Donald Trump’s ties to Jeffrey Epstein were back in focus Tuesday following the latest document dump by the Justice Department, which included a host of references to the president and communications between prosecutors remarking he’d traveled on the serial sex offender’s plane “many more times” than believed.
The remark was made in January 2020 by a prosecutor in the Southern District of New York, writing to an unknown recipient under the subject line “Epstein flight records.” The exchange came around five months after Epstein was found dead in a lower Manhattan jail cell following his arrest on sex trafficking charges, as the feds investigated his longtime accomplice Ghislaine Maxwell.
“For your situational awareness, wanted to let you know that the flight records we received yesterday reflect that Donald Trump traveled on Epstein’s private jet many more times than previously has been reported (or that we were aware), including during the period we would expect to charge in a Maxwell case,” the Manhattan assistant U.S. attorney, whose name was redacted, wrote.
2021.12.07 Government Exhibits in Ghislaine Maxwell – Jeffrey Epstein trial
Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein on a private plane, part of the government evidence used against Maxwell at trial. (Government Evidence)The email went on to say Trump had traveled on the jet with his ex-wife, Marla Maples, their daughter, Tiffany, and his son Eric Trump — and at least once, in 1993, with nobody except Epstein and a 20-year-old woman.
“On another, the only three passengers are Epstein, Trump, and then-20-year-old [REDACTED],” the email continued.
“On two other flights, two of the passengers, respectively, were women who would be possible witnesses in a Maxwell case.”
Another record released Monday showed the feds sent a subpoena to Trump’s Mar-a-Lago, Fla., estate in October 2021 concerning their sex trafficking investigation into Maxwell. It sought employment records for someone whose name was redacted from the document. No further information was disclosed on whether Trump’s estate complied with it.
It wasn’t clear whether the subpoena related to Virginia Giuffre, a prominent Epstein accuser who died by suicide in April. Maxwell poached Giuffre from a summer job at Mar-a-Lago when she was a teen, as jurors heard at Maxwell’s 2021 trial. Giuffre maintained for years that she faced horrific abuse at the hands of Epstein and powerful men in his orbit, like former U.K. prince Andrew Mountbatten. She did not accuse Trump of wrongdoing.
Trump was not accused of criminal wrongdoing in the email exchange, nor have authorities ever charged him in connection to Epstein’s serial sexual exploitation of teenage girls. As with dozens of notable names featuring in the government’s trove of Epstein files, the president’s inclusion does not mean he engaged in criminal activity.
Trump’s DOJ, in a statement Monday, said many of the claims against him included in its trove were “untrue and sensationalist” and levied before the 2020 election.
The feds have released tens of thousands of investigative files gathered on Epstein over the decades following the passage of the Epstein Files Transparency Act, bipartisan legislation that went into effect Friday.
While some 30,000 records have been released, victims of Epstein and lawmakers in both parties have heavily criticized Trump’s DOJ for failing to release everything by the deadline, as required by law, and for a sloppy redaction process that revealed the names of some victims, while concealing those of law enforcement members and friends and associates of Epstein.
Epstein was found dead at age 66 in his cell at the Metropolitan Correctional Center in lower Manhattan after he was arrested on sweeping sex trafficking charges and denied bail, around a decade after he had escaped meaningful accountability with a slap on the wrist in a Florida case. His death, which was officially ruled a suicide, denied justice to countless women who had accused him of terrorizing them in their youth.
Maxwell, 63, was indicted the following summer and convicted at trial in December 2021 of facilitating Epstein’s abuse and grooming his victims, including a minor. She was subsequently sentenced to 20 years and is currently representing herself in a legal effort to get out of prison.
Among the first batch of emails released Friday was an FBI complaint filed in 1996 by Maria Farmer, one of the first women to accuse Epstein of preying on teenagers, which confirmed her long held claim that the feds were warned about Epstein decades ago.
The multimillionaire financier went on to abuse and exploit potentially as many as 1,000 women and girls in the years that followed, according to federal law enforcement.
