President Donald Trump has lashed out angrily at the attention being given to the Epstein files after being asked if his friends and donors were implicated in them.
As survivors of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein descended on Capitol Hill on Wednesday, the president also described the issue as a Democratic “hoax” designed to turn people’s focus away from his presidential achievements.
“I think we should talk about the greatness of our country and the success that we are having,” he said, citing things such as his crime crackdown in D.C. and his push to end foreign wars.
“We’re having the most successful eight months of any president ever, and that’s what I want to talk about and should be talking about. Not the Epstein hoax.”
Trump’s comments came during an Oval Office meeting with Poland’s conservative nationalist president, Karol Nawrocki, who unexpectedly rose to power this year after running a Trump-esque campaign under the slogan of “Poland first, Poles first”.
But two miles away, near the steps of the U.S. Capitol building, survivors of sex trafficker Jeffrey Epstein rallied together to share their harrowing stories and call for justice.
Appearing during a bipartisan press conference with rebel Republican Thomas Massie, California Democrat Ro Khanna, and MAGA firebrand Marjorie Taylor Greene, the survivors demanded the full release of all the files related to the Justice Department’s investigation into the disgraced financier.
“There is no hoax,” said Haley Robson, who introduced herself as a registered Republican. “The abuse was real.”
However, Trump became visibly agitated during his Oval Office meeting when he was told about comments Massie had made earlier, in which the Republican said he did not believe the president was implicated in the files, “but I think his donors are, I think his friends are, and I think our own DOJ and government are implicated in this, too.”
Asked by a reporter if the Justice Department was trying to protect his friends or donors, Trump fumed.
“This is a Democrat hoax that never ends,” he said.
“It reminds me of the Kennedy situation,” he added, a reference to calls for all the files relating to John F Kennedy’s assassination to be declassified. “Nobody is ever satisfied.”
“Thousands of pages of documents have been given, but it is really a Democrat hoax because they are trying to get people to talk about something that is totally irrelevant to the success that we’ve had as a nation since I’ve been president,” he said.
The push for transparency came one day after the Republican-led House Oversight Committee released more than 33,000 pages of Department of Justice files relating to the case, including jail surveillance video, flight logs, jail surveillance video, court filings, emails and audio.
But most of the material had already been in the public domain, some of it for years, renewing claims of an ongoing cover-up.
Epstein was a well-known associate of Trump’s, and the pair spent years partying together in New York and Florida, however Trump has always insisted that he knew nothing about the disgraced financier’s crimes.
Epstein eventually died in a Manhattan jail in 2019 as he was awaiting trial on federal sex trafficking charges involving underage girls.
His former girlfriend and associate, Ghislaine Maxwell, was subsequently convicted to 20 years in prison on federal charges of sex trafficking and conspiracy for helping Epstein recruit and abuse underage girls.
Much to the anger of her victims, Maxwell was transferred to a low-security prison last month after gushing about Trump during an interview with Deputy Attorney General Todd Blanche, the president’s former personal attorney.
The family of Virginia Giuffre, who was recruited by Maxwell while working as a 17-year-old spa attendant at Trump’s Mar-a-Lago resort, told the rally that Maxwell ought to remain in a maximum security prison for the rest of her life.
“No leniency, no deals, no special treatment,” said Sky Roberts, the brother of the late Giuffre.
“The justice system was not designed to serve the powerful. It was meant to protect the people, and it’s time it started doing just that.”
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