Bringing White House into disrepute: Trump accusations play out in the Epstein Files
More than 5 300 files have 38 000 references linked to President
A search tool used by The New York Times has found more than 5,300 files containing more than 38,000 references to Mr Trump, his wife, and his Mar-a-Lago club. They include salacious, unverified claims and documents that had already been made public.
The Justice Department looked into sexual misconduct allegations against President Trump in connection with the sex offender Jeffrey Epstein but did not find credible information to merit further investigation, Todd Blanche, the deputy attorney general, said on Sunday.
Mr Blanche’s comments, which he made on CNN’s “State of the Union,” came less than 48 hours after the Trump administration released about three million pages of documents collected by the Justice Department as part of its years-long investigation into Mr Epstein, who died in 2019.
According to The New York Times, the controversy over Mr Epstein has dogged Mr. Trump for the past year. After Mr. Trump’s allies vowed on the 2024 campaign trail to release the Epstein files, his administration rapidly backtracked. Mr. Trump’s resistance to releasing the government’s files fueled speculation that they contained damaging information about him or his allies.
The files are peppered with references to Mr. Trump, who had been a close friend of Mr. Epstein’s until the early 2000s. While Mr. Trump has repeatedly downplayed the relationship, the two men bonded over their pursuit of young women. Mr Trump has denied any wrongdoing in connection with Mr Epstein.
Using a proprietary search tool, The New York Times identified more than 5,300 files containing more than 38,000 references to Mr. Trump, his wife, his Mar-a-Lago club in Florida, and other related words and phrases in the latest batch of emails, government files, videos and other records released by the Justice Department. Previous installments of the Epstein files, which the department released late last year, included another 130 files with Trump-related references.
Many of the documents released on Friday that mention Mr. Trump are news articles and other publicly available materials that had landed in Mr. Epstein’s email inbox. None of those files include any direct communication between Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein. (Few of the files date back as far as the early 2000s, when the two men were friends.)
Here is what The New York Times review of the files has found so far.
Mr. Trump is named in unverified tips received by the F.B.I.
Mr Trump is one of half a dozen prominent men about whom the agency’s files include “salacious information,” according to an email an F.B.I. official wrote to a colleague last year.
Some of that information appears to be in the form of more than a dozen tips submitted through the F.B.I.’s National Threat Operations Center in West Virginia. Some of the tips include accusations of sexual abuse by Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein. F.B.I. officials compiled the tips into a summary last summer, which was among the files released on Friday.
The F.B.I. summary does not include corroborating information, and The Times is not describing the details of the unverified claims. The names of some of the tipsters in the document have not been redacted.
The newly released files also include notes and transcripts of interviews that federal investigators conducted with Mr Epstein’s victims, some of whom describe interactions with Mr Trump.
In another file, Juan Alessi, who worked for Mr Epstein, reportedly told investigators that Mr Trump — along with other well-known individuals — had visited Mr Epstein’s home.
A White House spokesman declined to comment on questions about specific documents and referred to Mr. Trump’s comments to reporters on Saturday, when he claimed that the files “absolved me” of wrongdoing.
Some of the documents confirm previous reports about Mr. Epstein and Mr. Trump.
Investigators, lawyers, journalists and others have spent years trying to understand the extent of Mr. Epstein’s relationship with powerful men, including Mr. Trump, and a huge volume of information is already in the public domain. Many of the Trump-related files that The Times reviewed buttress or recycle those materials.
Some of the new files are duplicates of emails and other records released by the Justice Department or the House Oversight Committee late last year. Those files show that, long after Mr. Trump and Mr. Epstein’s relationship ended, Mr. Epstein remained intensely focused on his former friend, which included looking for ways to leverage Mr. Trump’s political rise for his own purposes.
Some newly released files add to the sense that Mr. Epstein was keeping close tabs on the president. In 2018, for example, Mr. Epstein’s accountant emailed him a link to a Reuters article about congressional investigations into Mr. Trump and Deutsche Bank, which for years was the president’s primary lender. At the time of the email, Deutsche Bank was also Mr. Epstein’s main bank.
The documents also include files that confirmed previous news articles about Mr. Epstein’s relationship with the future president.
The files include emails from a woman named Melania.
In 2002, a woman named Melania wrote a warm email to Ghislaine Maxwell, Mr Epstein’s longtime associate, who is now serving a 20-year prison sentence after being convicted of participating in his sex-trafficking operation. It is not clear if the sender of the email is the future first lady, Melania Knavs, who married Mr. Trump about three years later.
The email was sent shortly after New York magazine published a profile of Mr. Epstein that included a photo of him with Ms. Maxwell. The article included a now-famous quote from Mr. Trump in which he called Mr. Epstein a “terrific guy” and said that “he likes beautiful women as much as I do, and many of them are on the younger side.”
There are a variety of other references to Trump.
The files occasionally demonstrate the Trump administration’s apparent sensitivity about the president’s inclusion in the trove of documents.
One file shows a series of text messages between Mr. Epstein and Stephen K. Bannon, Mr. Trump’s former adviser, from 2019. One of them includes a photo of Mr. Trump delivering a ‘declined to comment on the messages.)
In December, the Justice Department posted and then removed from its website a photo of Mr Epstein’s New York mansion, in which an image of Mr. Trump with a number of women was visible inside a drawer. The department later reposted the photo and said it had been temporarily taken down to protect Mr. Epstein’s victims.
Mr. Trump said last summer that he ended his relationship with Mr. Epstein at least in part because Mr. Epstein “stole” Ms. Giuffre from Mar-a-Lago. Mr. Trump noted that Ms. Giuffre never accused him of misconduct