into Jeffrey Epstein’s house and you went in there and you continued to be an acquaintance of his then you would have to know what was going on there.”

Meanwhile, Johanna Sjoberg, one of Epstein’s other alleged victims, was quoted as saying Epstein’s plane made an unplanned stop in Atlantic City between 2001 and 2006. There is no indication they saw Trump, and she said she never gave Trump a massage.

The documents also included emails from an accuser who made allegations against Trump but then withdrew them. (Separately, a woman with the pseudonyms Katie Johnson and Jane Doe accused Trump of raping her in Epstein’s home when she was 13; those filings were dismissed or withdrawn years ago.)

The Bottom Line

As we have documented, 17 women have claimed Trump engaged in sexual misconduct. A Manhattan jury found that Trump sexually abused and defamed one woman on our list. But no credible allegation has emerged to connect Trump to any of Epstein’s crimes. If the full file is ever released, we are confident that no connection would be found.

Rest assured — if Trump were prominently mentioned, it would have been leaked by now.